Most EU member states continue to hold “serious concerns” about certain aspects of the European Parliament’s proposed electoral reforms, as the recent Council meeting between the bloc’s European affairs ministers in Luxembourg clearly showed. In particular, the ideas of a pan-European constituency and of the enforcement of the Spitzenkandidat system (where parties choose candidates to run for the spot of European Commission president) were seen as incompatible with EU treaties and even violating member states’ sovereignty.
During the meeting on Tuesday, June 27th, the ministers discussed Parliament’s proposed electoral reform package that was adopted in the plenary last year, as well as the more recent proposal to change the composition of the European Parliament to reflect on the bloc’s growing demographic imbalance.
The electoral reform package’s vaguely described aim is to strengthen the “European dimension” of the EU elections, meaning a number of measures aimed at increasing electoral turnout (such as a single European election day or lowering the voting age), as well as creating a pan-European constituency and making the Spitzenkandidat system the official mode of allocating the EU’s top jobs.
Needless to say, while most member states were generally supportive of the idea of increasing the number of MEPs by 11 to make the representation more proportionate again, their attitude toward the problematic aspects of the electoral reform package—which has been blocked by the Council for over a year now—remains unchanged.
Conflicting ideas
As Jessika Roswall, the Swedish European Affairs Minister and host of the meeting, noted, certain aspects of the electoral reform gathered quite a lot of support, such as, for instance, the proposal to ban double voting (by citizens of two or more member states) and to introduce sanctions against the practice, or to allow member states to create a single, national constituency for EU elections if they wish.
On the other hand, the most important proposals were largely met with skepticism and resistance, to varying degrees. For instance, the EP’s proposals to lower the voting age to 16 for EU elections (as the Parliament has been recommending for all member states for years) and to create a single European election day (romantically suggesting May 9th, ‘Europe Day’) were criticized by many, voicing incompatibility with their national electoral laws.
But just as expected, the harshest criticism was voiced over Parliament’s so-called pan-European constituency, the idea to allocate another 28 seats for MEPs elected directly from an EU-wide, transnational electoral list. Despite the fact that the Council’s opposition to the plan was well-known since last year, Parliament kept lobbying for the new instrument and even adopted a resolution two weeks ago that called for member states to consider the proposal again.
It looks like they did, and the answer is still ‘no.’ No Council member supported it directly, and most of them outright rejected it, stressing that transnational lists are incompatible with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, violate their sovereignty, and are seen as conflicting with the foundations of national representation in European politics, as designed by the treaties.
Another proposal that was only marginally discussed, but generally opposed to the same degree, was to enshrine the so far only informally adopted Spitzenkandidat system into EU law and make it mandatory to give the highest positions, including the Commission President, to candidates of the political group that manages to get the most votes in the European Parliament.
As expected, the Council’s approval was far from enthusiastic. According to Denmark and others, the Spitzenkandidat system would change the institutional balance and give a monopoly over deciding the top EU jobs to Parliament at the expense of the Council. And whatever hurts the competencies of the Council, also hurts the sovereignty of the member states.
“I’m wondering why, yet again, are we talking about transnational lists, lead candidate process, and lowering the voting age?” the Polish representative asked at one point, visibly annoyed that these points were even on the agenda. “The concerns are shared by the vast majority of the member states,” he said, adding that these proposals will not have enough support to be implemented before the next EU election, nor any other after it.
Others also pointed out the obvious: Pushing for these radical changes less than a year before the next European elections was doomed to failure from the start.
Spitzenkandidat: cui bono?
The so-called ‘Spitzenkandidat’, or lead candidate system was introduced informally ahead of the 2014 EU elections, in theory, to provide more legitimacy to the Commission president by giving the highest position in Brussels to the candidate of the political group that manages to get the most votes in the European Parliament.
In 2019, however, the theory failed spectacularly as the EU member states ultimately decided on giving the presidency to von der Leyen instead of the EPP’s Manfred Weber, as the Spitzenkandidat system would have suggested.
Unsurprisingly, the EPP—expecting to remain the largest group in Parliament—is now trying to change the rules and make the system the mandatory and exclusive way of selecting EU leadership, arguing that tying it to the EP elections makes the process more democratic and, therefore, more legitimate.
This would mean, however, that national governments no longer have a say in the decision, which is not something most of them would be happy to sign off on, understandably.
Member states also question Parliament’s argument for democratic legitimacy, since why would the outcome of the European elections have a bigger influence than the nationally elected governments themselves? Especially given that many governing parties are sitting in smaller parliamentary groups, essentially isolated by the cordon sanitaire maintained by the mainstream alliance of the center-right, the socialists, the liberals, and the greens.
What goes unspoken (although fairly obvious) is that the Spitzenkandidat system would only ensure that EPP gets to choose—and no one else. That is why the party pushed to adopt the proposal to formalize it in the EP last year, supported by several leftist groups but none of the other conservative groups, like the ECR or the ID.
Conservatives in Parliament argue that the Spitzenkandidat system favors only mainstream political forces, and nobody else who’s considered ‘extreme’ by them, regardless of the fact that a lot of those parties are in government in their respective countries. The very fact that most national governments oppose the system in the Council, yet the parliamentary majority elected in the same member states approve of it at the same time, shows exactly why all things considered, the Spitzenkandidat would mean less democracy and not more.
