The Slovenian parliament finalized the official nomination of former ambassador Marta Kos to the incoming European Commission on Thursday, September 19th, ending the week-long deadlock with Brussels caused by von der Leyen’s obsession with reaching gender balance at whatever cost. But as uncomfortable details of her past surface, Kos might not be able to get past the Parliament’s scrutiny.
The right-wing opposition-controlled committee that cleared Kos had been refusing to do so until the leftist government of Prime Minister Robert Golob released his correspondence with President von der Leyen. The committee suspected that the Commission chief pressured him to ditch his initial candidate Tomaž Vesel, who claimed he was dropping out at his own will.
Replacing Vesel with Kos took place while von der Leyen was reportedly pressuring several smaller member states, including Slovenia, to swap their male candidates with females to reach gender equality—dangling influential portfolios in front of them in exchange for compliance. Rumor had it that Golob was promised Enlargement—one of the key portfolios now with Ukraine and others at the door—and Kos was later indeed given the file when von der Leyen unveiled her distribution earlier this week.
If all the indicators point toward a deal between Golob and von der Leyen—give me a female candidate in exchange for the Enlargement portfolio—there’s no sign of that in the Commission chief’s letter to the PM, which she eventually released on Tuesday. What is in there, however, is von der Leyen’s rejection of Vessel’s candidacy, which is still outside of her competences.
“Having carefully assessed your suggestion, I regret to inform you that I am unable to propose Mr. Tomaž Vesel to the Council as part of the list of members of the Commission,” von der Leyen wrote Golob on September 5th. She argued that Vesel did not have the level of competence that the EU treaties required, and asked Ljubljana to replace him with someone else “without delay.”
The problem is that it should be solely member states who nominate commissioners. The president-elect distributes portfolios at her will, then it’s up to the Parliament to assess the candidates’ competence in their respective fields. There is nothing in the treaties that says the president can reject anyone before the parliamentary hearings, but that’s exactly what von der Leyen did.
“Now official: Vesel did not resign on September 6th, 2024, but [von der Leyen] rejected him a day earlier,” ex-Prime Minister Janez Janša, the leader of the right-wing opposition SDS commented on X. Janša then suggested that Kos might have even been Golob’s original pick all along, but the PM and the Commission chief resorted to the ploy of switching to her at the very last minute to minimize the time her “dark past” could be scrutinized.
Last week, Janša explained to The European Conservative that there’s archival evidence to prove that Kos began her career as a journalist in the 1980s while being an informant to communist Yugoslavia’s secret police, and was probably sent to work in Germany in the early ‘90s to continue reporting to them from abroad. It was also suspicious how she was later given ambassadorial posts to Germany and Switzerland without any prior political experience, and from which she was forced to resign in 2020 amid accusations of mistreatment of her staff.
What’s more, Kos’ “strongly pro-Russian” statements also resurfaced after her nomination, which is seen as especially problematic because of the nature of the portfolio she is to be given in the new Brussels administration.
According to Slovenian MEP Romana Tomc:
The portfolio assigned to Slovenia includes not only the Western Balkans, but also Ukraine. From Ms Kos’s statements, one could conclude that she is strongly pro-Russian. This is a problem.
For all these reasons, even Politico put Kos among its five candidates ‘most likely’ to be rejected by the Parliament in the coming weeks.
