MEPs threaten delay to hearings

The failure to agree a foreign policy chief has put the confirmation of a new European Commission by 1 November in doubt.

Leading MEPs are warning the European Council against taking for granted the European Parliament’s approval of the next college of European commissioners. They said they were being put under pressure by the Council to rush through approval of the next college without adequate scrutiny.

Danuta Hübner, chairwoman of the Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee, said it was “very uncertain” that MEPs would schedule committee hearings for nominated commissioners in the second half of September, following the Council’s failure last week to appoint a high representative for foreign policy.

Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, has scheduled a second meeting of national leaders on 30 August, to decide on the high representative, who is also a member of the European Commission.

That postponement leaves Jean-Claude Juncker, the incoming president of the Commission, unable to announce his line-up of commissioners, and the distribution of portfolios, until after that decision.

Hübner said: “We are supposed to have hearings on 22-30 September. But if the portfolio decision won’t be made until the end of August, that looks very uncertain.”

She said: “We are very unhappy with the lack of a decision at the summit, especially on the high representative because that’s part of the Commission.”

She said there was a risk that the Commission would not be in place by 1 November, as intended, and said that would be “a disaster in terms of communicating a message to the population, when public confidence is already so low”.

“Many of us feel responsible for having the process finalised as quickly as possible, and we’re not happy with being under this pressure,” she said.

A spokesperson for Juncker said that he would not make a distribution of portfolios until the line-up of commissioners was complete. He now intended to agree the final list of nominees with the Council in early September, so that MEPs could proceed with the hearings of nominees as planned in the second half of September.

Van Rompuy also expressed confidence, in the wake of last week’s inconclusive summit, that the timetable could be maintained.

The nominated commissioners must appear for confirmation hearings before joint meetings of the relevant Parliament committees. Those hearings are preceded by a round of written questions submitted to the nominated commissioners by MEPs. The committees had earlier been instructed to complete the drafting of questionnaires by the first week of September.

Ingeborg Grässle, who chairs the budgetary control committee, said: “The committees need to put together questionnaires for the nominees, and to do that we need to know who the nominee is. “The last time around MEPs worked for six weeks on this issue.”

She said she did not want to see the short timeframe mean that the committee secretariats put together questionnaires on behalf of MEPs. “I’m going to be very suspicious if we do an exercise where it’s the Parliament secretariat asking questions of the Commission secretariat.”

Hübner, who was Poland’s European commissioner in 2004-09 and has been talked about as a possible candidate for another term, said that in her experience, nominees needed more than two weeks to be briefed on the subjects in the portfolios assigned to them. “Very often candidates get portfolios they are not familiar with, and it can be a lot of work to understand it,” she said. “Two weeks is really not enough if we are serious about the hearings.”

Maroš Šefčovič, the European commissioner responsible for relations with the Parliament and the Council, said the nominations were “still well on the schedule” and said that MEPs should still be able to hold their hearings in the third and fourth weeks of September. He has been nominated by Slovakia for a second term as commissioner.

The shortage of women among the nominees to the Commission could be another cause of delay, with MEPs threatening to reject a predominantly male college.

Sandro Gozi, Italy’s under-secretary for Europe, who yesterday (23 July) chaired a meeting of ministers responsible for EU affairs, said: “I don’t think there will be a delay in the entering into function of the European Commission on 1 November, but if there was a delay it wouldn’t be a drama for the Italian presidency.”

Richard Corbett, a British MEP who worked as an adviser to Van Rompuy, in 2009-14, said a smooth handover to Juncker on 1 November was possible as long as none of the nominees was challenged.

“It should still be do-able, if the designate commissioners are competent and are put in fields that are not totally alien to them,” he said. “The difficulty will be if there’s a major problem with one or the other of the candidates. It usually takes a while for the leader of the country [of the rejected commissioner] to back down.”

He added: “I don’t think the tight timetable is going to intimidate people into rushing the hearings.”