Lhe European Commission has a head – Ursula von der Leyen –, a course – economic competitiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the world – and a roadmap directly inspired by the ambitious Letta and Draghi reports, and their vision of European sovereignty. All this should augur bold initiatives, worthy of the turbulence that is coming. But this momentum could quickly be halted by the political games, national rivalries and personal struggles, to which the Commission is increasingly intensely subjected.
Of the European institutions, it is, at the outset, the most original: not quite a government, but much more than an administration. Jean Monnet, one of the initiators of European construction, who chaired the High Authority, the forerunner of the Commission, wanted it to be supranational, sheltered from partisan wars that would distance it from its noble mission: that is to say, to promote the“general interest of the Union”according to the article of the European treaty defining it.
This machine for creating Europe has not escaped its own excesses: political blindness, bureaucratic zeal and legal dogmatism. Nor the very human passions that a power organ arouses. It was therefore essential that the Commission gain democratic legitimacy, thanks in particular to parliamentary hearings of future commissioners and the establishment of a vote of approval. But the Commission must not lose its independence: when he was its president, Jacques Delors knew, for example, how to preserve it by keeping an equal distance from the heads of state and government and the European deputies, whom he knew how to both listen to and shake up.
A complex equation
This independence is threatened when the European Parliament, on the one hand, and the Twenty-Seven, on the other, want to shape a Commission in their own pay. This is not new, but the phenomenon is now going too far. There can be no “EPP Commission [Parti populaire européen] »as Manfred Weber, the president of this group that came out on top in the European elections, dared to say. A phrase that sounds like a provocation towards his coalition partners supporting the von der Leyen II Commission, and above all contrary to the spirit that should prevail in this institution, guardian of the treaties and not of partisan interests, as Nicolas Schmit, leader of the social democrats in the European elections and talented outgoing commissioner, ousted in favor of a Luxembourgish compatriot from the EPP, denounces.
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Source: Lemonde
