On Thursday 10 October, against the advice of the S&D and Renew Europe Groups (see EUROPE 13499/2), the European Parliament’s Conference of Presidents (CoP) of the political groups approved the order in which the European Commissioners-designate will appear at the confirmation hearings, which will take place from 4 to 12 November.
The EPP Group’s proposal, supported by the conservative and far-right groups, was adopted. It provides for the hearings of the five Executive Vice-Presidents, plus that of the future High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, to be held at the end of this sequence, on Tuesday 12 November.
This running order suits the Christian Democrat family, from which most of the Commissioners-designate come. In the event of a poor showing, the other groups would be less inclined to reject their candidates, particularly as they will still be awaiting the hearings of the Executive Vice-Presidents from the Social Democrat and Liberal families, notably those of the Spanish Socialist Teresa Ribera and the French centrist Stéphane Séjourné.
“It was impossible to reach agreement on the order of the hearings with the political forces that initially supported Ursula von der Leyen [for her re-election as President of the European Commission, Editor’s note]”, criticised the President of the S&D Group, Iratxe García Pérez from Spain. “This is going to pose a lot of problems for the whole process”, she said, criticising the attitude of the EPP Group, which is “breaking the ‘cordon sanitaire’” by forming political majorities as it pleases, sometimes with the pro-European groups, sometimes with the conservatives and the far right.
Also disapproving of the CoP’s decision, the Renew Europe Group called, via X, for “democratic and pro-European forces to reunite again around a constructive agenda”.
The same is true of the environmentalists. The Co-President of the Greens/EFA Group, Germany’s Terry Reintke, considered that the attitude of the EPP Group President, his compatriot Manfred Weber, “weakens the political centre and pro-European forces”, insofar as, in her opinion, “the question of how the hearings of the Commissioners are organised affects in a central way the influence that Parliament has in setting up the new Commission”.
The European environmentalists also believe that auditioning the Italian Raffaele Fitto among the first candidates for a vice-presidency is likely to give him an advantage.
In 2019, the candidates for the (executive) vice-presidency of the Commission were all auditioned after the other Commissioners-designate.
See the running order of the European Commissioners-designate: https://aeur.eu/f/dtp
Green light from the Committee on Legal Affairs after examining the declarations of financial interests. On Thursday, Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) also announced that it had closed the procedure for examining the declarations of financial interests of the 26 European Commissioners-designate. After requesting more information from the vast majority of them, the committee found no conflict of interest. Thus, all 26 candidates will be auditioned starting on Monday 4 November.
According to JURI Chairman Ilhan Kyuchyuk (Renew Europe, Bulgarian), the parliamentary committee carried out an “impartial and in-depth analysis” of the declarations of financial interests. “Whenever we deemed the information incomplete, we requested further details in order to assess all relevant elements and reach our conclusions”, he added. Nevertheless, he felt that from a procedural point of view, “some reasonable criticism of the legal framework can arise”.
The JURI Committee could therefore propose amendments.
German Social Democrat René Repasi felt that “Parliament is limited in its scrutiny”. “According to the Commission’s rules, (candidate Commissioners) only have to declare interests ‘which can be assumed to give rise to a conflict of interest’. Commission candidates must therefore assess for themselves whether there are any conflicts of interest. Yet that is the task of Parliament”, he pointed out.
The coordinator of the Greens/EFA Group, German Sergey Lagodinsky, left the meeting room of the JURI Committee in protest, along with Dutch ecologist Tineke Strik and members of The Left Group. “We find it unacceptable that, this time, the process under way is not motivated by an interest in the facts, but by the major parties’ fear of losing their candidates. Instead of asking for concrete information, the JURI Committee froze in fear, rushed through the review in an ill-informed manner with fearful majorities”, he condemned in a press release.
Last Friday, The Left Group strongly criticised the lack of transparency and efficiency of the process for examining declarations of financial interests (see EUROPE 13497/11). (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)