Why am I returning to Daniel Cohn-Bendit's press conference on the presidency of the European Commission, when yesterday's bulletin published a comprehensive summary of it? Because Mr Cohn-Bendit has changed his tactics, and his revised tactics anticipate what is likely to happen. He is no longer recommending the previous configuration of a parliamentary majority opposed to confirming the current president, but is calling for a parliamentary debate before any decision is made. An open debate, which does not rule out the possibility of a majority forming in favour of Mr Barroso and if this should be the case, "so be it", he repeated twice, using a well-known religious form of words. This is not his own belief, but he does not wish to give the impression that he is pre-empting the result of the debate; the main thing is for the debate to take place. He stressed the absurd nature of an appointment procedure shared between two treaties: the Treaty of Nice to appoint the president, the Lisbon Treaty to appoint the Commission as a whole. Let us take another look at his arguments.
Treaty of Nice or f Lisbon Treaty? Sweden, which will hold the presidency of the Council in the second half of this year, supports the procedure whereby the president would be appointed under the rules of the Treaty of Nice and the Commission as a whole under the rules of the Lisbon Treaty. Absurd and unacceptable, says Mr Cohn-Bendit, who adds that even those members of the European Parliament who support Mr Barroso's reappointment admit this; in his view, the majority of the EP would vote against this kind of procedure. The Commission will remain in office until November, with Mr Barroso as its president; there is no urgent need to appoint a new president, particularly if we wish the current Commission to remain fully effective for the remaining months of its life. One treaty, or the other: a choice must be made.
If Nice is chosen, the number of commissioners will be lower than the number of member states: this is unavoidable. If Lisbon is chosen, the appointment of the president by the European Council will have to wait. According to Mr Cohn-Bendit, Mr Barroso should himself demand to be elected under the new rules, because he so constantly stresses the importance and significance of the Lisbon Treaty, and should be consistent.
The EP must show who is the right candidate. It should be up to the European Parliament to discuss and appoint the right person, in a debate which outstrips the logic of the political groups. Mr Cohn-Bendit points out that in the new Parliament, there is neither an absolute centre-right nor an absolute centre-left majority (unless the EPP/Socialist "grand coalition" comes into being, which he believes is extremely unlikely for the Germans in the run-up to the national elections); and he warned the Liberal-Democrat group against the temptation of exchanging the presidency of the Commission for a period of presidency of the Parliament itself; this, he feels, would be a miscalculation. He stressed, with some force, the freedom of debate and a parliamentary choice; from this, it is even possible that a majority in favour of confirming Mr Barroso could emerge; if this is the case, so be it. The main thing is that the debate takes place. In his view, the required majority should be formed around a name, a figure who would be "recognized by everybody, or nearly everybody", who must emerge from above and beyond the discipline of political groupings. When asked to name names, he declined to do this, because "if you mention a name too early, that name crashes and burns". Although he eventually referred to Guy Verhofstadt by name, this was to make the point that five years ago he was not appointed, due to opposition from the member states which supported the war in Iraq.
What will happen at the summit. I have come back to this press conference because it fully anticipates, with the ambition partly to correct it, what is likely to happen this Thursday and Friday at the European Council: political support for the confirmation of Mr Barroso without his actual legal appointment. It is true that the heads of state and government are motivated by considerations which are different from those which motivate Mr Cohn-Bendit: they aim chiefly to create a balance between the various new positions which arise from the Lisbon Treaty: stable president of the European Council, a high representative to chair the External Relations Council who would also be a vice-president of the Commission, with a few guidelines on the future European Commissioners and the dossiers to be entrusted to them. But although motivations are different, the results are by and large the same: there will be no formal naming of the candidate to the presidency of the Commission, even though both the president of the summit, Mr Fischer, and Mr Barroso himself, in their letters stating their expectations of the session of the European Council, spoke of starting the appointments procedure of the new president of the Commission. It is likely, therefore, that there will be no official appointment but a political indication and, definitively, the in-depth Parliamentary debate would take priority.
(F.R./transl.fl)