The resignation of Kristalina Georgieva barely two years into the life of Jean-Claude Juncker’s European Commission is a blow that the president will not be able to easily shrug off.
Georgieva’s departure is doubly damaging. It deprives the Commission of someone of undoubted quality and, intentionally or otherwise, it exposes flaws in Juncker’s leadership.
The resignation of a commissioner is not unprecedented. All recent Commission administrations have experienced some turnover and the probability has increased as the Commission has grown in size.
Most European commissioners have been elected politicians on their national stage and a term in the Commission was either a step up or a move sideways. So it is not unusual for them to be tempted away when a chance to return to national politics presents itself.
Markos Kyprianou, Cyprus’s first European commissioner from 2004, left in 2008 to be foreign minister. Similarly, Franco Frattini, Italy’s European commissioner from 2004, went back to Rome in 2008 to pick up the office he had previously held — foreign minister. Peter Mandelson, the European commissioner for trade, went back to London in October 2008 to be minister for business in Gordon Brown’s government.
In retrospect, the most injurious effect of the latter two departures was that they eased the path of their successors: Antonio Tajani created a vacuum as European commissioner for enterprise in José Manuel Barroso’s second administration; Catherine Ashton’s gentle 13-month apprenticeship in the trade dossier was insufficient preparation for her over-promotion as the EU’s foreign policy chief.
More predictably, the Barroso II Commission also saw a handful of early departures in its last year as commissioners opted to take up seats in the European Parliament, whose elections fall six months before the end of a Commission term. Janusz Lewandowski, Olli Rehn, Vivian Reding and Tajani all jumped ship.
But Georgieva’s departure does not fit any of these models and consequently is more damaging.
By background, she is not a politician but a technocrat. Indeed, when she was initially nominated to the Commission in 2009, it helped that she was not a politician: the European Parliament had rejected Bulgaria’s first nominee, Rumiana Jeleva, as inadequate. So Georgieva’s decision to leave cannot be excused by the now-or-never demands of electoral politics.
Clearly, some personal reappraisal was bound to happen in the wake of her failed bid to become secretary-general of the United Nations (handicapped by only belated support from the Bulgarian government). But that she should opt to return to her previous employer, the World Bank, where she spent 16 years from 1993-2009, does not reflect well on the Commission.
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In theory, at the outset of his Commission two years ago, Juncker gave Georgieva a wide remit, running across all departments. Her portfolios of budget and human resources gave ample potential to improve the way the Commission is run. That she has given up the struggle so early suggests that she did not have the full backing of Juncker and his main collaborators — Frans Timmermans, the first vice president, and Martin Selmayr, the head of Juncker’s private office.
You do not have to subscribe to all the conspiracy theories to recognize that this is not a vote of confidence. At the very least, Georgieva’s departure strips away some of the marketing gloss from Selmayr’s public relations efforts.
The Juncker team made too much at the launch of the administration of its gender balance. Ludicrously, it published a graphic that compared with previous administrations the number of women made vice-president. Shortly thereafter, the draft team was revamped when Slovenia’s Alenka Bratušek, one of the women nominated for vice-president, was rejected by the European Parliament. Georgieva’s resignation leaves Federica Mogherini as the only woman in the top team of the president and his seven vice-presidents.
Much more than that, the Juncker team loses someone who was representative of one of the EU’s newest member states, an enthusiastic champion of the EU’s ability to do good in the world, with a reputation for intelligence and competence, blessed with a degree of human warmth. Georgieva’s cheerful, down-to-earth, common sense way of talking about what the EU does was a powerful asset, whether she was speaking as commissioner for humanitarian aid on the other side of the world, or as commissioner for the budget in the European Parliament or the Council of Ministers.
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Juncker’s Commission will undeniably be weaker without Georgieva. But what makes her departure worse is that Juncker is compounding the loss by promoting Günther Oettinger to take her place. In normal times, this would be considered a reckless act of self-inflicted injury, though David Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on EU membership has changed the measurement scale for that kind of behavior.
Leave aside the current controversy over what Oettinger said in a speech last week to a business audience in Hamburg; leave aside whether Oettinger’s performance as commissioner for energy (2010-2014) or commissioner for the digital economy (2014-present) has been above or below par. Limit yourself to what Oettinger is and represents: a German Christian Democrat who for more than 20 years was a Christian Democratic Union member of the regional parliament of Baden-Württemberg and for five years its minister-president.
Whatever the idealistic theory about European commissioners being above nationality and party allegiance, it is a mistake to put the portfolio of the EU budget in the hands of a German Christian Democrat.
Ever since the migration crisis rocked Angela Merkel’s government last year, Germany has in EU circles been increasingly aggressive in budget discussions, demanding that money be diverted to addressing what it sees as the paramount issue confronting the EU today.
The hard line taken by the German finance ministry has not gone down well with the EU’s Central and Eastern European states, nor with the likes of Spain and Portugal. At the same time, Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister, has maintained demands for structural reforms and fiscal discipline.
That is the context into which Oettinger’s appointment to the EU budget portfolio and promotion to Commission vice president will play. It is unbelievable that Selmayr, himself a German Christian Democrat, and Juncker, a Luxembourgish Christian Democrat with close ties to the CDU, is not aware of that. (Juncker, it should be noted, early on alienated the Visegrad nations — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — with proposals for quotas of migrants to be resettled.)
Pretty well whatever Oettinger does in the budget portfolio, he will be vulnerable to accusations that he is acting on behalf of Berlin. Even if he defies the will of Merkel and Schäuble, he will be accused of settling old scores or stirring up old rivalries.
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As if it were not enough to have Selmayr and Oettinger involved in the budget from the Commission’s side, and German ministers throwing their considerable weight around in the Council, Germans are also prominent in the budget discussions in the Parliament. Jens Geier is rapporteur for the proposals on the budget for 2017 — a Socialist (SPD) rather than from the CDU, but both parties are in a grand coalition in Berlin.
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Martin Schulz, another SPD MEP, is president of the Parliament and could still play an influential role. Reimer Böge, another German Christian Democrat, is an outspoken member of the budgets committee.
To make matters still worse, the European Court of Auditors, the body that audits the use of the budget, with an influential voice on how EU money has been used and should be used, is now headed by a German Christian Democrat. Klaus-Heiner Lehne, who was an MEP for 20 years until 2014, was made president of the ECA on October 1. And Ingeborg Grässle, another German Christian Democrat, chairs the Parliament’s budgetary control committee.
At a time when the future direction of the EU is in the balance, with France’s influence on the wane, and the U.K. on the way out, it is an increasingly common accusation that the EU dances to Germany’s tune. It will do nothing to the EU’s sense of cohesion to have Germany so obviously controlling every aspect of the purse strings.
No matter that Oettinger may long ago have worked in auditing and accountancy, his appointment to the budget portfolio is an avoidable error. The brief (especially when combined with human resources) requires a bridge-builder and conciliator — not among Oettinger’s most-cited characteristics. A cannier choice, now that the trade deal with Canada has been signed (and acknowledging that TTIP is going nowhere), would have been to move Sweden’s Cecilia Malmström, an ex-MEP, ex-national minister and second-term European commissioner.
Juncker’s best hope is that Georgieva will wrap up the most contentious parts of the budget portfolio before she leaves at the end of the year — both the negotiations on the 2017 budget and the first parts of the mid-term review of the 2014-2020 spending cycle. That would buy both Juncker and Georgieva’s successor some time, but when the next annual budget cycle comes round Oettinger will still be a German Christian Democrat.
Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch