VDL's commissioners: separating the wheat from the chaff

The EU's broken system for appointing commissioners, which forces someone from each of the 27 member states on the president, has resulted in a tiered system of importance unrelated to job titles.

Today, at long last, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled her long-awaited portfolio assignments for her college of 27 commissioners - the equivalent of a president’s cabinet of ministers in a national system. The process has been beset by delays mostly beyond the president’s control, exposing the deep flaws with the EU’s commission formation process which is clearly not fit for purpose for a union that has evolved in the way it has.

In a normal system, presidents and prime ministers get to choose the ministers in their cabinet. Not in the EU, where it's the member states who choose who's in the cabinet (college), and the president only gets to decide what they do. It is a strange tradition for an executive institution which is not supposed to represent the interests of national governments. The Council, the upper chamber of the EU’s legislature, is the representative body for governments. In the Commission, commissioners are supposed to represent the interests of all Europeans, not their member state. That’s why countries can’t swap out their commissioner if they fall our of favor or if a new party takes over the government after an election. Once confirmed, the commissioner is there for five years and there’s nothing their home country can do about it (although this is a principle that was badly damaged by von der Leyen in 2020 when she appeared to bow to pressure from Dublin to force Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan to resign). On the other hand, it also makes it almost impossible to fire a commissioner from a difficult member state, as we saw when von der Leyen took no action against the rogue Hungarian commissioner last year when he unilaterally announced the EU would no longer give aid to any Palestinians when he had no authority to do so. She would have been forced to replace him with someone even worse sent by Orban. The principle is that countries don’t control their commissioners, but they are guaranteed to have one.