Journal of European Public Policy

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Why the European Parliament lost the

Spitzenkandidaten-process

Ben Crum

To cite this article: Ben Crum (2023) Why the European Parliament lost the
Spitzenkandidaten-process, Journal of European Public Policy, 30:2, 193-213, DOI:
10.1080/13501763.2022.2032285

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JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY
2023, VOL. 30, NO. 2, 193–213
https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2022.2032285

Why the European Parliament lost the

Spitzenkandidaten-process
Ben Crum
Department of Political Science and Public Administration (FSW), Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

ABSTRACT
Research has demonstrated how the European Parliament has expanded its
powers vis-à-vis other EU institutions by strategically exploiting powers it
already holds and appealing to its contribution to democratic legitimacy.
However, established theories are challenged by the failure of the EP to
secure the election of a so-called Spitzenkandidat to the post of European
Commission President in 2019. Was this failure an incidental set-back or does
it point to a structural limit to the EP’s ability to expand its powers? Exploring
the latter option, this article proposes that the 2019 events warrant the
revision of the EP-centred parliamentarisation thesis that dominates our
understanding of EU inter-institutional politics. Instead, it develops an
alternative theory that departs from the conception of the EU as a demoi-
cracy. Using the events in 2014 and 2019, the article constructs analytical
narratives for both theoretical positions. Reading the 2019 case through the
demoi-cratic perspective suggests that national leaders are unlikely to allow
the EP to reclaim the Spitzenkandidaten-process. More generally, it follows
from this perspective that the EP can only successfully get the member states
to share powers, not to cede them.

KEYWORDS Commission President; demoi-cracy; European elections; European Parliament; EU inter-

institutional politics; Spitzenkandidaten

Introduction
On 16 July 2019, the European Parliament (EP) elected Ursula von der Leyen as
President of the new European Commission with a relatively slim majority of
383 against 327 votes. In doing so, the incoming EP retreated on the commit-
ment of its predecessor that had insisted that it would be ‘ready to reject’ any
candidate for the position of Commission President who had not been put
forward by one of the European parties as a so-called Spitzenkandidat for the
EP elections (European Parliament, 2018). What is more, in confirming non-
Spitzenkandidat von der Leyen as Commission President, the EP also gave up

CONTACT Ben Crum b.j.j.crum@vu.nl

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDer-
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transformed, or built upon in any way.
194 B. CRUM

on the inter-institutional ‘win’ that it seemed to have secured in 2014 when

Spitzenkandidat Jean-Claude Juncker was elected Commission President.
The Spitzenkandidat-controversy is a high-profile illustration of European
Union (EU) treaties being ‘incomplete contracts’ (Farrell & Héritier, 2007;
Hix, 2002). In this case, the culprit is Article 17.7 TEU as it was formulated
in the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon:
Taking into account the elections to the European Parliament and after having
held the appropriate consultations, the European Council, acting by a qualified
majority, shall propose to the European Parliament a candidate for President of
the Commission. This candidate shall be elected by the European Parliament by
a majority of its component members.

This formulation was inherently under-determined and an open invitation to

inter-institutional politics (Christiansen, 2016; Heidbreder & Schade, 2020;
Raube, 2020). It seems to presume that the European Council and the EP
will naturally come to converge on the candidate for the Commission presi-
dency. The treaty makers did not anticipate that the EP would want to exploit
the article’s incompleteness by seeking to pre-empt the European Council’s
choice of nominees. All they provided for in case the EP would not
approve the nominee was to require the European Council to come back
within a month with another nominee.1 That solution seems untenable as
it risks fostering a permanent stand-off between the EP and the European
Council and creates exactly the void that the EP sought to exploit by initiating
the Spitzenkandidaten-process.
While the 2014 hijacking of the Spitzenkandidaten-process by the EP and
its party-groups fits the dominant scholarly understanding of EU inter-insti-
tutional politics, the 2019 roll-back by the European Council poses a funda-
mental puzzle. Notably, the established literature sees the EP as the prime
beneficiary of EU inter-institutional politics (Hix, 2002; Stacey, 2003) and
each of its wins as setting the EU on a longer-term course towards parliamen-
tarisation (Héritier et al., 2019; Rittberger & Schimmelfennig, 2006; Shackle-
ton, 2017). From this perspective, analysts saw the Spitzenkandidaten-
‘success’ in 2014 as heralding ‘the institutionalisation of the Spitzenkandida-
ten’ (Christiansen, 2016, p. 993; Hamřík & Kaniok, 2019; Héritier et al., 2019,
p. 75). The events of 2019 seriously challenge this reading and the few ana-
lyses that we have so far of these events (Heidbreder & Schade, 2020;
Raube, 2020) remain notably cautious in their theoretical conclusions.
The question is whether the 2019 events were an incidental set-back or
point to a structural limit to the EP’s ability to expand its powers? Exploring
the latter option, this article proposes that the 2019 failure of the Spitzenkan-
didaten-process warrants the revision of established theories of the EP’s infor-
mal inter-institutional power. To develop an alternative to the EP-centred
parliamentarisation-thesis, it draws on theories that conceive of the EU as a
 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 195

demoi-cracy (Cheneval & Schimmelfennig, 2013; Nicolaïdis, 2013). The demoi-

cratic perspective highlights that the EP’s expansion of powers is only one
side of a process in which the EU member state governments have allowed
it to share in powers that, originally, they held exclusively themselves. In
this view, the logical end-point of this process is not an EP-based govern-
ment, but rather a full and equal sharing of powers in legislation and execu-
tive oversight between the EP and the EU governments.
The fate of the Spitzenkandidaten-process offers a critical test to discrimi-
nate between the two theories. The EP-centred parliamentarisation-thesis
can only be upheld if the events of 2019 turn out to be an incident and
the Spitzenkandidaten-process is revindicated in the European elections in
2024. In contrast, the demoi-cratic perspective suggests that the member
governments may be willing to share power with the EP but will block any
claim to dominate them. The implication of that would be that, even if
attempts are made to reinstate the Spitzenkandidaten in 2024, the process
is not viable to turn into a permanent procedure.
This article starts from the established theories of EU inter-institutional
politics and of the EP’s ability to expand its powers over time (section 2). It
then explicates the EP-centred parliamentarism thesis that tends to underlie
these analyses (section 3) and proposes the EU demoi-cracy perspective as an
alternative (section 4). The argument then turns to the events in 2014 and
2019 to develop and illustrate an analytical narrative of each perspective.
The conclusion reflects on the wider implications of the difference between
the two positions for 2024 and for our thinking about EU inter-institutional
politics in general.

Explaining the ascent of the European Parliament

The history of the EP has been marked by a steady expansion of its powers
(Héritier et al., 2019; Rittberger, 2005; Rittberger & Schimmelfennig, 2006).
Originally established in 1958 as the European Parliamentary Assembly for
the European Communities with mostly a consultative role, the Assembly
renamed itself into a Parliament. In 1979, its members, who up until then
had been delegated by the parliaments of the member states, were directly
elected for the first time. In the series of treaty revisions that started with the
Single European Act of 1986, the EP expanded its involvement in EU legis-
lation. This process was completed with the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon that recog-
nised the EP as a full co-legislator besides the Council of Ministers, with full
amendment powers and a veto on all EU legislation.
In a similar way, the EP has been able to increase its powers over the
appointment of the members of the European Commission (Crum, 2012;
Moury, 2007). The Treaty of Rome (Art.158 EEC) provided that the European
Commission would be appointed by the member state governments acting
196 B. CRUM

by common accord. It did not foresee any role for the Parliamentary Assembly.
However, after the first direct elections in 1979, the EP made the incoming
Commission the object of a debate and a vote. This practice was formalised
in the 1991 Treaty of Maastricht with the recognition of the EP’s right to be con-
sulted on the appointment of the Commission President and the introduction
of a parliamentary vote of confidence on the College of Commissioners as a
whole (Westlake, 1998, p. 439). However, political reality soon made it clear
that it would be very hard to ignore a negative vote of the parliament on
the Commission President nominee (Hix, 2002, p. 276; Moury, 2007, p. 376).
Hence, in the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, the EP’s vote over the Commission
President was recognised to be binding (Hix, 2002, p. 270).
By now there is a well-established understanding of the conditions that
allow the EP to expand its powers. Its essential logic has been characterised
by Rittberger and Schimmelfennig (2006) as ‘strategic action in a community
environment’ (cf. Héritier et al., 2019). More specifically, the prevailing expla-
nations for the EP’s rise in powers conceive of it as a rationalist power game
between the EU institutions, but one in which normative appeals carry con-
siderable weight. In this ‘game’, the EP is motivated by an inherent insti-
tutional interest to expand its powers. Its main antagonists are the member
states who are the ‘masters of the EU treaties’ originally, and therefore
control the allocation of powers in EU decision-making. Typically, the EP
uses issue linkage to attain new powers: it leverages powers that it holds
already, like the power to reject the EU budget or the power to censure
the Commission as a whole, to attain further and more detailed powers in
the EU’s decision-making processes. The EP can complement and reinforce
this strategy with a host of other strategies, like delaying decision-making
and cross-institutional coalition building (see Héritier et al., 2019, section
2.1.2 for a comprehensive catalogue of strategies). The success of these strat-
egies is premised on the ability of the EP to maintain a united front, with its
members prioritising their collective institutional interest over the political
differences that divide them (Hix, 2002, p. 271).
Critically, however, besides this crude bargaining power, the EP also holds
a normative card, which lies in its ability to appeal to democratic legitimacy.
As European integration has removed power outside of the direct control of
national parliaments, the most logical compensation for this is to be found in
the empowerment of the EP. Hence, whenever the member governments are
inclined to adopt decisions on their own, the EP can effectively shame them
for bypassing the democratic representatives of the people (Héritier et al.,
2019). Importantly, the EP’s appeal to democratic representation and its
potential to shame the other institutions requires an audience. Thus, it only
works on issues that are of importance to the European peoples and that
are sufficiently visible (de Wilde, 2020; Rittberger & Schimmelfennig, 2006,
p. 1148).
 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 197

Furthermore, it is essential to recognise that the different EU institutions

depart from different starting positions and hence also calculate their wins
and losses in different ways (Hix, 2002). As the EP started out with very
limited powers, it has everything to play for. Hence, institutional wins for
the EP are often considered a big prize for which its members are willing
to set aside short-term interests and internal political divisions. However,
what may be a major win for the EP, may appear as a small concession of
limited consequence to the Council. An indicator of this is the different
time horizons which preoccupy the institutions. As Farrell and Héritier
(2007) argue, the member states in the Council are generally under greater
pressure from their domestic constituencies to secure a legislative decision
than the EP. Under these conditions, the EP enjoys a structural advantage
in inter-institutional politics.

EP-centred parliamentarisation
While we can thus explain the stepwise empowerment of the EP, the litera-
ture so far offers little clarity about where this process may find its limits. It
is generally recognised that once powers have been granted to the EP,
they cannot be rolled back. Stacey (2003, p. 953; cf. Hix, 2002, p. 280) labels
this ‘the ratchet effect’:
the phenomenon by which any powers transferred from one of the Three [EU
institutions] have without fail been transferred in one direction, i.e., from
either the Council or the Commission to the Parliament and never in reverse
(moreover, once a power has been won or given, it has never been taken back).

More broadly, the overall process has been characterised as a process of ‘par-
liamentarisation’ (Rittberger & Schimmelfennig, 2006). This conceptualisation
suggests that the expansion of EP powers ultimately is to lead to a situation in
which it exercises power over all competences and all executive agents in the
EU system. More concretely, Héritier et al. (2019, p. 187; cf. Hix, 2008, Ch. 9;
Shackleton, 2017) link this process to the emergence of a proper EU ‘govern-
ment’, which would then be ‘supported by a majority of members of a demo-
cratically elected parliament to which it is accountable’. Thus, the telos of the
expansion of EP powers comes to look very much like the parliamentary pol-
itical systems of many EU member states.
Héritier and her co-authors recognise that the completion of parliamentar-
isation is still far off as it encounters important counterforces. In particular,
these counterforces involve tendencies to (new) intergovernmental govern-
ance in which EU competences are delegated to member state-controlled
authorities beyond the EP’s sphere of direct influence. Still, Héritier et al.
(2019, p. 192) also note that even these new EU competences need not be
immune to the logic of the EP’s power expansion, since its involvement
198 B. CRUM

can be seen as a process of co-evolution rather than as a zero-sum game

between the EU institutions; the power losses primarily fall at the national
level.
If we then take it that the EP is the key driver in a continuing process of EU
parliamentarisation, the Spitzenkandidaten-process appears as a perfect fit. It
logically constitutes the next step of the EP taking control over the election of
the European Commission and it contributes to attributing a government-like
status to the Commission. Thus, Article 17.7 offered itself as the next battle-
ground on which the EP could expand its competences. The success of such
an expansion would rely on the twin factors of a) the party-groups in the EP
prioritising the institutional interest of attaining this new power over the
party-political differences that divide them and b) the majority of the
member state governments in the European Council considering the costs
of conceding to the EP lower than the costs of an outright inter-institutional
confrontation. The perceived costs of such an outright confrontation could
moreover be increased if the European parties would seize the Spitzenkandi-
daten-process by putting forward candidates with a prominent and pan-Euro-
pean profile and select them in a pan-European and open way. Thus, one
could envisage a pan-European campaign between the candidates, which
would increase the saliency and publicity of the European elections as a
whole.
After the Spitzenkandidaten-‘success’ in 2014, analysts built on the parlia-
mentarisation-thesis to affirm ‘the institutionalisation of the Spitzenkandida-
ten’ (Hamřík & Kaniok, 2019). Héritier et al. (2019, p. 75) recognised the
creation of a new rule and considered it a demonstration of the EP’s ability
to impose its preferences as a ‘first mover’. Christiansen saw the events as
ushering ‘a new era of European Union politics in which leadership
changes result from popular choice rather than bargaining behind closed
doors’ (Christiansen, 2016, p. 993; cf. Shackleton, 2017).
However, the events of 2019 have left analysts at a loss. The few post hoc
analyses so far (Heidbreder & Schade, 2020; Raube, 2020) are notably cautious
in their theoretical conclusions.2 They review the different strategies with
which the EP and the member states approached the 2019 election of the
Commission President. Beyond that, however, they shy away from identifying
any generalisable aspect from the 2019 events. Instead, they underline that
the Spitzenkandidaten-process remains under-institutionalised and that
hence it is an open call how things will unfold in 2024.

EU demoi-cracy as an alternative perspective

The central claim of this article is that the failure of the Spitzenkandidaten-
process in 2019 forces us to rethink the parliamentarisation-thesis. Specifi-
cally, I argue that accounts of EU inter-institutional politics have remained
 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 199

deficient in their focus on the EP as the main agent of institutional change.

For an alternative to EP-centred parliamentarisation we can draw on theoreti-
cal accounts that emphasise the multiple sources of legitimacy on which the
EU relies. Most notable among these is the understanding of the EU as a
demoi-cracy, that is, as a polity that is composed of multiple self-governing
peoples that are never fully integrated into one. The dominant understand-
ings of the EU as a demoi-cracy conceive of it as a simultaneous union of citi-
zens – who constitute an overarching EU demos – and of its members states,
which are based on self-governing national demoi (Cheneval & Schimmelfen-
nig, 2013; Nicolaïdis, 2013). Thus, demoi-cracy offers a perspective on the
democratic nature of the EU that is not exclusively centred around the EP
and the integrated EU demos that it purportedly embodies. Instead, it under-
lines the continuing relevance of the democratic legitimacy enshrined in the
member states’ governments.
In institutional terms, this perspective is made more concrete in con-
ceptions that see popular sovereignty in the EU as embodied in a ‘multilevel
parliamentary field’ (Crum & Fossum, 2009) or a ‘Euro-national parliamentary
system’ (Fasone & Lupo, 2016) that is composed of the EP together with the
national parliaments of the EU member states. Both these conceptions depart
from the provision of article 10.2 of the Treaty of Lisbon that stipulates that
the EU relies on two chains of democratic representation. On the one
hand, ‘Citizens are directly represented at Union level in the European Parlia-
ment’. On the other hand, ‘Member states are represented in the European
Council by their Heads of State or Government and in the Council by their
governments, themselves democratically accountable either to their national
Parliaments, or to their citizens’.
Such understandings of the EU as a demoi-cracy suggest that a complete
account of the EU inter-institutional politics needs to recognise the double
nature of EU’s representative legitimacy, which does not exclusively rely on
the EP but also on the representative qualities of the member governments
assembled in the Council of Ministers. The demoi-cratic perspective need not
contest the logic of the EP’s expansion of powers as presented above. It does,
however, frame these events not merely as a series of EP wins but rather as an
evolving relationship between the EP and the member state governments in
the Council. Obviously, the two institutions – the Council and the EP – have
followed different evolutionary trajectories. The member governments have
always been prominent at all levels of EU decision-making. As a consequence,
they did not need to seek an expansion of their powers through inter-insti-
tutional politics. Rather they were the ones granting concessions: delegating
powers (under their ultimate supervision) to the Commission and other EU
executive agencies, and sharing powers with the EP (cf. Moravcsik, 1998,
p. 67). Thus, under considerable political and normative pressure, the
200 B. CRUM

member state governments have allowed the EP to emancipate itself and

achieve a more or less equal standing in EU decision-making.
This alternative perspective highlights that all power concessions by the
EU member states to the EP involve the sharing of powers; they have never
transferred powers in legislation or executive oversight. Thus, in EU legis-
lation, the Council and EP have come to operate side by side as co-legislators
and, if the Council can no longer impose laws upon the EP, neither has the EP
come into a position in which it can impose laws upon the Council. As a con-
sequence, any step forward requires the agreement of both institutions;
otherwise, the proposed decision fails, and we return to the pre-existing
situation.
This demoi-cratic reading has several critical implications for the parlia-
mentarisation-thesis. The first one is that the limits to the expansion of the
EP’s powers are inherent in the EU’s inter-institutional politics. Specifically,
the EP can successfully use its leverage potential to come to share powers
with the member state governments. However, since any extension of
powers is ultimately dependent on the consent of the member state govern-
ments, they will not allow the EP to take powers away from themselves:
powers may be shared but not transferred. Furthermore, if we then consider
where the process of parliamentarisation may lead eventually, we also need
to include the Council: a parliamentarised EU is unlikely to be built upon the
EP alone, rather it will need to involve some kind of joint or bicameral struc-
ture in which powers are shared between the EP and the Council (cf. Lupo,
2020).
The demoi-cratic perspective underlines that the treaty provisions on the
election of the Commission President are premised on a back-and-forth
between the member state governments and the EP. In that sense, the aspira-
tion of the Spitzenkandidaten-process differs from preceding EP claims in that,
rather than a claim to attain equal standing, it involves an attempt by the EP
to outflank the member state governments. This fact fundamentally changes
the calculations of the member state governments, and significantly raises
the costs that a concession on this procedure would have for them. By this
reasoning, the Spitzenkandidaten-process is expected to be blocked by the
European Council as it asserts its own place in the procedure and the right
to choose its own nominee. However, the EU’s double legitimacy may also
already leave an imprint earlier in the process. Thus, it would suggest that
national parties may claim a dominant role in the nomination processes in
the European parties and seek to ensure that the selected candidates
remain under their control. Furthermore, it is less self-evident that EP-del-
egations, and especially those affiliated to national governments, will let
the collective institutional interest of the EP prevail over party-political
differences.
 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 201

Table 1. Two theories of the election of the president of the European Commission.
EP-centred parliamentarisation EU demoi-cracy
Premises
Main source of EU EP - uniquely and exclusively EP and member state governments
popular legitimacy (accountable to their national
parliaments) jointly
Key features of EU inter- EP expands its powers combining Council shares powers with EP
institutional politics power politics with normative because of low costs and
claims normative claims
Telos of EU The EP controlling single-handedly Full sharing of powers in legislation
parliamentarisation an EU government and executive oversight between
EP and member state
governments
Expectations regarding the Art. 17.7 process
Interpretation of Art. . Art 17.7 offers an opening for the . Art. 17.7 requires a back-and-
17.7 newly elected EP to take control forth between member state
of the election of Commission governments and EP
President

Party-group dynamics . Party-groups organise selection . National parties seek to

procedures in pan-European and
open way
. Candidates have a prominent and
pan-European profile
dominate nomination
procedures
. National parties ensure that the
selected candidates remain
under their control

EP reception . EP party-groups prioritise their . Party-political interests limit EP

institutional interest to control delegations’ commitment to the
the election over party-political Spitzenkandidaten
differences

Decision-making in the . Majority of European Council . Majority of European Council is

European Council considers costs of conceding to intent to maintain its place in
the EP lower than the costs of the procedure and to choose its
outright confrontation own nominee

Essentially, then, the EP-centred parliamentarisation thesis and the notion

of EU demoi-cracy offer competing theories of the election of the Commis-
sion President (Table 1). In the remainder of this article, I use the events
leading up to the election of the Commission President in 2014 and in
2019 to develop two analytical narratives that illustrate and elaborate the
two theories. My premise is that the events of 2014 very much align with
the EP-centred parliamentarisation-thesis, but that the events in 2019 are
best understood in terms of the demoi-cracy perspective.
The analytical narratives essentially build on well-established facts, com-
plemented by original sources, contemporary news coverage and earlier ana-
lyses to substantiate points that are of particular relevance in light of the
theoretical expectations. The narratives are organised in four parts that cor-
respond to the four kinds of expectations in Table 1:
202 B. CRUM

- The interpretation of Article 17.7 TEU

- The role and internal dynamics of the European party-groups in the run-up
to the European elections
- The EP’s reception to the election outcome
- The dynamics of the nomination process in the European Council

We can reconstruct these four themes for each of the two episodes. The
mechanisms that are thus revealed yield insights that may be indicative of
the future of the Spitzenkandidaten-process and for other inter-institutional
issues of contention in the EU.

The 2014 Spitzenkandidaten-success as a case of EP-centred

parliamentarisation
The interpretation of article 17.7 TEU
On the face of it, the changes that the Treaty of Lisbon introduced into the
procedure for electing the Commission President were mostly presentational.
On the one hand, it added a formulation that underlined that the European
Council had to take ‘into account the elections to the European Parliament’ in
deciding on its nominee. On the other hand, it stated that the nominee would
be ‘elected’ by the EP rather than ‘approved’ as it had read before. Still, these
relatively minor changes were easily picked up to give fuel to the idea of
having European party-groups promote lead-candidates for the Commission
Presidency in the campaign for the EP elections, an idea that had already
been circulating among EP members and their supporters as far back as
the negotiations on the Treaty of Amsterdam in the 1990s (European
People’s Party, 2014; Hamřík & Kaniok, 2019; Hix, 2008, Ch. 9).
In November 2012, the EP (2012) adopted a resolution, authored by Carlo
Cassini from the European People’s Party (EPP), which called upon ‘the Euro-
pean political families to nominate candidates for the Presidency of the Com-
mission’. These candidates were ‘to play a leading role in the parliamentary
electoral campaign’. In support of this proposal, parliament added that it
expected this procedure to reinforce ‘the political legitimacy of both Parlia-
ment and the Commission by connecting their respective elections more
directly to the choice of the voters’. In its considerations, the EP referred to
the treaty phrases that ‘political parties at European level contribute to
forming European political awareness and to expressing the will of the citi-
zens of the Union’ (Art. 10.4 TEU) and it echoed the first part of Article 10.2
that ‘citizens are directly represented at Union level by Members of the Euro-
pean Parliament’.
Thus, the Spitzenkandidaten-process was launched with a strongly EP-
centred reading of the treaties. Typically, the EP resolution ignored the
second part of Article 10.2 that adds the second leg of EU democratic
 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 203

representation through the democratically accountable governments of the

member states. In their reading of Article 17.7, the EP party-groups over-
rode the critical role for the European Council in deciding on the
nominee for the presidency of the Commission as they set out to pre-
empt that decision by determining the slate of possible candidates by
themselves.

The role of the European party-groups

European party families quickly moved to live up to the role that this
interpretation of Article 17.7 offered them (Put et al., 2016). While few
Heads of Government supported the idea (Dinan, 2015, p. 96), their hesita-
tions were overtaken by the dynamics that were unleashed within the
party-group organisations, the entrepreneurial role played by members of
the EP, and the normative appeals to a democratisation of the election of
the Commission President.
Particularly the second biggest party family, the Party of European Social-
ists (PES), was keen to push forward with the initiative as it felt that it had
underperformed in the 2009 elections and wanted to challenge the
primacy of the EPP (PES Council, 2011). In November 2013, without any chal-
lengers, EP president Martin Schulz was put forward as the Social-Democratic
lead candidate (Christiansen, 2016).
While the EPP committed to an internal nomination process already in
2012, it ran on a slower schedule. Eventually, at the party’s congress in
March 2014, delegates were offered the choice between two prominent
candidates: Michel Barnier, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of France
and a two term European Commissioner, and Jean-Claude Juncker, who
had just been forced to step down as the Prime Minister of Luxembourg
after having served in that function for eighteen years.3 By 382 votes
against 245, EPP delegates voted for Juncker over Barnier as their lead
candidate.
Other party families followed suit (Put et al., 2016). The Alliance of Liberals
and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) put former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Ver-
hofstadt forward as its Spitzenkandidat. The European United Left–Nordic
Green Left (GUE/NGL) opted for Alexis Tsipras, leader of its Greek member
party Syriza. The European Green Party pushed the democratisation of the
nomination process to the next level by opting for two lead candidates
and having them elected in an open primary. Eventually, 22,676 voters
chose the tandem of German MEP Ska Keller and French MEP and agricultural
activist José Bové. All in all, the European parties succeeded in putting
together an impressive line-up of Spitzenkandidaten with distinctively pan-
European profiles.
204 B. CRUM

The EP’s reception of the election outcome

In the EP elections of 2019, the EPP remained the biggest party-group even if
its seat share went down significantly from 36% to 29%. The Socialist &
Democrats group consolidated its share at 25%, while the ALDE went
down from 11% to 9%. The Greens stabilised, while wins were secured by
the United Left, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), the
Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD), and some not (yet)
aligned parties on the extreme right parties that would form the Europe of
Nations and Freedom (ENF) group later in the term. Notably, the latter
three groups had not run a Spitzenkandidat.
The EP quickly seized the initiative. Leaders of the party-groups convened
after the elections and the five groups that had ran a Spitzenkandidat, together
good for three-quarters of the EP’s seats, called for the EPP Spitzenkandidat,
Jean-Claude Juncker, to be put forward as Commission President (Nielsen,
2014). Thus, four groups set aside their party-group interests and endorsed
the EPP candidate to secure an inter-institutional win for the EP. Most notable
in this case was the quick siding of the S&D-group, including its own candidate
Martin Schulz, with Juncker, instead of exploring the possibility of building a
majority coalition of its own. Being a twenty-year veteran of the parliament,
Schulz was happy to set his personal ambitions aside for the sake of the EP’s insti-
tutional interest and the promise of him securing its presidency again.

The dynamics in the European Council

Confronted with the normative claim of the EP, the closing of ranks by the
party-groups, and the EP’s apparent preparedness for a full-blown clash, the
majority of the members of the European Council acceded to the nomination
of Juncker, even if they had been less than enthusiastic about the Spitzenkan-
didaten-procedure (Dinan, 2015, p. 96/7). The few member states who did
object – the Prime Ministers of the UK and of Hungary – were unable to over-
turn this assessment of the (super-)majority. In any case, no alternative candi-
dates were forthcoming, and it was hard to challenge Juncker’s qualifications
given his extensive track record as a European Council veteran (Christiansen,
2016, p. 1001). Hence the European Council nominated Juncker for the presi-
dency of the Commission, and on 15 July 2014 his election was completed by
the EP with a majority of 422 votes (56% of all MEPs).

The European Council reclaiming its autonomy in 2019

The interpretation of article 17.7 TEU
Compared to 2014, all actors were better prepared for the election process of
the Commission President in 2019. The success of the 2014
 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 205

Spitzenkandidaten-process certainly emboldened the EP party-groups. This

was reflected in the report, prepared by the Spanish EPP-member Esteban
González Pons, that the parliament adopted in January 2018 (European Par-
liament, 2018; Raube, 2020, p. 28). In this report, the EP presented the Spitzen-
kandidaten-process as part and parcel of a process of EP-centred
parliamentarisation, claiming that its reading of Article 17.7 ‘reflects the inter-
institutional balance between the Parliament and the European Council as
provided for in the Treaties’, and adding that ‘this further step in strengthen-
ing the Union’s parliamentary dimension is a principle that cannot be over-
turned’. The EP proceeded to warn that:
the European Parliament will be ready to reject any candidate in the investiture
procedure of the President of the Commission who was not appointed as a
‘Spitzenkandidat’ in the run-up to the European elections

In its sideling of the autonomous role for the European Council, this reading
goes directly against the conception of the EU as a demoi-cracy. From a
demoi-cratic perspective Article 17.7 rather appears as a three-step back-
and-forth procedure: the opening shot is issued by the European voters in
the European elections; then the member state governments weigh in; and
eventually, the choice of Commission President is endorsed by the EP. For
member state governments who were not willing to succumb to the EP’s
interpretation of the article, the main concern thus became how they
would retain control over the second step of nominating a candidate
without that step being forced by the EP party-groups.

The role of the European party-groups

Following the Spitzenkandidaten-success in 2014, most European parties kept
the same procedure for selecting their candidates in 2019 (Wolfs et al., 2021).
Only in the case of the ALDE party it was apparent that member state govern-
ments had become more attentive to the process. Rather than promoting a
single Spitzenkandidat, ALDE opted for a ‘Team Europe’ of no less than
seven candidates. While formally insisting that there was little point to the
Spitzenkandidaten-process without the introduction of transnational lists for
the EP elections, the adoption of a team of candidates ultimately reflected
divisions among the party membership and, specifically, the envisaged
joining of French MEPs of President Macron’s La République en marche (Chris-
tiansen & Shackleton, 2019, p. 50; de Wilde, 2020, p. 38). Macron was known
to be critical of the Spitzenkandidaten-procedure and unwilling to have the EP
party-groups tie the hands of the Heads of Government on determining the
Commission President nominee.
In most other parties the process seemed to proceed very much like five
years earlier. The Social-Democrats gathered around Commission Vice-
206 B. CRUM

President Frans Timmermans as their Spitzenkandidat. The European Left fol-

lowed the example of the Greens by opting for a tandem of two candidates:
Slovenian parliamentarian Violeta Tomic and Belgian trade unionist Nico Cué.
The Greens reverted from the open primary to an election by representatives
of the member parties. German MEP Ska Keller emerged again as the most
preferred candidate, and she teamed up with Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout.
What is more, this time two more European parties put forward a candidate.
The ECR party family chose Czech MEP Jan Zahradil, and the European Free
Alliance (EFA, regionalists) ran with Oriol Junqueras, removed vice-president
of Catalonia.
Because it was bound to become the biggest parliamentary group again,
the most important nomination process was that of the EPP. The EPP had
again two prominent candidates running against each other: EP party-
group leader Manfred Weber and former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander
Stubb. Eventually, Weber beat Stubb by a considerable margin of 492
against 127 votes. Weber succeeded in not only capitalising on his relations
with members of the EP but also in securing the support from most member
parties, including most importantly the big CDU/CSU-delegation from his
fatherland (Herszenhorn, 2018).
Still, Weber appeared as a much less compelling candidate than his prede-
cessor Jean-Claude Juncker. Unlike Juncker (and, indeed, unlike Stubb), he
had no experience in government. What is more, his leadership of the
biggest EP party-group had not necessarily secured him the respect of
other political groups. Specifically, Weber was criticised for pandering to
Fidesz, the Hungarian EPP member, while it ran a government that, by all indi-
cations, was engaged in a domestic campaign of backsliding on the rule of
law and democracy (Kelemen, 2019). Obviously, Weber’s German nationality
and membership of the CSU-part of Merkel’s CDU-CSU tandem, guaranteed
access to the main national government in the EU. However, it also risked
making his political fortune dependent on the willingness of Berlin to
support him.

The EP’s reception of the election outcome

At the EP elections of May 2019, the EPP and the S&D continued their trend of
long-term decline, each of them losing about 40 seats (Crum, 2020). Still, with
182 seats (just short of 25%), the EPP remained the biggest group. However,
for the first time since 1979, the combined seat share of the EPP and the S&D
fell below 50%. Hence, any candidate for the Commission presidency would
need the support of at least three party-groups.
Two days after the ballot boxes closed on Sunday 26 May, the presidents of
the EP party-groups met. However, contrary to what happened in 2014, they
did not issue a joint statement that it would be up to the Spitzenkandidat of
 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 207

the biggest party-group, i.e., Manfred Weber of the EPP, to be the first candi-
date to be considered for the Commission Presidency. Instead, they merely
confirmed the general commitment that the next Commission President
was to be chosen from among the candidates that had been put forward
by the party-groups (European Parliament, 2019).
Thus, the position of the EP was less unified and outspoken than it had
been five years earlier. Notably, it were the big parties other than the EPP
that were more hesitant this time around. As seen, with Macron gaining lever-
age over the ALDE group, the group’s commitment to the Spitzenkandidaten-
process had become less than half-hearted. In turn, the S&D was this time less
willing to trade its party-group interest for the institutional interest of the EP
than it had been under Martin Schulz. With the EPP having lost seats, it
became a less unassailable partner to construct a majority in the EP.

The dynamics in the European Council

In the European Council, the political divisions as well as the resistance
against Weber’s candidacy were even stronger than in the EP (Herszenhorn
et al., 2019). These divisions were sharpened by the fact that the EPP share
in the European Council was exceptionally small. With Sebastian Kurz
having been stepped down in Austria and Kyriakos Mitsotakis only coming
into office after the Greek elections of 7 July, the number of EPP Heads of
Government was down to eight, while S&D and ALDE/RENEW each had
seven affiliates in the European Council. What is more, a coalition between
the Liberals and the Social-Democrats emerged to prevent the Christian-
Democrats from claiming the Commission presidency. Whereas the Social-
Democrats, led by Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez, were mostly keen to
break the EPP’s grip on the EU’s top positions, Macron spearheaded the Lib-
erals in seeking to break the EP’s claim to power.
After a first European Council on 20 June failed to reach agreement on a
Commission President nominee, the coalition of Social-Democrats and Liber-
als seemed close to win Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel over to accept the
Social-Democratic Spitzenkandidat Frans Timmermans (Herszenhorn et al.,
2019; de Wilde, 2020, p. 48). However, Merkel was called back by other EPP
Prime Ministers who were not going to allow her to trade away the Commis-
sion Presidency. What is more, Timmermans’ candidacy ran into vehement
objections from governments from Central and Eastern Europe who con-
sidered him the main advocate in the Commission for imposing sanctions
on Hungary and Poland for violations of the rule of law.
On Sunday 30 June a special European Council was called to resolve the
issue. For two days, the meeting remained deadlocked. Eventually, it was
French President Emmanuel Macron who came up with German Defence
Minister Ursula von der Leyen as a suitable candidate (d’Hoore & van
208 B. CRUM

Haver, 2019). Von der Leyen was an option that Bundeskanzlerin Merkel could
not refuse – even though she would eventually be the one Head of Govern-
ment withholding her vote under pressure of her Social-Democratic coalition
partner – given that she came from her own country, from her own party, and
was a personal confidante. Promoted by Macron, von der Leyen was accepta-
ble to the Liberals, who had in the meantime already secured the position of
European Council president for Belgian Prime Minister Michel. Von der
Leyen’s nomination was also acceptable to the governments from Central
and Eastern Europe as it promised to end the candidacy of Timmermans.
Eventually, also the Social-Democratic Prime Ministers realised that they
could not trump a Franco-German agreement, and Spanish Prime Minister
Sánchez saw the position of EU High Representative being handed to PSOE
veteran Josep Borrell.
Now the question was whether the newly elected EP would stand by the
commitment of its predecessor: would the parliament reject von der Leyen
for the fact that she was no Spitzenkandidat? As it turned out, most EU
party-groups quickly rallied behind the agreement reached by the Heads of
Government. The only party-group where a rejection was seriously enter-
tained still was S&D, particularly among the 16 members from the German
SPD. With their former leader Martin Schulz, they had been most wedded
to the Spitzenkandidaten-process (Herszenhorn et al., 2019). However, most
EP party-groups realised that the chances of the Spitzenkandidaten were
finished. Weber had withdrawn and Timmermans’s candidacy had no
chance of being revived. Hence, rejecting von der Leyen would return the
issue to the European Council. Even if the Heads of Government would be
willing to look for another nominee, they were not going to return to a Spit-
zenkandidat. Thus, von der Leyen succeeded in securing the majority support
of the EP, even if she attained only seven votes above the required majority.

Discussion and conclusion

The critical difference between 2014 and 2019 is that in 2019 the European
Council reasserted itself and was unwilling to hand the institutional win to
the EP. In 2014, the Heads of Government were ill-prepared: the European
parties were given free rein in nominating their candidates and the European
Council did not have an alternative to Juncker as he was put forward by the
EP party-groups (Christiansen, 2016, p. 1001). Having learned from these
events, in 2019 the governments reasserted their control over the process
and prevented the Spitzenkandidaten-process from becoming an institutional
rule. Guided by Emanuel Macron, they quickly rejected the candidacy of
Manfred Weber and, after that, the possibility that they would nominate
any other Spitzenkandidat. Thus, the 2019 events give credence to the
demoi-cratic perspective.
 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 209

Apart from the decision-making in the European Council, intimations of a

more double-handed approach came to the fore already earlier in the
process. Among the party-groups, ALDE decided to revise its nomination pro-
cedure and the EPP elected a candidate who, given his particular vulnerabil-
ities, could be manipulated by the governments. Political divisions and the
wishes of affiliated national leaders also resonated in the EP party-groups.
They backtracked on their commitment to the Spitzenkandidaten-process
and did not close ranks around Weber as their key candidate.
It is an open question what will happen in 2024. If one is committed to the
EP-centred parliamentarisation thesis, then one may consider the 2019
events as a temporal setback and expect the EP to relaunch the Spitzenkan-
didaten-process. In contrast, the findings in the various stages of the 2019
process suggest that national leaders are unlikely to allow the EP to
reclaim the Spitzenkandidaten-process.
If the EP is indeed unable to reclaim the Spitzenkandidaten-process, then
this reveals some critical limits to the EP-centred parliamentarisation-thesis
that is implied in most theories of inter-institutional politics in the EU. EP-
centred parliamentarisation misjudges the power awareness of the Heads
of Government and, more fundamentally, it has a deficient understanding
of the power balance that underlies the Union. Instead, the demoi-cratic per-
spective as it has been developed in this article underlines that the national
governments maintain critical controls over the distribution of powers in the
EU and that they retain a claim to legitimising EU decisions independent from
the EP. For these reasons, they can be pressurised to share powers, but it
would fundamentally undermine their standing if they were to allow
powers to be fully transferred to the EP.
If we follow the demoi-cratic perspective, the way forward for the election
of the Commission President cannot lie in resolving the balance in favour of
either the EP or the European Council. Instead, the procedure of Article 17.7
needs proper completion, including a process for inter-institutional resol-
ution in case the two institutions end up in a deadlock. Taking a cue from
the conciliation procedure in the EU legislative process, one might for
instance establish a joint search committee following the EP elections, or at
least in those cases where the present process does not lead the European
Council and EP to agree on the candidate for Commission President. A
joint search committee would still strengthen the position of the EP com-
pared to the situation before the Treaty of Lisbon, but it would place it on
a par with the European Council rather than seeking to dominate it.
More generally, as an alternative to EP-centred parliamentarisation, the
demoi-cratic perspective offers important hypotheses for future research
on EU inter-institutional politics. One is that it underlines that the co-legis-
lation procedure is the end-point of the EP’s emancipation in EU legislation.
The EP may gain powers in the few legislative domains in which it does not
210 B. CRUM

enjoy equal standing to the member states, but it would not be expected to
gain a procedural advantage over the Council – for instance by acquiring a
right to legislative initiative – without the Council securing the same right.
Instead, the main domains in which the EP still stands structurally behind
the member states are executive in character, for instance foreign policy,
economic policy coordination, and implementation oversight. Although
there is a developing literature on the position of the EP in these domains,
it has not been systematically connected to theories of EU inter-institutional
politics to explain which factors have prevented the EP from asserting itself so
far and under which conditions it may be able to emancipate itself still. Also in
these cases, the central tenet of the demoi-cratic perspective is to be tested
as it predicts that the EP can come on a par with the member states but that it
will not overtake them.

Notes
1. Also the (non-binding) Declaration 11 that was attached to the Treaty of Lisbon
offers nothing but good intentions as it submits:
the European Parliament and the European Council are jointly respon-
sible for the smooth running of the process leading to the election of
the President of the European Commission. Prior to the decision of the
European Council, representatives of the European Parliament and of
the European Council will thus conduct the necessary consultations in
the framework deemed the most appropriate.
2. An exception is the constitutional law analysis by Lupo (2020), who relies on the
fate of the Spitzenkandidaten-process to argue that the EU is on its way to a par-
ticular parliamentary form of government, which he labels ‘assembly-consen-
sual’, and in which also the Council retains its role. While taking a different
approach, there is considerable convergence between Lupo’s position and
the position argued for in this article.
3. A third candidate, Latvian Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis, withdrew his can-
didacy shortly before the vote.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Valentin Kreilinger, Alvaro Oleart, and three anonymous reviewers for excel-
lent comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to the JEPP editors for their gui-
dance through the review process. A very first version of the argument of this
article was presented at the Conference ‘10 Years Treaty of Lisbon. Still fit for
Purpose?’ on 6 December 2019 at the RENFORCE Centre for Regulation and Enforce-
ment in Europe at Utrecht University.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 211

Funding
Research for this article has been carried out as part of the RECONNECT project, which
has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Inno-
vation Framework Programme under grant agreement No. 770142.

Notes on contributor
Ben Crum is Professor of Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

ORCID
Ben Crum http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4330-295X

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