Greens condemn three-party election deal

Parliament’s three main parties say next Commission president must be one of their candidates.

The European Greens have described as “undemocratic” a declaration by the three largest groups in the European Parliament in which they pledged to back one of their candidates as the next president of the European Commission.

“The candidate from the largest group [in the next Parliament] will be the first to attempt to form the required majority,” the declaration, issued yesterday (3 April), said. “On this basis, we will jointly submit a proposal to the European Council, to start inter-institutional consultation.”

According to the EU’s Lisbon treaty, the president of the European Commission is elected by the European Council, “taking into account the elections to the European Parliament and after having held the appropriate consultations”.

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“The next elected Commission president will be the result of a transparent process, not the product of back-room deals,” yesterday’s declaration said. It was jointly issued by the centre-right European People’s Party, the centre-left Socialists and Democrats, and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.

“Our political families will present themselves at the European elections each with their own candidate(s) for president of the next European Commission,” the declaration continued. “The next Commission president must be chosen from amongst them. Citizens’ expectations will thereby be respected, making the European Union more democratic and closer to them.”

A spokesman for the liberal group said that the point of the declaration was to reaffirm the groups’ determination that it should be one of the current candidates for president of the Commission who will be chosen by the European Council and not someone else, and that it was not supposed to exclude any other group from the process.

But the Green group said in a statement: “In spite of all the promises that these elections would fundamentally change the way the European Commission president is chosen, [these three groups] want to defend as much as possible their tradition of striking deals among themselves. They want to make sure that the status quo prevails, dividing up the spoils between themselves ahead of the elections.”

Reinhard Bütikofer, a Green MEP from Germany and a co-chair of the European Green Party, said: “The forces of business-as-usual will make sure that nothing will change” in the election of the Commission president.

“All of these three [groups] stand for business as usual, they have no transformative policies regarding the economy,” he said. “Now just imagine that voters send the message that they want no more austerity – how can these three parties decide to ignore that even before the voters have spoken? How arrogant, not only toward the other parties but toward the voters.”

“This contradicts the message that we are trying to send to voters – that this is an open race, and that after election day, after they’ve taken their decision, we will work out what to do with that result.”