The secret, unwritten rules of the EU’s top jobs carve-up

BRUSSELS — When cardinals select a new pope after backroom negotiations in the Vatican, they send out a cloud of white smoke. When EU leaders meet in Brussels to hand out the bloc’s top jobs, they put out a press release.   

Apart from that, the two processes are remarkably similar.

On Thursday, the EU’s 27 leaders will meet in Brussels and are set to sign off on the three top jobs. As of Tuesday, Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen, Portugal’s António Costa and Estonia’s Kaja Kallas have been pencilled in by negotiators for the most senior positions at the European Commission, European Council and foreign policy service. 

This is “undemocratic at multiple levels,” said Alberto Alemanno, professor of EU Law at HEC Paris. 

The rules to elect the new EU leadership are largely unwritten. Just like a papal conclave, they are based on long-standing traditions and gentlemen’s (and, in the EU at least, ladies’) agreements. In Rome, some enter as cardinals and leave as bishops. In Brussels, some enter as former national leaders and leave as senior EU officials.  

When EU leaders work out the top jobs puzzle, they only have to “take into account” the results of the European election, even though 373 million citizens were eligible to vote in one of the world’s largest democratic exercises — and voters in France, Germany and elsewhere opted for a slate of MEPs that is considerably more conservative and Euroskeptic than the previous class.

While all 27 national leaders will be in the room on Thursday, the group making the decisions is far smaller and representative of the pre-election balance of power. Six negotiators from three political groups — the center-right, socialists and liberals — have already agreed on the trio of leaders, expecting the others will sign off on the deal later this week. 

To compound the issue, there are a lot of unwritten rules, said Steven Van Hecke, professor of European politics at KU Leuven. Leaders consider the political, geographic and gender diversity of the candidates. 

The rules “are not written in any of the treaties, but they make the puzzle much harder,” Van Hecke added. 

Hungarian populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lashed out at the news that the six negotiators had already reached an agreement, saying: “EU top officials should represent every member state, not just leftists and liberals!”

Denying Orbán and other critics of Brussels’ authority seats at the negotiating table — despite gains in the June election — is based on pro-EU factions’ “ assumption that they alone own the project,” said Alemanno.

“This undemocratic way of proceeding may backfire spectacularly,” he added, “as it may alienate the ‘far-right’ parties and even unite them.” 

Backroom deals

For the 27 leaders, the first informal target they are aiming for is political balance — and this is the one place where the EU election results actually play a role, albeit informally. 

This time around, Ursula von der Leyen did not run for a seat in the European Parliament. | Masiello/Getty Images

The biggest political group after the EU election — currently the European People’s Party, the party of von der Leyen — gets to put forward a candidate to become European Commission president. This idea of a Spitzenkandidat, or lead candidate, is supposed to help European voters have a more direct influence on who will lead the Commission. The socialists, the second biggest group, then put forward Costa as European Council president, while the liberals claimed the foreign policy post for Kallas. 

It doesn’t always turn out this way. In 2019, the EPP’s lead candidate, Manfred Weber, was firmly rejected by EU leaders despite being from the largest group after the election. This time around, von der Leyen did not run for a seat in the European Parliament, so even Germans could not directly vote for the EPP’s lead candidate. 

The president of the European Parliament is chosen by the 720 European lawmakers. But in practice, this job is also taken into account by leaders when dividing up the top jobs. The goal is to split the five-year mandate in half by letting current President Roberta Metsola (EPP) continue for 2.5 years and then hand over to a socialist. 

Such a “pre-cooked” handoff halfway through the parliamentary term is problematic, said Ken Godfrey, executive director of the European Partnership for Democracy, a civil society network that advocates for democratic values. That’s especially true if socialists do poorly in upcoming national elections. “It will seem divorced from democratic reality. In my opinion, they should change that,” Godfrey said.

The second informal factor to be taken into account is geography. 

The four EU top jobs are supposed to be equally divided between the different regions of the bloc. In the current plan, both Costa (from Portugal) and Metsola (who hails from Malta) represent the South. Von der Leyen hails from Germany, while Estonia’s Kallas clinches a seat for the East. This package also provides a balance between smaller and bigger member EU countries, and between older and newer member states — criteria that are less important than the overall geographical balance, but still taken into account. 

In theory, each top job puzzle starts from scratch. But leaders know their history. For example, it would have been hard to claim another top job for a Belgian or Luxembourgish politician this time around given how many top jobs Benelux has had (Belgium has had two European Council presidents in Herman Van Rompuy and Charles Michel, Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker was Commission chief, and outgoing Dutch PM Mark Rutte just clinched the top job at NATO).

A third unwritten rule is gender balance. In the past, this often came down to ensuring that at least one woman was included in the top jobs package. In the current plan, there would be two women and two men. 

Can we all just please get along?

This time around, a fourth informal indicator has emerged: Do they like each other? 

The notoriously bad relationship between von der Leyen and Michel is not something the leaders want repeated. The tensions between von der Leyen and the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell are less glaring — but they became visible when the pair disagreed over how to handle the war in the Middle East. 

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lashed out at the news that the six negotiators had already reached an agreement. | Attila Kisbenedek/Getty Images

Costa has a good working relationship with almost all EU leaders, including von der Leyen. 

That said, the EPP and the socialists had disagreed about the amount of time that Costa would serve. The mandate of the Council president is officially for 2.5 years and then has to be renewed by EU leaders, and every Council president so far has had two terms.

However, the EPP wanted to split up the job, to potentially bring in an EPP leader for the second half of the mandate — much to the anger of the socialists. The six negotiators have now agreed that “when it comes to the second term of the president of the European Council, the intention is to follow the well-established practice,” an EU diplomat said.

A final unwritten rule is who should referee the process. In theory, it is up to Michel to lead negotiations. When EU leaders met last week, it was obvious that he was being sidelined. “It was clear from the beginning that leaders would take this into their own hands instead of leaving this to Michel,” one EU official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. 

Now, Michel has merely been presented with a done deal by the six top negotiators, about which he was informed by French President Emmanuel Macron (one of the six). 

“Michel’s room for maneuver was very limited,” said Van Hecke. “This is the moment when EU countries want to use the leverage that they have on von der Leyen, to secure good portfolios or influence policy.” 

Also sidelined is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has been fuming about being excluded from the negotiations. The socialists, and Scholz in particular, did not want to include her European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the negotiations, despite the ECR becoming the third biggest group in the European Parliament, ahead of the liberals. 

Socialists “have said very openly to their voters they will not cooperate” with right-wing parties, said Godfrey. “Many people vote for them on this basis. They cannot backtrack on that.”

While Meloni was given progress reports before and after the talks, she could still protest the backdoor negotiations when leaders meet on Thursday. 

If things do get tricky again, Michel can always resort to the medieval method of forcing cardinals to select a new pope — by only giving them bread and water.