The EU Needs a Directly Elected Commission President
The Commission president has become too influential for the EU to remain a representative representative democracy.
In its current form the EU isn’t a representative democracy. Instead, it’s a representative representative democracy. That isn’t a typo; let me explain what I mean.
As an EU citizen, when EU elections come around, you vote for a national party within your country, which is in turn affiliated with an EU-wide political group. This group then goes on to represent you in the European Parliament. Similarly, when you vote in your national election, whichever head of state is chosen ends up representing you and your country in the European Council.
When it’s time to choose the president of the EU Commission, the European Council (i.e. the heads of state of each member nation) nominate a candidate who is then approved or rejected by the European Parliament.
So both the Parliament and the Council are democratically elected, and together they decide on the president of the EU Commission.
Does that make the EU a representative democracy?
It doesn’t, because there are two levels of representation between you and the EU Commission president who, at the end of the day, is the ultimate representative of the union and holds the most powerful position.
There’s the first level of representation, comprised of:
The national party you voted for (and the EU-wide political group it’s associated with)
The head of state of the country you live in
And there’s the second level of representation: the EU Commission president (theoretically) representing the collective will of the various political groups in the Parliament and heads of state in the Council and acting as the figurehead for the union.
So given that there are two levels of representation, it’d be more precise to call the EU a representative representative democracy, rather than a representative democracy.
Why a representative representative democracy isn’t good enough (anymore)
In the past, when the EU was little more than a trade union, a system like this was arguably fine because the EU Commission president didn’t have a significant impact yet on the lives of the citizens of the union, and so it wasn’t necessarily the expectation of the European populace to be able to vote on the president of the union; just like you wouldn’t expect to be able to vote on the executive director of the International Energy Agency for example.
But in the present day, with the degree of influence the EU has on the lives of its citizens, there are significant problems with having more than one level of separation between its leadership and its citizens:
With each level of representation, signal is lost. Even a single level of representation is flawed; it’s very rare that a candidate or party precisely represents your views, so you vote on the one that’s the closest match. That’s a compromise and (I would argue) a reasonable one. But if you extend this to two levels of representation, the loss of signal compounds. It’s a compromise on a compromise, and at the end the elected representative(s) may not align much with your preferences anymore at all.
A sense of disconnect between the leadership of the union and its citizens. Agree or disagree with Ursula von der Leyen, no citizen directly voted for her. That’s an issue, because for those who disagree with her there’s a sense that views and policies are being imposed on them by someone that wasn’t even directly elected. Given the amount of influence the EU has on the lives of its citizens today, this naturally creates resentment among those who do not agree with the course of the EU.
A broken feedback loop. When representatives aren’t directly elected, it breaks the feedback loop that’s supposed to exist in a democracy between the citizens and their leadership. Citizens should be able to vote out leadership that they feel isn’t acting on their behalf, but that mechanism currently doesn’t work well in the EU, again creating (unnecessary) resentment towards its leadership.
It’s time to change this
Direct election of the Commission president is long overdue. Given how much power the EU has over the lives of its citizens, the current, representative representative system is no longer appropriate.
Direct elections would make the union more democratic, create a much stronger connection between the citizens and the leadership of the EU, and fix the feedback loop between the people and their representatives. Further, it would help foster an increased sense of Europeanness among the people of the union. Polls also show that the majority of citizens in polled EU countries already support direct elections:
So, why hasn’t this been done yet?
An obvious answer here is: inertia. The system works the way it does because that’s how it has worked so far. But on top of this there are three common objections to the idea of a directly elected Commission president:
Common objection 1: The Commission president isn’t like the president of a country (i.e. they’re not as powerful), so it doesn’t matter whether they’re directly elected or not.
Again, this may have been true in the past, but nowadays the Commission president actually does wield significant power over the lives of citizens. They control the policy agenda of the Commission and in practice no policy can be proposed without the president's agreement. Additionally, they act as the face of the EU in international relations.
Common objection 2: The EU is already democratic enough because of the Spitzenkandidat process, so there’s no need to change anything.
The Spitzenkandidat of the largest party (or the one able to secure the support of a majority coalition) is proposed by the European Council to the European Parliament for election to the Commission Presidency. The theory then is that this makes the election of the Commission president democratic, because the parties (and because of that, theoretically, the coalitions) are democratically elected.
However, the coalition forming process is opaque and citizens have no say in it, yet the Spitzenkandidat of the largest coalition is the one that’s proposed as Commission president and either approved or rejected by the Parliament, again without any input from the people of the union.
This process has also been ignored in the past. For example, when Ursula von der Leyen was first elected in 2019, she was not the Spitzenkandidat for the EPP. So even if you believe that the Spitzenkandidat process is what ensures that the Commission president is elected democratically, it isn’t always adhered to.
Common objection 3: Citizens will always vote for the candidate that has their nationality, so candidates from smaller countries won’t have a chance.
This is a concern that’s sometimes mentioned as well. The idea is that Germans will always vote for a German, French people will always vote for a French candidate, and so on. The worry is then that the Commission president will always be German, French or Italian because those countries have the most citizens.
However, the very nature of direct elections would force candidates to campaign across the EU and secure votes from citizens across the union. Even if, hypothetically, a candidate received 100% of the German vote (something that’d never happen in practice), that’d only get them a little under 19% of the total vote and through running a campaign so exclusively focused on Germany they’d likely alienate voters from other countries.
On top of this, to assuage any remaining concerns that have to do with the nationality of the Commission president, mechanisms can be put in place to avoid problems with nationality-based voting. For example, rules could require candidates to secure endorsements or votes from a minimum number of countries or regions, or it could be a requirement that the Commission president cannot be from the same country twice in a row.
A specific proposal for a mechanism by which to directly elect the Commission president
In my next article on this topic, I will talk in detail about a fair and effective mechanism by which the Commission president could be elected.