MEPs
to confront Juncker on his support for Schulz
The
Commission president’s own center-right allies are angry about his
endorsement of the Socialist.
By MAÏA DE LA
BAUME 9/7/16, 5:33 AM CET
Center-right members
of the European Parliament plan to take Commission chief Jean-Claude
Juncker to task next week over his recent endorsement of Socialist
Martin Schulz for re-election as the assembly’s president,
according to sources from the European People’s Party group.
Juncker is scheduled
to hold an “exchange of views” with EPP members at their group
meeting on September 14 in Strasbourg, after delivering his State of
the Union speech to the full Parliament. It will be the first meeting
of the group’s MEPs with Juncker — himself a member of the EPP —
after he publicly backed Schulz in an interview published in the
German magazine Der Spiegel in June.
“They will tell
him [to] stop doing this,” said an EPP official who requested
anonymity because he is not entitled to speak about the matter. “His
comments made many MEPs uncomfortable.”
Juncker angered many
MEPs when he told Der Spiegel that Schulz should stay on as
Parliament president to provide “stability” in Europe. His
comments contradicted the terms of a longstanding deal between the
Parliament’s two main political groups that the presidency should
pass to the center-right EPP in January 2017. Schulz himself agreed
to the deal when he began his current term as president in 2014.
Juncker and Schulz
are from different political parties but they are known to have very
close personal ties, meeting regularly for strategy dinners with
other EPP and Socialist group leaders.
The next Parliament
president will be elected by MEPs in January for a
two-and-a-half-year term lasting until the end of the current
mandate. Schulz was the first president of the assembly ever to be
re-elected for a second term, in July 2014.
Campaign season
Though the official
presidential campaign has not started yet, sources said Schulz has
been working behind the scenes for months to convince colleagues he
should stay in his current job beyond the end of his agreed term,
arguing that it is important not to let all three EU presidencies be
held by center-right politicians (European Council President Donald
Tusk is, like Juncker, a member of the EPP).
“President Schulz
is focusing on the pressing issues the EU is confronted with,” said
Giacomo Fassina, Schulz’s spokesperson. “A number of possible
scenarios concerning his future are in the press but these amount to
speculation.”
Names of potential
candidates from the EPP, including France’s Alain Lamassoure,
Italy’s Antonio Tajani and Ireland’s Mairead McGuinness, have
been circulating for months. EPP sources also said that two other
potential contenders, France’s Elisabeth Morin-Chartier and
Françoise Grossetête, have now added their names to the list.
“We need Schulz to
clarify his position first,” said Morin-Chartier, who didn’t
confirm that she would run. “This is all too premature, there is no
timetable. There are many names circulating, and the candidacies are
not open yet.”
The EPP is expected
to hold primary elections to choose its presidential nominee before
MEPs elect the next president at a plenary session in January.
Another EPP official said the primary election timetable would be
discussed “in the coming weeks.”
The assembly’s
other political groups can also choose nominees for the post, though
small groups rarely do so as the president usually comes from one of
the major parties.
“We still need to
decide what our strategy will be,” said Philippe Lamberts, the
c0-president of the Greens. “One of our major criteria would be to
have a woman as president.”
“The candidate who
will gain the Greens support will not fear confronting other
institutions on substantial topics, and will apply the rules of the
European Parliament with a certain neutrality,” he said.
Sticking to the
agreement
Other sources in the
Greens said they would reject another term for Schulz.
Since no political
group holds a majority of parliamentary seats, winning the election
requires a coalition — hence the agreement between the EPP and
center-left Socialists and Democrats group to take turns holding the
presidency, with each group supporting the other’s candidate.
A spokesperson for
the EPP’s leader in the Parliament, German MEP Manfred Weber, said
Tuesday that the party would stick to the agreement to take over the
presidency in 2017.
“Juncker has been
informed of the EPP group’s position,” an EPP official said.
Parliament sources
said the most credible EPP candidate appears to be Lamassoure, who
has been a European affairs minister, a government spokesman, a
member of the European Convention, as well as a longtime member of
the European Parliament.
Lamassoure also
headed the Parliament’s Luxleaks committee, which investigated
preferential tax deals for multinational companies.
“Lamassoure is
very respected, and even by the Socialists and Greens,” another EPP
official said. “His committee on tax fraud did a very good job,
that kind of policy was a consensual policy and it’s very rare that
they find consensus. He was a leading force in all of this. He does
have a stately presidential profile.”
McGuinness, who is
also one of the assembly’s vice-presidents, “is in a constant
campaign,” the source said. “She’s very presidential. All the
signs are there, she’s always in the limelight in the EP, she
doesn’t attack other party groups, she is very consensual.”
Tajani may have a
tougher time in the primary because he has been forced to defend role
as the EU commissioner for industry from 2010 to 2014 in connection
with the Dieselgate scandal, which revealed that Volkswagen, the
world’s biggest carmaker, had been cheating on its diesel emissions
tests.
Tajani, who oversaw
the Commission’s interactions with the car industry before
re-joining Parliament, appeared at a hearing on Dieselgate on Monday.
He said he had never received any information about possible emission
test “defeat devices” in cars.
But he came in for
harsh criticism from MEPs. “Commissioner Tajani ignored growing
warnings, including a letter from his colleague, former Commissioner
for Environment Janez Potočnik, that car companies could be using
defeat devices to cheat emissions tests,” Seb Dance, a British MEP
from the Socialists and Democrats, wrote in a statement following the
hearing.
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