Meltdown
at the European Parliament
The
‘grand coalition’ has imploded. Prepare for weeks of distraction
and legislative paralysis.
By DAVID M.
HERSZENHORN AND MAÏA DE LA BAUME 12/1/16, 5:11 AM CET Updated
12/1/16, 7:45 AM CET
The carefully
calibrated “grand coalition” of Europe’s dominant political
parties, which EU leaders have relied on to sustain their agenda and
to manage a series of crises since 2014, this week imploded amid the
collapse of a power-sharing deal in the European Parliament and the
start of a bruising fight over the Parliament presidency.
The rupture cast a
shadow of uncertainty over Brussels, raising the prospect of weeks of
distraction and legislative paralysis, and leaving European
Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council
President Donald Tusk with little choice but to watch in dismay from
the sidelines and brace for further turbulence.
The fragility of the
coalition had been clear even before Parliament President Martin
Schulz, a member of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and
Democrats (S&D), last week announced his plans to step down and
return to Germany to run for a seat in the Bundestag. But the scope
of disarray resulting from his departure is now coming into focus.
The power-sharing
agreement had called for the presidency to pass next year from the
S&D, the second-largest group in Parliament, to the center-right
European People’s Party (EPP), the largest group, which also
controls the Commission and the Council, through Juncker and Tusk.
But any hope of an
orderly transition to fill the presidency evaporated Wednesday as
Gianni Pittella, the Italian leader of the S&D, officially
declared his candidacy for the top job, setting off a free-for-all
among party leaders.
Guy makes his move
Belgian MEP Guy
Verhofstadt, the leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for
Europe (ALDE) — which could provide the decisive votes in an
alliance with either the EPP or S&D — moved swiftly to increase
his leverage by shoving aside French MEP Sylvie Goulard, an ALDE
member who had sought to put herself forward as a compromise
candidate, and making clear that he had his group’s backing to
declare his own bid.
The ALDE MEPs gave
Verhofstadt their unanimous support at a group meeting on Tuesday
night and Goulard issued a statement Wednesday withdrawing.
Even if the EPP, led
by German MEP Manfred Weber, ultimately is able to clinch the
presidency, Pittella declared that the S&P would no longer
participate in the “grand coalition” or “Große Koalition” as
it is called in German, a nod to the German-speaking buddies —
Juncker and Schulz — who were at its heart from the beginning.
“The compromise on
which we based our legislative collaboration, which has been carried
out in the past two years and a half, was broken — and not by us,”
Pittella declared, in announcing his candidacy. “We think there
should be a new phase with a new progressive agenda for the second
half of the legislation.”
His comments seemed
to promise a more combative posture by the S&D, particularly in
fighting back against the German-led economic austerity policies that
are a bane to countries across the Continent’s southern tier, not
just Italy but also Greece, Spain and Portugal.
“We
had the impression that the EU was governed by a board of directors
led by Juncker and Schulz” — Jean Arthuis, French MEP
“For us
socialists, the grand coalition has never existed,” Pittella told
POLITICO. “There has been legislative cooperation, borne out of the
necessity to go ahead on parliamentary work.” He added: “The
great coalition creates an obligation that on every legislative file
we have to agree. But it didn’t happen like that because many times
we and the EPP have voted differently.”
Pittella told
reporters he was willing to work with all groups “except right-wing
extremists” to win support for his candidacy and his new agenda.
“We want new economic politics, put aside austerity, a new social
agenda, a new development model,” he said.
MEPs from other
parties also slammed the Große Koalition, which was held together in
part by regular dinner meetings of the so-called G5: Juncker,
Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans, Schulz, Weber and
Pittella.
“We had the
impression that the EU was governed by a board of directors led by
Juncker and Schulz,” said Jean Arthuis, a French MEP from the ALDE
group. “That had brought too much resentment and not enough debate
in the Parliament.”
Whatever the
resentments, the Große Koalition has been so central to Juncker’s
effort to run a more political, accountable and top-down Commission
that in recent months he had loudly expressed his support for Schulz
to stay on as Parliament president for an unprecedented third term —
despite the agreement calling for the presidency to be passed to the
EPP, Juncker’s own party.
Juncker’s woes
For Juncker, the
consequences of the coalition breakdown could be severe. On
Wednesday, the Commission announced two ambitious new initiatives —
a clean energy package and a proposal for stepped-up military
cooperation – that could stall amid Parliamentary infighting.
In a recent
interview with POLITICO, Juncker’s chief of staff, Martin Selmayr,
explained the importance of the coalition — and Schulz — to
carrying out the Commission’s agenda over its five-year term.
“In the European
Union, we are going through a big crisis, many big crises,” Selmayr
said. “And the mandate is five years. And if you want to get
something done, you don’t change the team in the middle of it.”
“The team includes
Donald Tusk, Martin Schulz,” Selmayr continued, noting they were
both up for re-election. “The president of the Commission,
therefore, who is here for five years, has an interest that his
partners, with whom he has started to work well together — Martin
Schulz in the Parliament and President Tusk in the European Council —
that they stay the same because you get used to each other. And that
is a matter of effectiveness. It’s also a matter of political
balance because it’s important to have the balance with Martin
Schulz who is the leading Social Democrat.”
That political
balance has now gone up in smoke.
Verhofstadt, a
former Belgian prime minister who has led ALDE since 2009 and who
serves as the Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator, seems to have
little chance of winning the presidency but has already maneuvered
aggressively to increase his leverage over the ultimate outcome —
and to ratchet up his party’s influence.
One ALDE official
acknowledged the power play. “Our priority is to get the most
perfect agreement,” the official said. “We want to keep our
leadership positions — at least a vice-presidency and maybe more.”
For now, at least,
the third-largest group in the Parliament, the European Conservatives
and Reformists (ECR), has chosen the Belgian MEP Helga Stevens as its
candidate and ruled out supporting any rival conservative candidate
from the EPP — its own maneuver to put a high price on any future
alliance.
“The EPP is in
danger of just assuming that we will fall behind their candidate,”
an ECR official said, adding that the group didn’t appreciate
Weber’s “attacks” against the U.K. government. “I could see
them not voting at all,” the official said.
The ECR currently
has Polish MEP Ryszard Czarnecki as a vice-president of the
Parliament and British MEP Vicky Ford as chairwoman of the powerful
Internal Market Committee. The official said the group wants to keep
both of those posts.
Numbers game
Under parliamentary
rules, to be elected president a candidate must win an absolute
majority of the votes cast, which means 50 percent plus one. The
Parliament is comprised of 751 members, so 376 votes are needed to
win the presidency.
External political
pressures make this a particularly bad moment for Brussels discord.
Currently, the EPP
holds 216 seats, while the S&D has 189, the ECR has 74 and ALDE
has 69. Smaller parties and non-affiliated MEPs make up the balance.
Allegiances tend to break along party lines, but also nationally with
Germany having 96 MEPs, followed by France with 74, and Italy and the
U.K. with 73 each.
To be sure, the
horse-trading has only just begun. And in the EU, dark clouds can
suddenly give way to new sunlight. But external political pressures
make this a particularly bad moment for Brussels discord.
Ahead of announcing
his bid for the presidency, Pittella reached out to Socialist leaders
across the Continent, including French President François Hollande
and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, whose own political careers
are deeply uncertain. Hollande seems certain to be defeated if he
seeks re-election, while Renzi could resign if he loses a crucial
constitutional referendum to be held Sunday.
With the 28 heads of
state and government in the European Council increasingly pulled in
different directions by conflicting political imperatives back home —
not to mention the divisiveness of the U.K.’s vote to leave the
bloc — the alliance between the Commission and the Parliament has
been the key to advancing policy initiatives despite the turbulent
atmosphere of rising nationalism and Euroskepticism.
At least part of the
blame for the collapse of the coalition lies with Schulz, whose
announcement that he would step down caught his own party completely
by surprise. At the same time, the unfolding disarray only seems to
confirm Schulz’s argument that he was crucially needed in the
Parliament, even if it meant unraveling the previously agreed upon
power-sharing agreement.
Schulz’s
spokesman, Giacomo Fassina, acknowledged that the coalition was built
on the friendship and professional trust between Juncker and Schulz.
“The close
relationship between President Schulz and President Juncker is built
both on personal and political affinity,” he said. “In practice,
the relationship served as a functioning coalition in the European
Parliament between the EPP and progressive forces and in the
institutional domain between the Parliament and the Commission.”
Pittella also said
Schulz had been the glue. “This compromise was also guaranteed by
Martin Schulz’s presence at the European Parliament,” he said.
“For now, there
won’t be any G5,” Pittella added. “For us, Martin Schulz was
fundamental.”
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