The EU Commission’s drift towards authoritarianism

 

Opinion

The EU Commission’s drift towards authoritarianism

Opinion

by Päivi Leino-Sandberg, Helsinki, May 13, 2025, 10:27:28 AM

https://euobserver.com/rule-of-law/ar038e6ec2

 

The second Ursula von der Leyen EU Commission lists ”protecting our democracy, upholding our values” among its key priorities. These are commendable words but, as always, actions speak louder.

 

 Judging by its actions, the commission’s commitment to democracy seems to stop at the vocabulary, and definitely does not extend to upholding basic principles of participatory democracy in its own institutional practices.

 

As a researcher, following the von der Leyen presidency demonstrate its attitudes towards participatory democracy has been a journey from disbelief to frustration, and then to worry and anger. These emotions have been shared by members of civil society and journalists working with EU affairs.

 

The commission’s general policy towards public access requests can be characterised as one of strategic delay. Legal time limits are ignored as a matter of policy, and the simplest request can take months or even years to respond. The European Ombudsman sees these systematic failures amounting to maladministration.

 

The commission denies the existence of documents, even when this is obviously a big fat lie, and destroys documents to avoid disclosure obligations. It disregards the European Court of Justice’s established case law.

 

The commission’s general policy towards public access requests can be characterised as one of strategic delay

 

In its responses to access requests, the commission sees democratic debate as ‘external pressure’, which it needs to be insulated from. The way to do that is by further limiting transparency. The whole point of the commission’s policy is to make timely and informed debate impossible.

 

Finding effective ways to redress such failures has proven nigh on impossible. The commission pays no heed to the views of the European Ombudsman, an attitude demonstrated by its total non-engagement with her inquiries and recommendations.

 

In recent years, the commission has spent a lot of time monitoring authoritarian governments and their playbooks. It seems to have learned a trick or two.

 

When disclosure is so unlikely and slow as to frustrate even the most hard-core EU geek, we — the academia, the media, the public — will just stop asking.

 

This, of course, is the whole point.

 

The commission will then be free to manoeuvre as it sees fit, while feeding passive citizens with curated information from the commission’s PR department or the president’s cabinet. And every commission initiative will always be a success.

 

In this vision, democracy is reduced to the right to visit a ballot box every five years — an act that has limited impact on Europe’s future direction. And the sorry absence of the EU as an integrated political community, with a strong and independent EU-level media and civil society, continues unabated.

 

An informed EU public sphere cannot develop without the commission’s active cooperation, and the commission should do its utmost to promote the emergence of one. If it believes in truly integrated Europe, it should embrace the right of the public to call power-holders to account, even when this feels inconvenient and risks short-term embarrassment.

 

Instead, von der Leyen’s second commission seems to continue where the first one left off.

 

Read the small print

In its first meeting on 4 December 2024, the new commission revised its Rules of Procedure. In an annex, the commission unilaterally sets numerous limitations on the application of the EU transparency law, with the obvious aim of excluding as many of its own documents as possible from the scope of public access rules.

 

The new rules make it explicit that the commission has no intention of applying the court’s case law relating to proactive disclosure of legislative documents. Documents that should be automatically disclosed to facilitate timely debate of legislative options become accessible only through complex, time-consuming and, ultimately, likely unsuccessful access request.

 

The new rules also formalise the practice of destroying documents and establish new categories of general presumptions of secrecy with nearly unlimited temporal scope. Instead of a presumption of openness, vast areas of commission action are presumed secret.

 

The ‘Guardian of Treaties’ chooses to overlook that transparency is a normative choice made in the Treaty of Lisbon and the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Exceptions to public access are to be laid down in law, not in internal rules of individual institutions at their own discretion.

 

The commission’s new rules also constitute a breach of the EU’s international obligations under the Aarhus Convention.

 

This has led to a request for internal review by the environmental NGO ClientEarth under the Aarhus Regulation, which may also lead to proceedings before the Court.

 

Separately, I have, together with Emilio de Capitani and NGO AccessInfo Europe, challenged the new rules before the General Court.

 

The democratic credentials of the European Commission have always been weak. The formal retort to this is that the EU is not a state, nor is the commission a government. It leads with expertise and promotes the European interest. Hence, there would be little point to broad democratic debate or citizen involvement.

 

But as part of an ever-deeper Union, the commission keeps gathering powers that reach ever deeper into national policy making.

 

Being a supranational executive is no excuse. It is a reason to do your utmost to remain transparent, to remain accountable to the people that you claim to serve.