EU leaders face need to balance top job appointments with future priorities

As European Union leaders gear up to finalise key appointments at their summit between 27 and 28 June, they will need to strike a delicate balance between competing candidates and pressing priorities.

EU leaders last week were not able to seal a preliminary deal for a trio of top job positions for the next five years, despite earlier hopes of a swift agreement.

The same package—consisting of incumbent European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, former Portuguese prime minister António Costa for European Council president, and Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas for the bloc’s top diplomat post—remains on the table for this week’s talks.

Grudges with negotiators

However, EU diplomats and officials said last week’s tensions are expected to spill over to the next round of negotiations if the talks are led according to the same model.

The six lead negotiators of the ‘big three’—the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), and liberal Renew Europe—include French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the prime ministers of Poland, the Netherlands, Greece, and Spain.

The group attempted to ‘pre-cook’ an agreement before EU27 leaders met for dinner and were presented with what some saw as an attempt to reach a fait accompli.

“It didn’t play well in the room, and there was a significant number of EU leaders that did not like to be presented with such a pre-cooked agreement before even having the chance to talk about priorities,” one EU diplomat familiar with the negotiations said, which was also confirmed by several others.

“The strongest reaction at the dinner table was probably the one expressed by [Italy’s Prime Minister] Giorgia Meloni (…) who criticised those negotiations among the three political families,” a senior EU official involved in last week’s talks said.

“The three [main] political parties made a strategic choice, they decided to show Meloni is isolated – it was a clear power play,” the senior EU official said.

Only two days later, Meloni’s hard-rightwing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) parliamentary group became the third biggest force in the European Parliament, with 83 MEPs, ahead of the Renew, which now has to cope with significant losses in numbers.

But Meloni was not the only one to express frustration at being excluded from the three-party negotiations as some Nordic leaders, who, on the national level, are in coalitions with political parties belonging to ECR or being chased by them in the polls, felt uncomfortable with the isolationist approach.

Other smaller EU member states felt sidelined, questioning the transparency and fairness of the process.

A second senior EU official said that part of the problem was that the negotiator format had not been used before and gave the wrong impression to the remaining EU leaders.

“Even if you’re a negotiator, it doesn’t give you a blank check to do whatever you like, you need to go to the whole room,” they said.

The three main political groups’ lead negotiators, who are in constant touch over this week, are expected to confer again before Thursday, the day of the leaders meeting in Brussels, according to officials briefed on the matter.

“This time around, they better not make the other EU leaders wait, otherwise, we might face a very unpleasant and difficult situation,” another person involved in the top job negotiations said.

While the decision will be made by a qualified majority, meaning that EU leaders could do without Italy’s or Hungary’s approval, many EU leaders seemed to agree last week that trying to isolate Meloni from the EU top jobs negotiations may backfire in the long term.

“Do we want a total battle with the risk that the European Council will be blocked [in the long-term]? After all, they will all need to sit in the same room after this is over and achieve unity on a range of topics,” the first senior EU official, quoted above, warned.

Enter the Strategic Agenda

What could complicate things is that EU leaders must agree unanimously on the bloc’s Strategic Agenda at the summit, which sets the priorities for the next five years.

A major grievance voiced by EU leaders at last week’s informal dinner was that they had hoped to speak about the next term’s priorities first and then decide the top job candidates based on what they can bring to the table.

A leaked draft of the document, seen by Euractiv, foresees a strong focus on competitiveness, security and defence, migration and the rule of law, pushing the EU’s Green Deal agenda to a second plan.

However, it falls short of details on financing the sweep of new priorities – such as the idea of new common European debt to fund increased defence needs, instead only calling for “innovative options”.

While the agenda is meant to be locked down in a separate document, with a reference to the EU summit conclusions, it will require unanimity.

“We could end up with a situation where both discussions – the one on the EU top jobs and the one on the agenda – will be conducted in parallel, and we can’t move on one without the other,” one person familiar with the summit preparations said.

For some EU leaders, who are eyeing bigger, more important portfolio for their country in the next European Commission, this would also give room to negotiate for it in exchange for their support.

[Edited by Aurelié Pugnet/Alice Taylor]

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