THE PRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN COUNCIL

As provided in the Lisbon Treaty, the general description for the President of the Council reads as follows:

• The European Council shall elect its President, by a qualified majority, for a term of two and a half years, renewable once. In the event of an impediment or serious misconduct, the European Council can end the President's term of office in accordance with the same procedure.
• The President of the European Council:

1.  shall chair it and drive forward its work;
2.  shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European Council in cooperation with the President of the Commission, and on the basis of the work of the General Affairs Council;
3. shall endeavor to facilitate cohesion and consensus within the European Council, and;
4. shall present a report to the European Parliament after each of the meetings of the European Council.

• The President of the European Council shall, at his level and in that capacity, ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy, without prejudice to the powers of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
• The President of the European Council shall not hold a national office. Again, these abstract terms obviously leave a substantial area open for further negotiation and concrete practice. For example, blanks remain regarding the way the EU Council President concretely works with the High Representative, the President of the Commission, the national leaders and the remaining rotating presidency.

 The Selection Process

The process is one of bargaining with and balancing between series of totemic factors: nationalities, political affiliations, small and large countries, new and old member states, males and females, and then finding the least worst outcome.

On the structural side, the Lisbon Treaty provides for the President of the Council to reflect the running sentiment in the European Member States and the European Parliament. Thus, the successful candidate should be drawn from a center-right affiliated party. But as mentioned, next to broad calculations of political affiliation, nationalities are to be balanced, as well as the size and geography of the candidate's country. The gender issue should not be forgotten either. And as always, the knowledge of certain languages is an important element to consider. Because, while English is ever more the lingua franca of the Union, in order to satisfy France, fluency in French is an implicit requirement for those eager to obtain high level jobs. Another element in the selection process  but one that is hard to track and quantify  is the judgment of the eminence grise of the EU.

Note about the EU institutions

The European commission has also allowed itself to be influenced too heavily by the European Parliament, the only institution that can dismiss it, instead of acting as a balance between the Council of Ministers (representing national governments) and the parliament as the two co-legislators in the system.

Commissioners are appointed by their national governments, but are subject to confirmation by the European Parliament. The Commission President is now indirectly elected under a process called Spitzenkandidaten .  Leaders dissatisfied with the outcome in 2014 say they are determined to ditch the Spitzenkandidaten process for the next election in 2019, but they may find it hard to put a stop to it.

By contrast, the innovation of appointing a permanent president of the European Council has proved a success.

True, the EU now suffers from an inflation of presidents: of the European Commission, the European Council, the (rotating) Council of Ministers, the Eurogroup of finance ministers, the European Central Bank and the European Parliament, to name but six. But the increasing prominence of the European Council of heads of state and government reflects the reality that, when important decisions have to be made, it is national governments, not EU institutions, that do most of the hard bargaining. To some extent power has shifted from Brussels to national capitals (primarily Berlin).

As an international bureaucracy, the EU has spawned many other bodies, some of them of dubious value. A number of them have been scattered around national capitals as sweeteners to keep the countries concerned loyal to the project. Perhaps the most preposterous pair are the Economic and Social Committee, which brings together trade union and civil representatives for monthly meetings, and the Committee of the Regions, which does the same for regional authorities. Between them these two Brussels-based bodies cost over €200m a year to run. Hardly anybody, even in Brussels, would notice if they were to disappear tomorrow.

That is not true of the EU’s main representative institution, the European Parliament. Since direct elections were introduced in 1979, its powers have been increased by every treaty, to the point where it is now largely a co-equal legislator with the Council of Ministers. At French insistence it still moves pointlessly between Brussels and Strasbourg every month, at an annual cost of some €114m. Many MEPs are impressively well-qualified and do an excellent job, often better than their national counterparts, in improving legislation and in questioning Commissioners and the European Central Bank.

Yet as an institution seeking to bring voters closer to the European project, the Parliament must still be judged a failure. It may frighten the Commission, but it does not exert the sort of control over governments that national parliaments aspire to. Its link to voters is tenuous: turnout in European elections is low and falling, and voters tend to decide largely on national not European issues. Far from acting as a Parliament that controls spending and curbs the executive, the European Parliament has often behaved more as a lobby group whose main aim seems to be to spend more and to augment its own powers.

One way of remedying this would be to increase the role of national parliaments. Many experienced EU officials regret the switch from a European Parliament made up of nominated national MPs to a directly elected institution, breaking the link between national and EU-level politics. National politicians in many countries remain shamefully ignorant of the EU and its rules, and too few MEPs see it as part of their role to help educate them. Indeed, many national parliaments have cast doubt on the European Parliament’s democratic credentials, as has the German constitutional court. Yet the Parliament is hardly likely to vote for its own demise.

Instead, it might be used to help fill the EU’s famous democratic deficit. Most talk of such a deficit is wrong or exaggerated: EU lawmaking is in many ways more transparent than national lawmaking, and national governments usually have to approve EU laws in the Council of Ministers, although they may pretend otherwise. The place that may be suffering most from a democratic deficit is not the Union as a whole but an increasingly integrated euro zone. As it penetrates more deeply into national fiscal and other domestic policies, the case for a democratically elected chamber to keep it in check is becoming stronger.

One idea would be to reconstitute the European Parliament so that it represents only the euro zone. That could become part of a new architecture which would also feature a new Euro-zone Finance Minister as well as a euro-zone budget that would act, as in any federal system, to smooth out differences in economic performance between the constituent parts. MEPs from non-euro countries might revert to being nominated by national parliaments. That would mean much of the wider EU budget could be scrapped; most farm support has been detached from production, so it could be renationalised, and regional spending could continue within the euro zone but not in the rest of the union. Such innovations would confer greater legitimacy on the European Parliament and give it a role, but only in the central core, not the wider EU. For countries thinking of joining or quitting the euro, a euro-zone parliament might also bring home to them how momentous a step that would be.