Analysing the European Parliament Vote to confirm the New President of the Commission

On 21 July 1994, the European Parliament voted by a narrow margin to accept the European Council's nomination of Jacques Santer as President of the Commission. In analysing this result we found that there were two significant cleavages: a European cleavage and a national one. On the one hand, there was a clear left/right split at the European level. The party groups of the Right and Centre Right in the European Parliament voted almost solidly for Santer, the only exception being Europe des Nations (EN), a group opposed to Maastricht that can, indeed, be considered an anti-system party in the EU con-text and thus prone to maverick behaviour. In all, 202/205 of the combined vote of the European People's Party (EPP), Rassemblement pour Europe Democratique (RDE) and Forza Europa (FE) went to the new President of the Commission and Santer drew 77 per cent of his vote from this block. By con-trast, Santer picked up only 54 of the 289 votes of the Party of European Socialists (PES), Liberals (ELDR), United Left (GUE) Greens (V) and Radical Europe (ARE). Only 21 per cent of his support came from this source with the remainder coming from non-inscrits (MEPs without a party group).

Table 2 illustrates the cogency of a European level left-right split by categorizing the 494 MEPs from centre right and centre-left groups as respectively the 'European support' and 'European opposition' to Santer, and treating the remaining 34 MEPs from the EN and non-inscrits (unattached membesrs) as an anti-system residual. In the highlighted box, the 425 MEPs on the shaded diagonal confirm the hypothesis of a European level left-right alignment on Santer's nomination, leaving only 55 who voted contrary to this expectation, 14 who abstained and the 34 votes from the anti-system parties. In all, 87.4 per cent of MEPs and 82.5 per cent of national party delegations can be said to have voted according to a European alignment if we take the standard procedure in roll-call analysis of weighting abstentions at 0.5.

That there should have been a left-right split at the European level is entirely understandable. The EPP was eager to support a member of the Christian Democrat political family. There was also a feeling that the Socialists had held the Commission presidency for ten years under Delors, that it was now the turn of the Centre Right to occupy that key position and that the EPP, in particular, should mobilize all its votes for Santer, rather than throw the whole selection process into hazard and risk the emergence of an alternative from another political family. Indeed, the EPP was on the defensive with many of its opponents claiming that Santer's nomination already represented reductio ad absurdam of political bargaining within the European Centre Right, even before matters had got beyond the European Council. The failure of Santer's candidacy in the Parliament - after the elimination of Brittan, Lubbers and Dehearne - would thus have been taken as final proof that the Right was incapable of exercising its option on the Commission presidency with the implication that the nomi-nation should pass to the Left. Against this background, the President of the EPP group, Wilfrid Martens, seems to have taken a remarkably tough line, indicating that failure to support Santer would be met with sanctions, including possible expulsion from the group.

Although the duopolistic hold of the EPP and PES on EU politics meant that there was almost no chance of the Commission presidency passing to an RDF or FE sympathizer, these groups and the parties they represented would clearly be least worst off with a Commission president of the Centre Right. Moreover, Berlusconi had requested the admission of Forza Italia to the EPP. Given that it had been effectively put on probation by Chancellor Kohl, who took the view that the new party was an unknown quantity in both Italian and European politics, the Forza group had every reason to support Santer who had been persuaded to accept the nomination by Kohl himself. Indeed, were it to fail to gain entry to the EPP by January 1995, Forza ran the risk of ceasing to be a group altogether under the Parliament's rules. (If the minimum of 26 MEPs from one country required to form a group was going to be increased pro-portionately with enlargement, FE with only 27 MEPs would cease to qualify.)

Amongst MEPs from the ELDR and PES, an inclination to secure a Commission president closer to their own political preferences was reinforced by two further factors. First, there was a wish to affirm the principle that Commissions should from now on reflect the political balance of concurrently elected Parliaments. It was felt that the procedure would lack political significance and fail to give the parties anything to fight for in future European elections, so long as the Commis-sion presidency was based on a mindless left-right alternation which was wholly unrelated to the popularity and perform-ance of the political parties. Secondly, many members of the PES and ELDR were profoundly uneasy about the political process by which Santer had emerged as the nominee of the European Council. For the French Socialists, the former prime minister, Michel Rocard, argued that Santer's candidacy was an instance of lowest common denominator decision-making with one member state explicitly vetoing a 'stronger' nominee in what looked like a deliberate assault on the powers of the Commission. According to this view, the Commission as another supranational body was the EP's natural ally in EU decision-making and the Parliament had no conceivable inter-est in an apparent attempt to decapitate that institution by placing it under a weak presidency, or, indeed, in any shift in the balance of power towards the foggy bottom of the Council, whose workings were impenetrable to parliamentary scrutiny. Others complained that the hugger-mugger nature of Santer's selection from amongst the club of sitting prime ministers only served to confirm the impression of the EU as a closed political cartel of national government leaders.

Yet MEPs do not seem to have been exclusively concerned to organize themselves on a right-left basis, for and against Santer. The vote was by no means evidence of a pure transnational politics with all preferences arranged along ideological lines, uncorrelated to the national origins of MEPs. Those whose parent national parties were in government back home behaved very differently from those belonging to parties in opposition in domestic politics. Of the first group 87.2 per cent supported Santer, while 74.3 per cent of the second voted against his nomination. The logic behind his second cleavage is clear: if MEPs work hard to build and maintain transnational groups, they are also never far removed from their national party politics. Their dependence on national party machines for selection and election is near complete. MEPs are recruited from cadres soaked in the assumptions of national party politics. The overwhelming majority have either served as national MPs or even government ministers, continue to hold office in their national party hierarchies, or have represented their parties as local councillors and mayors. A handful of MEPs, in fact, hold a dual mandate, continuing to combine membership of domestic and European parliaments. Their career structures are such that service in the European Parliament is often an interlude in a national party career. And most of the personal networks of greatest importance to them centre on the party back home. It is a safe prediction that one of their foremost political values is that their own party should obtain or retain office back home and that a limiting factor on the practice of transnational party co-operation is that the latter should not produce any consequences likely to count against a national party in domestic politics. Santer was not just a candidate for the presidency of the Commission who happened to come from the European Centre-Right, he was also the choice of the national govern-ments and domestic parties of government, whether of the Left or the Right, who were heavily implicated in his selection. Although Santer had indicated that he would go quietly in the event of a parliamentary rejection, a 'no' vote would have forced the European Council to repeat the fractious process of finding someone acceptable to all governments - and so far, the Luxembourgeois had been the only person on whom they had all been able to agree! Most heads of government now just wanted to get the problem wound up, rather than allow it to fester over the summer in a manner that would call their trusteeship of the EU's affairs into question, further denting their already depreciated domestic reputations for governing competence. A summer of institutional stalemate and public recriminations could even have jeopardized Enlargement and the efforts of Scandinavian governments to persuade their publics to vote 'yes' in referenda due in the autumn. Table 3 analyses the Santer vote according to whether MEPs belonged to national parties of government or opposition and the high-lighted box at the bottom gives an overall summary of this political pattern. Once again, the shaded diagonal, indicating confirmation of the behaviour hypothesized, clearly outweighs the white diagonal.