The incoming head of the EU executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, was in urgent talks with Slovenia’s prime minister yesterday to find a replacement for the Slovenian who quit his team after a humiliating rejection by the European Parliament.
Party political wrangling, in both Ljubljana and Brussels, was holding up a new nomination from Slovenia for its seat on the 28-member European Commission after Alenka Bratusek withdrew as vice president-designate for energy.
Aides to Juncker said the process could disrupt a timetable by which the new executive is due to take office on November 1. At a single plenary vote scheduled for October 22, parliament must approve the whole Commission in order for it to take over.
“There is a risk that if these political discussions do not come to an end soon then the whole calendar will be extended,” Juncker’s spokesman Margaritis Schinas told a news conference.
As a former prime minister and a woman she fitted a profile Juncker had favoured
Juncker said of Bratusek’s resignation: “She is helping me to finalise the composition of the European Commission. I am in close contact with the prime minister of Slovenia ... and the leadership of the European Parliament.”
EU and national party haggling played a role in Bratusek’s downfall and continue to dog efforts to name a substitute, even as Juncker welcomed the patching up of a broad left-right coalition in parliament that saw the remainder of his 27 choices approved in a series of committee votes late on Wednesday.
Bratusek had always appeared vulnerable. As a former prime minister and a woman, she fitted a profile Juncker had favoured for a team he wants to focus on regaining the trust of voters who turned massively toward anti-EU parties at elections in May. But having nominated herself while serving out her term as a caretaker following an election defeat, Bratusek lacked support from the new government in Ljubljana. And as a centrist, she had risked being caught in the crossfire between the two biggest groups in the EU legislature, the centre-right and centre-left.
A stumbling performance during her confirmation hearing before a parliamentary committee on Monday sealed her fate. In a non-binding committee ballot on Wednesday, lawmakers voted by an overwhelming 113-12 to ask Juncker not to give her a job.
The centre-left S&D group in parliament, backed by Juncker’s centre-right EPP, called on the Slovenian government, now led by Bratusek’s centre-left nemesis Miro Cerar, to nominate an S&D member of the European Parliament, Tanja Fajon, in her place.
Gianni Pittella, the parliamentary leader of the S&D, said Fajon’s experience of EU institutions would give her the best chance of successfully passing a confirmation hearing in the less than two weeks left before the Commission goes to a vote. But Cerar insisted he would not be rushed and political sources in Ljubljana said his coalition cabinet was divided. Expressing “surprise” at Pittella’s “ultimatum”, Cerar’s government said in a statement that it would send the name of its new candidate to Brussels “as soon as possible”.
In the EU legislature, the centrist ALDE group to which Bratusek belongs slammed what one lawmaker called “harassment”.
One alternative to Fajon, cited by Slovenian sources, is outgoing EU environment commissioner Janez Potocnik, a centrist – though his nomination would force Juncker to miss a target of having nine women on his team.