A decision deferred on the EU’s high representative

The European Council’s failure to appoint a foreign-policy chief and what it means for the Union.

The European Union will stumble through the summer without decisions on who will be its next foreign-policy chief and who will take other top posts, after the special European Council convened on 16 July to make these appointments broke down without agreement. The 28 prime ministers and presidents from the member states instead focused on the situation in Ukraine – evidence for the growing EU attention to foreign policy.

Had it not been for Ukraine, the initial plan hatched by Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, might well have worked out. Van Rompuy was working toward a package deal in which Federica Mogherini, Italy’s foreign minister, would be appointed foreign-policy chief, and his own successor would be a consensus candidate chosen from among the current or recently departed leaders, possibly Denmark’s Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

There are some clear casualties of the failed summit. One is Mogherini; another is the standing in the European Council of her prime minister, Matteo Renzi; Van Rompuy’s reputation as an effective dealmaker has also suffered; and the plan by Jean-Claude Juncker, the president-elect of the European Commission, to put together his college of commissioners by late July or early August has been derailed.

Last week’s meeting did provide greater clarity on one issue about these senior appointments, though. Several leaders, including Angela Merkel of Germany, insisted that the foreign-policy post was for Europe’s centre-left to fill.

But clarity on that point raises doubts about who might become the president of the European Council – a position that the left also claimed should be filled by their own (most likely, Thorning-Schmidt.

The end of the summit was marked by a call from several leaders for a Council president who would be a unifying figure, with party affiliation merely a secondary consideration.

This is a shift from the position of less than a month ago, when, in the wake of the European Parliament elections, it seemed entirely plausible that the Party of European Socialists might reasonably aspire to fill both these posts, as a form of compensation for allowing the centre-right European People’s Party to gain the presidency of the Commission with Jean-Claude Juncker.

Another special summit has been scheduled for 30 August, which will give Van Rompuy more time for consultations. But the delay will weaken the PES claim, as the appointment of Juncker will by then have been banked and discounted by the EPP. The Liberals too are restive and claiming that they should get one of the jobs. And Van Rompuy wants to make both appointments by consensus, the standard procedure at the European Council.

“Juncker was an exceptional situation,” a diplomat said, since he was chosen against the votes of the UK and Hungary. “Nobody wants to repeat that.”

 

A BAD NIGHT FOR…

There was no evident animosity toward Federica Mogherini at the European Council, her backers point out. Her candidacy was barely discussed. But what was discussed – Ukraine – dealt a serious blow to her candidacy. As the summit got under way, the Obama administration announced new sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine, strengthening the resolve of Poland and the Baltic states to block Mogherini, because of her perceived softness on Russia. Then just hours later, on 17 July, a Malaysian Airlines passenger plane was downed over eastern Ukraine, apparently by pro-Russian separatists equipped with sophisticated air-defence hardware from Russia.

Mogherini was in part the agent of her own undoing. She had done herself no favours by choosing Moscow as the destination of one of her first trips abroad after Italy took over the rotating presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers on 1 July. (She also went to Kiev on the same trip.) A photo-opportunity with
President Vladimir Putin was a strange form of job application with the Ukraine crisis rumbling on. An invitation to Putin to join a Europe-Asia summit in Milan in October added to the irritation among many member states, and deepened the impression that she lacked diplomatic experience.

But she was also the victim of others’ actions. On the eve of the special European Council that Renzi thought would appoint Mogherini, Juncker stabbed her in the back by telling a plenary session of the European Parliament that the next foreign-policy chief should be “a strong and experienced player”. Juncker’s opinion mattered because the post also makes the incumbent a vice-president in his new Commission. And her principal backer, her prime minister, did not play an adroit hand ahead of the crucial meeting.

It is hard to see how the Mogherini candidacy can be salvaged. Renzi’s influence will weaken, not strengthen. Poland and the Baltic states are not about to learn to love Putin. Mogherini will probably limp along as a diminished foreign minister of a country that is not a serious foreign-policy player on the European scene.

Matteo Renzi was angry after the meeting at what he saw as Van Rompuy’s mishandling of the Mogherini candidacy, and of the summit proceedings more generally. He said that the summit had been “badly prepared”, and made an accusation that Italy had been told that there would be a deal when, in the end, there was not.

Renzi’s inexperience on the European stage – he has never been a minister and therefore lacked the apprenticeship of countless lengthy meetings of the EU’s Council of Ministers – showed at last week’s summit.

Confident of Mogherini’s candidacy and presuming on his position at the European Council as one of the leaders with a strong democratic mandate, Renzi neglected to do his homework in the Party of European Socialists, whose pre-summit meeting he skipped, and in the Council. The assertiveness that has served him well in domestic politics (witness his ruthless despatch of Enrico Letta, his predecessor as party leader and prime minister) backfired. He expected to get his way, and as resistance to Mogherini hardened, he overplayed his hand by declining to contemplate alternatives.

The status he gained in the aftermath of the European Parliament election results, after defeating Silvio Berlusconi and facing down Beppe Grillo, is increasingly fragile as time elapses and the Italian economy grinds along without any Renzi-inspired reform. Nor is he apparently ready to consider the face-saving option of seeing Letta become president of the European Council. Although that would elevate an Italian, Renzi appears interested only in elevating his Italian, that is, Mogherini.

Jean-Claude Juncker’s task of putting together a Commission has become more difficult with the failure of last week’s European Council, because he lacks the one appointment – the high representative – that would unlock the others. Countries with hopes for that post will hold back from naming their candidate or candidates for the Commission. Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, told reporters after the summit that he might wait until 30 August to put forward a name. Frans Timmermans, the Dutch foreign minister, is one of the possible candidates for high representative (although his appointment would help neither the gender balance in the Commission nor its east-west balance).

Not having the names of the candidate commissioners is likely to delay their hearings in the Parliament, and this now puts into question the date when the new college of commissioners takes office.

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