ROME — Conflicting visions of Europe’s future are par for the course, even in conversations between the leaders of the EU’s institutions.
When Martin Schulz was asked, in English, about the future of the Spitzenkandidaten process to elect the next president of the European Commission, he almost switched to his native German. “My answer should be in German, it should be heard in the capital of Germany,” the president of the European Parliament said on Thursday.
“I am proud that I belong to the people who suggested the Spitzenkandidaten process. And exactly that exercise will be repeated in the next European election,” he told a mostly German audience in Rome, still insisting on speaking in English.
National governments that believe “a parliament who won one right would give it up, know nothing about history,” Schulz said during a debate on the way forward for Europe, referring to moves by European leaders to clip the Parliament’s wings and take back the power to pick the next Commission president.
Two years ago, for the first time, each political party group in the Parliament was able to nominate an “EU-wide” lead candidate for the Commission presidency — the Spitzenkandidaten process. The groups agreed they would approve the candidate chosen by the party that won the most seats in EU parliamentary elections, which was the European People’s Party of Jean-Claude Juncker. He defeated the Socialists’ candidate: one Martin Schulz, who stayed on as president of the Parliament instead.
Finally switching to his mother tongue, Schulz said party groupings were already preparing to pick their lead candidates for the European elections in 2019, “even if some people in the wonderful capital of my country want to stop that process” — a reference to Angela Merkel, a leading critic of the process.
There were many critics of the idea of giving the top job in the Commission to a candidate from the biggest group in the Parliament. “I was one of them,” European Council President Donald Tusk said, sitting just two seats away from Schulz.
But, Tusk acknowledged, it seemed to work. That was something everyone in the room could agree on.
In an unusual setting, the German Charlemagne Foundation brought together the three presidents of the main EU institutions for a panel debate on the future of Europe. Schulz, Tusk and Juncker often communicate in private, but in public their communication often appears little more than the equivalent of shouts across the street conducted via the media. Here, Schulz was the federalist, Tusk was the most cautious on further integration, and Juncker defended his lifetime achievements.
They were in Italy to honor Pope Francis, recipient of this year’s Charlemagne Prize which will be handed over on Friday.
But on Thursday they gathered in a room with history — in the Capitoline Museum where the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, as well as the European Constitution that never was after being rejected by the French and the Dutch.
Matteo Renzi, Italy’s prime minister, had earlier made a speech in which he called for “a new push to change the institutions from this room” and talked about his own proposals to tackle the migrant crisis — including joint bonds to finance his idea of making the EU-Turkey refugee deal a blueprint for northern Africa.
“We’re not in love with one or the other form of financing [for tackling the refugee crisis], as long as there’s a holistic approach,” Renzi said. That afternoon he admitted during a joint press conference with Merkel that the two leaders disagree on that point.
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When Renzi said he was about to speak about economic policies, Juncker, who understands Italian, put on earphones to listen to translation instead, only to hear Renzi say that austerity alone was not the road to take.
Juncker said there had been major changes in Europe and that when he and Schulz were competing to be Commission president “migration was an Italian or Maltese problem. Today it is a European one.”
But he warned that migration “is a fertile ground for populists, when everyone steps out of a Council meeting as a self-declared winner.”
Juncker’s Europe is one where every leader is aware of the fact that he’s part of a bigger thing; or at least part of an EU legislative body. “We have too many part-time Europeans. Too many listen to their national opinion only,” he said.
Tusk, the bluntest of the three leaders, disagreed. “Radicals march for power from Poland to Spain, from Scandinavia to Italy. The only way to stop them is to do something tough but humane and reestablish the external borders.”
Tusk called for a less emotional stance on the EU: “If we realize today an EU utopia is totally unrealistic, we can come back to some more common sense,” he said. Tusk who is supposed to broker deals between the 28 EU countries’ s leaders, knows well about diverging interests. “Politics is a permanent attempt without a final victory,” he said.
Despite discussing the future of Europe, the question of Brexit wasn’t raised — and none of the panelists even mentioned it.