EU Commissioner hearings

Published on Tue 19th Jan 2010

For the last ten days there has only been one show in town - the grilling by MEPs of the 26 proposed new commissioners, in a process ably led by our own MEP Andrew Duff.

Before the formal process began there was a flurry of informal contact, as the would-be commissioners and their staff tried to work out what bear traps MEPS were preparing for them. Ahead of the live hearings, the commissioners-designate submit written answers to a standard set of questions relating to experience, independence and willingness to be accountable to the European Parliament. This should be the easy bit for them, but any holes in their answers are of course seized upon. Then comes the hearing itself: three hours without a break, "the longest interview of my life" as Danish Climate Commissioner-designate Connie Hedegaard put it, with at least 30 MEPs putting questions, mostly in the ping-pong format of question - answer -supplementary question.

So how did these high-profile interviewees fare? Variably. Hedegaard shone, and left no-one in doubt that she would fight to mainstream action on climate change. Piebalgs was quietly effective, as he has been as Energy Commissioner, and took a firm line supporting gay rights in developing countries. Dutch liberal former Competition Commissioner Neellie Kroes slightly underperformed from interview nerves, and we can sympathise with that. The one disaster area was the disaster commissioner - Bulgarian conservative Rumiana Jeleva, Commissioner-designate for Humanitarian Aid, who dodged probing about her financial interests and told MEPs that they were asking the wrong questions!

It remains to be seen whether President Barroso will seek Jeleva's removal. The Parliament can only approve or reject the Commission as a whole, not individual commissioners, but Barroso will not wish to risk MEPs going for the nuclear option and thereby further delaying the installation of the new Commission. A round of hostage-taking may be starting, in which the right-wing European People's Party (EPP) turns supercritical about socialist and liberal candidate-commissioners in order to give themselves bargaining power over Jeleva and other EPP weak links. For the latest news and full details on all the commissioners, go to www.europarl.europa.eu/hearings .