5
votes
Ursula von der Leyen to head European Commission and Christine Lagarde to lead European Central Bank
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- Title
- Women to head top EU institutions for first time
- Authors
- Daniel Boffey
- Published
- Jul 2 2019
- Word count
- 1031 words
As a German, I am not too happy with this news. Von der Leyen ist quite unpopular due to her failures as minister of defense. It's unclear to me why Vestager, considered a compromise candidate, wasn't picked.
Until yesterday, Timmermans (Social Democrat, former Vice-Head of the Commission, known for defending democracy & rule of law) was basically agreed upon. However, apparently Merkel didn't properly communicate that with the EPP (conservative party in the EP) who still thought they would get the top jobs even though they were the big looser in the election (still staying largest party). More here. The Visegard-4 were also against Timmermans (but could've been outvoted I think) because he started the investigation into Hungary and Poland for violations of democratic and rule of law principles.
I was already uncomfortable with al the closed-door, super secret negotiations. Now it's going to be someone I pretty much never heard of (in the Netherlands, we heard about her a while ago when here PhD thesis appeared to contain plagiarism), and that wasn't even exposed to EU-wide reporting and discussion because they weren't a candidate in the EP elections. And they wonder why people feel the EU is undemocratic...
The fact that the selection of the sort-of government and sort-of prime mininister has so little to do with elections or even a public debate, for me, is a symptom of the lack of legitimacy of the whole EU system of government :-(.
Yeah, it's quite annoying how quickly the Spitzenkandidat-system was abandoned. O hope the EP will vote this down - S&D ist already rebelling. She really isn't made out for the job (let's hope the backlash brings Vestager & Timmermans back into the race). Arguably, they were still following the public debate & election outcome until the V4 and the EPP started blocking.
Given I remember Lagarde as being included in a pretty sizeable scandal and having worked with/for noted crooked politicians such as François Fillon I'm not super stoked to see her put at the helm of the ECB.