The Spitzenkandidaten Practice: Establishing an Ambiguous Constitutional Convention?

Article 17, paragraph 7, TEU enables the European Council to choose a candidate for the Presidency of the Commission “taking into account the elections of the European Parliament”. The ambiguous legal provision was developed and integrated by the Spitzenkandidaten practice: apparently, an attempt to give citizens the power to choose the President of the Commission through the EP elections. The chapter analyses the Spitzenkandidaten practice in order to investigate its nature. Under a legal perspective, it can be defined as an attempt to establish a constitutional convention, among European political parties and EU institutions. This non-written rule aimed at filling a gap left open by the Treaties is consistent with an old idea circulating among legal and political architects of the European integration, and while it appeared to succeed after the 2014 elections, it failed after the 2019 elections. Then, the chapter seeks to investigate some of the reasons for the 2019 outcome, arguing that they lie in the several ambiguities that have characterized this Constitutional convention since its inception: still undefined in between a kind of “direct election” of the Commission’s President, according to a premiership model, on the one side, and a confidence vote of the parliamentary majority, in compliance with the traditional parliamentary government, on the other side. Finally, the chapter wonders if there is something else at the root of these ambiguities, namely the tendency to overlook some of the specificities of the EU composite institutional system, assimilating it entirely, instead, to the functioning of national democracies, at least in the narrative used towards EP voters.