The EU Commission

Chapter 7 discusses the Commission’s pathway to legitimacy, as it moved from a rigid interpretation of the “one size fits all” rules of the European Semester to an increasingly flexible one. The chapter begins by analyzing the Commission’s powers, diminished by the Council’s increase in intergovernmental decision-making but enhanced by its ever-growing oversight responsibilities and discretionary authority, and its quandaries with regard to throughput legitimacy. These stem from the countervailing pressures from Northern Europe calling for more rigid rules application, and from Southern Europe calling for greater flexibility. Such pressures also contributed to Commission politicization, starting with Council appointment of José Manuel Barroso as Commission President in line with his political “color” and culminating with the Spitzenkandidat, Jean-Claude Juncker, and his self-declared “political” Commission. The chapter follows with a discussion of the Janus-faced public perceptions of the Commission in Eurozone crisis governance as “ayatollahs of austerity” or “Ministers of Moderation.” During the fast-burning crisis, the Commission appeared ayatollah-like in its rigid approach to governing by the rules and numbers that it had itself proposed to the Council. But as the crisis slowed, the Commission ministered greater moderation, with the Barroso Commission reinterpreting the rules while denying it, and the Juncker Commission fully admitting to its greater flexibility. The exception was the Commission’s Ayatollah-like stance in the Troika (as the voice of the Eurogroup). The chapter closes with a discussion of the deleterious impact of the European Semester on national sovereignty and democracy, in particular with regard to the Commission’s national budgetary oversight.