mèþru wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 1:13 pm
I;d be interested in more detail. Never heard of her.
One of Merkel's top lieutenants, formerly seen as being groomed either to be Chancellor or to be President of Germany. She's from Merkel's right-wing party, so she's a leading EPP figure, but she has a relatively liberal, left-wing record (pro-immigrant, pro-LGBT, pro-minimum wage, pro-parental leave, etc), so the liberals and socialists don't hate her.
I'm not sure exactly why Raphael hates her, but I guess the grass is always yellower on one's own side of the fence.
It's important to bear in mind that the selection process is based on complicated, widespread compromise, so the candidates are never likely to be people anyone adores, but rather just candidates nobody can't live with, and I guess nobody would have particularly hated the idea of von der Leyen.
In particular, a slate of jobs are selected at once, and balance between the jobs is just as important as getting any one job exactly right. Given that, and if we accept that everybody involved quickly decided they had no interest in the democratic spitzenkandidat process in the slightest, this seems like a pretty clever solution they've (finally) found.
Everybody hates Weber, so he's out. Barnier was promoted by the French as the 'sabotage Weber' candidate, so he's out. Timmermans would have been nice, if only because of his wonderful accent, but not only does that take power from the EPP it also seriously pisses off the authoritarians in eastern europe. The top job was always likely to be a conservative, and if not Weber or Barnier then who? Some PMs were putting themselves forward, but they were both very conservative and a bit too closely identified with their countries. The ideal candidate would have to be someone prominent in politics but ideally not a national leader, a conservative but also someone who didn't scare the other factions. It also helps if they're from, or at least have strong cultural connections to, one of the biggest countries.
VDL is German, but known throughout the EU; she's a conservative, but not a very conservative one (unlike some of the eastern european candidates, for example). She has (a vast amount of) government experience (she's been a minister in Germany since 2005), but isn't actually a PM, so it's not TOO nationalist an appointment.
Charles Michel is respected, and spoken about as a candidate for the top job. The EPP, however, wouldn't give that up (after all, they control most countries and are the largest party). He's a PM, but it's only Belgium, and he's only a caretaker now, so nobody's going to protest too much and he won't much mind giving up his domestic career. He's a francophone, which probably placates France, and a liberal, which placates the liberals. As a PM of a country where all politics relies on impossible compromises, he's probably better suited to the role of council president (i.e. wrangling prime ministers) than someone like Vestager would have been.
A positive side-effect: Vestager being passed over for the top two jobs means she's free to serve another five years as competition commissioner.
That leaves the socialists. There might have been a possibility of selecting a German socialist, but since the Germans got the presidency of the commission, that means the spanish pretty much have to have the foreign policy brief. And if you want a spanish socialist to be in charge of foreign policy, it's obviously going to be Borrell.
To complete the deal, Lagarde gets the ECB. The biggest problem with the first three posts is that it gives a top job to a German and nothing to anyone French (though Michel being francophone helps)... so finding someone French for the ECB is a big win for the deal. Lagarde isn't the perfect candidate - she's a lawyer, not an economist - but she's not a bad one either. She's always been highly-rated by economists and is generally seen as having been good at the IMF (an almost impossible job); she's right-wing, but not overwhelmingly so, and socially liberal, and apparently has gotten on well with people from the left (even Varoufakis described her as sympathetic).
Overall, it's a younger and more left-wing team than the one it replaces. Its biggest flaw is probably that all four jobs have gone to western europe (Germany, France, Spain and Belgium), which may enflame dissatisfaction in the east and in the south.
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