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For Timmermans, things are getting tense

5 October 2014

For Timmermans, things are getting tense

Dutch candidate-Commissioner Frans Timmermans (photo: Roel Wijnants / CC BY-NC 2.0)

Tuesday the hearing takes place of Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, who has been nominated for the European Commission. It’s the last of the series of such hearings, although there could still be supplementary sessions with candidates who haven’t done so well the first time around. Things could be tense for the Dutch candidate: to date he has done everything by the book, and he is well-known on the international stage. Nevertheless, being from the centre-left Dutch Labour Party, he could fall foul of the row between centre-left and centre right, a victim of the political establishment’s scheming. In my role as a Member of the European Parliament I don’t go along with such things. If Timmermans adopts socially progressive policies and puts a distance between himself and the corporate lobby, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

You can certainly leave Timmermans to do his own lobbying. He knows the international circuits and is aware that an informal tour of the Parliament’s Members can help. The Czech candidate-Commissioner for Justice, Gender and Consumer Affairs, Věra Jourová, failed to do this and tried during her hearing to cover up her lack of knowledge with a dose of arrogance, and see what happened: suddenly she finds herself on the list of candidates obliged to take a written re-examination. In my view this was completely justified, because if a candidate isn’t prepared at this stage to seek an open dialogue with MEPs, and moreover defends the interests of consumers only on the grounds of their ‘economic value’, this does not augur well. I joined colleagues on the Internal Market Committee, therefore, in writing a critical letter with homework assignments attached.

I don’t anticipate anything like that from Timmermans, but he’ll certainly have to offer a bit of give and take. If he opts to support my proposal for a ‘solidarity’ check to be applied to the re-evaluation of European legislation, this won’t go down so well with the right, who would prefer him to use his brief for ‘better regulation’ principally to abolish laws which don’t suit big business. On poverty, unemployment and the social divide they have less to say, and the same is true of social rights. If he doesn’t come close enough to my position on this, his credibility amongst his own social democratic PSD, as well as with the Greens and the United Left Group (GUE-NGL, to which the SP is affiliated), will diminish somewhat. I greatly hope that he will opt for the social. In that case he can count on the support of our political group in the event of possible attacks. If he doesn’t do this, this will as far as I can see represent a false start and support from the GUE-NGL will fall away.

Timmermans’ performance won’t, moreover, be the end of the story. In the days to come the two biggest groups, the centre-left PSD and the centre-right EPP will draw up a balance. If the PPE candidate from Hungary goes down, a social democrat will have to pay the price. It could be the French candidate, but it could instead be Timmermans, if the French know better than the Dutch how to play the PPE. More probable, however, is that there is already in place a non-aggression pact between the two, which means that if any Commissioners are to be rejected, it’s likely to be either the British Conservative or the Czech Liberal. This political scheming between its two biggest groups is typical of the present EP. The SP’s efforts in the European elections were aimed at giving the political establishment a good kick in the pants. They’ve had just that, but it wasn’t hard enough, as the two groups still command a majority in the EP. If indeed candidates from other political tendencies fail their exam, it will say nothing about these people’s relative weakness, and everything about the establishment’s practices. Hopefully the voters at the next European elections will manage to remember this, even if there’s four-and-a-half years to go.

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