Merkel’s savaging of Orban is sadly all too necessary

“Honestly, I can’t understand what is meant by illiberal when it comes to democracy,” said Merkel at a joint press conference with Hungary’s Prime Minister Orban on Monday.  With demonstrations against the Fidesz government’s authoritarian streak, Merkel was right to raise these concerns with her fellow EPP premier.

Orban has famously said “not all democracies have to be liberal”, and has been the subject of EP debate over whether or not to invoke Article 7 sanctions against Hungary (essentially suspending its voting rights for breaching EU values) over his government’s meddling and restrictions in the judiciary and the media.

While voices from outside a country can inflame nationalist opinion, it’s important to voice concern over the health of Hungarian civil society, as Merkel has done. The health of Hungarian democracy affects us all in the EU as we are part of the same system – and one that has liberty and democracy written into its founding treaties as fundamental values.

Merkel's CDU and Alternativ fuer Deutschland: the Saxon result

The euro-skeptic (rather than Euroskeptic) German party Alternativ fuer Deutschland won almost 10% of the vote in the state elections in Saxony, coming in ahead of the Green Party. The win has been a big boost for the party, propelling it into the Saxon Landtag while the liberal FDP and far-right NDP drop out as they didn't win enough votes to clear the threshold for entry.

The rise of the AfD has been reported on elsewhere on how it could impact Angela Merkel's CDU and her EU policy (it's hard to imagine even 5 years ago so much interest being shown in a German state election). But I don't see the result as one that would pressure the CDU to take a more Euroskeptic stance. It's important to note two facts when thinking about the AfD's impact on the CDU: that the CDU has retained almost 40% of the vote, its percentage dropping only slightly since the last election, and the turnout was very low at 49%.

Concern over the "splintering of the right" in Germany is another angle that's being reported on, but it also looks a bit overblown - the last federal elections saw the economically right-wing FDP party lose all their seats, with the CDU the largest beneficiary - a huge consolidation on the right, at least federally. In some ways the AfD, with its economically right-wing positions, is starting to fill the political vacuum left by the decline of the FDP.

Of course, the AfD is not the FDP: it's a protest party and hard to pin down on many of its positions, but its leadership is on the economic right and it has attracted a socially conservative membership who may have been former CDU supporters disappointed that the CDU has become socially more centrist (though there are still plenty of socially conservative voices in the CDU too). Saxony is also a state that has seen support for the far-right NDP, a nationalist party that is periodically the subject of banning attempts. So it makes sense that the AfD took votes from the FDP and a small number from the NDP (not to mention that it would be more respectable to vote for the AfD than the nationalist NDP). Oddly for a protest party, it looks like those who voted for it in Saxony are largely satisfied with their own economic position.

The CDU has kept its distance from the AfD, leaving the Social Democrats and the Greens as its two possible coalition partners for the state government, and a similar stance is being taken on the federal level. Its euro-skeptic stance and protest party style makes it an unsuitable and probably unstable coalition partner, and a coalition with it could toxify the CDU when it is the biggest of the 2 big tent parties and is comfortable with coalitions with the centre-left. The rising profile of the AfD could boost the socially conservative and anti-transfer union voices in the CDU, but at the moment the AfD hasn't actually eaten into the CDU's vote to a significant degree. And it should be remembered that the CDU is in coalition with the Social Democrats at the moment - a party that would like to ease austerity in Europe - so Merkel's government is probably relatively insulated from the AfD's politics.

A very Cameronian blunder

Since the election the backing for Juncker as the European Commission President has stiffened, from Angela Merkel to even European Left candidate Tsipras saying that Juncker deserves to get the job if he can get a parliamentary backing, because that's the democratic, parliamentary process. Set against this, Cameron's campaign against a Juncker presidency looks more and more misguided by the day. While the Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary are against Juncker, by leading such a prominent campaign against him, Cameron has probably made it more likely that Juncker will get the presidency.

Cameron tends to have a very short-term, tactical approach to politics, particularly when it comes to the EU. The big speech that was supposed to outflank UKIP clearly didn't - in fact, the more the Conservative party echoes UKIP, the better UKIP seems to do. Promising a renegotiation and an in/out referendum on the basis of the result hasn't done much to quiet his party on the matter either (with people now wondering if the referendum date of 2017 will be brought forward to 2016). When wielding the veto in December 2011, Cameron was able to strike the pose of a decisive leader with good Euroskeptic credentials, but the ability of the other countries to go on without the UK ended up showing how devalued a veto can be. (If the UK had taken part in the negotiations while holding on to the veto, it would have been able to shape the agreement and it's potential veto would have carried more weight towards the end of the process). This short-termist thinking is often traced back to Cameron promising to take the Conservatives out of the EPP as part of his platform for the party leadership.

Opposing Juncker's candidacy was always going to be risky. While the campaign might not have been as high profile as some would have wanted, it's difficult to name alternatives from outside the Europarty candidates - Lagarde has ruled herself out, and many of the others are serving Prime Ministers and Presidents. Pascal Lamy, director-general of WTO and formerly the chef de cabinet of Jacques Delors, is hardly a fresher name than Juncker when it comes to EU politics. More importantly, the European Parliament is set on getting one of its candidates in the job, and they can veto any nomination by the European Council. It's difficult to see any of these speculative alternatives giving up their jobs (or present themselves as willing to give up their premierships/presidencies to their national electorates), to place themselves in the middle of a power struggle between the Parliament and the Council.

And while the UK has some allies on its side, it's going to be very difficult to form a blocking minority in the European Council. Cameron's view on EU politics seems strikingly simplistic - focused on winning over Merkel and co-opting Germany's political weight in Europe. It's hardly a secret that Merkel is lukewarm on a Juncker presidency, but the German media rallied behind Juncker when it was suggested that the UK may be threatening leaving the EU. That the CDU's coalition partners in Berlin, the Social Democrats, were so closely wedded to the presidential campaign meant that the pressure on Merkel to publicly back Juncker was strong within the government too. Rather than working to quietly sideline Juncker behind the scenes, Cameron has made it much harder to get rid of him by forcing public declarations of support or opposition.

All this raises the question: if it's this difficult to block Juncker, how much influence would the UK have in shaping the alternative? A nomination still requires a majority. Even if Italy joins the UK in blocking Juncker (a big if, in my opinion, as Italy will soon have the presidency of the Council for the second half of 2014 and will probably want good relations with the Parliament if it wants to push legislation through), will the blocking minority form a coherent enough bloc vote to be able to shift the rest of the Member States (and for the UK to have a decisive role in that)?

Cameron would probably have done better by quickly getting the European Council to adopt priorities that are closer to his position using the election results as political support. The European Council still sets the overall policy direction of the Union (and Merkel has tried to steer the debate in this direction as a way of finding consensus). But now a Juncker presidency will have been badly burned by the right-wing, British-led, opposition to him, and he will be aware that his political base in the Parliament rests on a coalition with left-wing parties who were needed in order to overcome ECR opposition and any EPP rebellions. The institutional balance and Juncker's own affinity for fellow national leaders will mean that his presidency will focus more on consensus rather than confrontation, but it will be far from a natural ally of the current UK government.

Presidential Race: Juncker's Battle for the Berlaymont

The EPP may have won a plurality of seats in the European Parliament, but Jean-Claude Juncker, its candidate for Commission President, hasn't got the job yet. His Social Democrat rival, Martin Schulz, was reluctant to concede (and has not actually completely given up yet), but the numbers in the Parliament mean that Juncker is far more likely to form a stable majority. That's not the end of the story - several Prime Ministers and national delegations oppose his candidacy, so now there could be a stand-off between the European Parliament and the European Council.


Supporters and Opponents

The PES has recognised Juncker's right to the first attempt at finding a parliamentary majority. The seat numbers have changed a little since my first thoughts on the results on Monday, but essentially a Grand Coalition between EPP and PES (around 405 seats) would provide the most stable coalition with a workable majority. However, some national delegations of the EPP, such as Orban's Fidesz, are against Juncker's candidacy, and since the vote on a Presidential nominee is by secret ballot, it's not clear how cohesive a coalition would be in practice. It may be that the Liberals and Greens need to be added to the coalition to ensure there's a majority that can endure a prolonged struggle with the European Council.

David Cameron quickly came out against Juncker. Though Juncker is a centre-right candidate, Cameron calculates that he is too federalist to have in the Commission during his planned renegotiation. It's not clear who Cameron would find acceptable in the job. Two of the other possibilities that are subject to speculation are Christine Lagarde and Pascal Lamy, though I can't see them being arch-supporters of a repatriation programme. Juncker's supposed federalism may be overstated a bit: he's definitely for the status quo insofar as he backs the current treaties and had a hand in how the Eurozone has been reformed so far, but I think he's more of an intergovernmental pro-European - he's very close to the European Council, having sat in it for many years.

Without an alternative, it's questionable whether Cameron's opposition will actually pay off meaningfully for him. On Newsnight it was said that the UK's ability to block Juncker would be a test of Cameron's influence and ability to renegotiate, but at the moment the reward side of this risk is vague at best. (Remember, the European Council makes it nomination by Qualified Majority). Angela Merkel appears to have cooled on Juncker's candidacy (not that she was ever a fan of giving the Parliament the decision over the job - despite the CDU's manifesto pledge that the Commission President become a directly elected post). To act against your party's successful candidate is an odd political decision, especially given the head-to-head debates between Schulz and Juncker on German TV.


Juncker should get the job

The European Parliament has to stand behind Juncker if it wants the elections to be as important as they claimed during the campaign. Agreeing a compromise candidate with the European Council would discredit the Parliament and make the next elections more difficult. After all, the EPP won the most seats, not the Euroskeptics, and for the winning party's candidate to be dumped by the Council now would send a signal for next time to the voters: there's no point paying any attention to the candidates - or even the election - we'll just strike a deal afterwards.

Far from a Juncker Presidency playing into Euroskeptics' hands or ignoring the voters, it would underline the importance of the vote and respect the outcome and the resulting parliamentary arithmetic. Which is why the commentary on the Tagesschau today rightly pointed out that placating Cameron by ignoring the voters is a stupid political decision.