On the eve of the unveiling of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s college of commissioners, the European Union’s powerful internal market commissioner dropped a bombshell on Brussels. After first tweeting a picture of a blank canvass and saying cryptically, “my official portrait for the next commission term,” Thierry Breton published his resignation letter to von der Leyen attacking her “questionable governance” and accusing her of going behind his back to sabotage him.
The former CEO of France Telecom, who had emerged as the most powerful and vocal member of von der Leyen’s college (the equivalent of an executive branch cabinet of ministers in a national system) during her first term, had been a thorn in her side for years. His public and private conflicts with the commission president were numerous and notorious, most recently when she threw him under the bus in August disavowing him after he sent a letter to Elon Musk ahead of his interview with former US President Donald Trump warning him that Musk’s social media platform X would have to comply with EU law on disinformation. Breton had also publicly opposed her continued tenure, claiming that she didn’t have the full support of her center-right European People’s Party (EPP) group.
Macron’s Surrender
Breton’s desire to take over von der Leyen’s job was well known, even if he was ultimately unsuccessful. Once he secured his renomination from French President Emmanuel Macron to continue into von der Leyen’s second term, he appeared to want Paris to lean on the commission president and force her to accept him as her first vice president. But the exact opposite happened. According to Breton’s letter, and subsequently confirmed by news outlets, von der Leyen called Macron and said she simply could not continue working with Breton. Either the French president rescinded his nomination and replaced him with someone else, or she would give the commissioner from France one of the notorious “nonsense portfolios” handed out to about a third of the EU’s bloated 27-member college. Macron relented, it seems, surrendering to von der Leyen’s threat.
For the European Commission president to have successfully strong-armed the president of France, politically the most powerful EU member state when it comes to these kinds of personnel matters, was nothing short of astonishing to long-time Brussels observers. Paris has always been the one force you cannot cross in Brussels—but she had done so and lived to tell the tale. This followed her commission’s decision to put France under an excessive deficit punishment procedure earlier this year, something that Paris had managed to avoid for many years despite clearly falling afoul of the rules. It is a sign that President Macron’s political capital is dissipating, not only in Paris but in Brussels as well.
Von der Leyen’s Revenge
But this was about more than humiliating the French president. This was von der Leyen’s revenge against all of the national governments who had humiliated her over the summer by completely ignoring her request that they put forward two commissioner nominees, a man and a woman, so she would have the flexibility to honor her campaign pledge to have gender parity in the European Commission college. Not only did they ignore her request, but the majority (70 percent) of them nominated a man.
The problem for her was that, unlike a national prime minister or president, she does not get to choose the “ministers” in her government—she can only choose the jobs they do. It is the 27 EU member states that choose the names, and they are still guaranteed one commissioner each despite repeated attempts to reduce the college’s size in successive treaty revisions (the European Council has refused to abide by the treaty changes that were enacted). The national governments weren’t refusing to put forward two nominees because they hate women. They refused to do it because it would partially cede power to the president to choose who serves in her college. And, as EU history has shown, national capitals always have the instinct to preserve their own power.
Breton’s replacement is Stéphane Séjourné, the mild-mannered outgoing French foreign affairs minister. “She’s going to eat him for lunch,” one commission staffer quipped, noting that France has lost an influential and aggressive conduit within the EU executive. Séjourné, along with five other commissioners, has been made an executive vice president of von der Leyen’s commission, put in charge of industry. It’s a vague remit that could turn out to be important or unimportant, depending on the skills and ambitions of the officeholder.
Von der Leyen’s doling out executive vice president titles to anyone and everyone was the other part of her masterful plan. To accommodate the bloated size of the commission after enlargement, a tiered system of vice president positions was introduced many years ago to distinguish the important commissioners from the not important ones. Then a “first vice president” position was introduced, most recently with Dutch Social Democrat Frans Timmermans serving as deputy to center-right European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker from 2014 to 2019.
Timmermans was made to share that position with two others, Margrethe Vestager from Denmark and Valdis Dombrovskis from Latvia, during von der Leyen’s first term, and the position was renamed executive vice president. This year, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was insisting that the commissioner from Italy be made an executive vice president and be given the economy portfolio. But Italy’s nominee Raffaele Fitto is from Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party, and liberal and left-wing MEPs warned they might reject the whole college if someone from the far right was made an executive vice president. So, von der Leyen made Meloni happy by giving Fitto the title, but she also gave it to five other people—including France’s Sejourné. She also eliminated the regular vice president position. As a result, while her first term contained three tiers of importance, her second term will only have two: “executive” vice presidents (the first word now being meaningless) and commissioners.
Clever Moves
Von der Leyen also gave Fitto the relatively unimportant portfolio of cohesion funding which, while a big part of the EU budget, isn’t very politically sensitive and doesn’t have much for the commissioner in charge of it to do. The economy portfolio was given to Dombrovskis, who has strangely been demoted from being an executive vice president to being a regular commissioner—showing just how little these titles mean. But the move seems to have been enough to make Meloni happy as she and her party responded triumphantly to the appointment news (it’s unclear whether behind the feigned exuberance they understand the truth of how unimportant the portfolio is).
The left-wing and centrist MEPs threatening to torpedo von der Leyen’s college also seem to have been mollified by the unimportant portfolio assignment and the fact that Fitto is one of six. As the commission president cleverly pointed out at her press conference in the European Parliament on Tuesday unveiling her assignments, two of the European Parliament’s 14 vice presidents are from Fitto’s European Conservatives and Reformists group so this is only reflecting the same arrangement that the parliament came to.
Von der Leyen has made other clever moves ahead of the European Parliament’s confirmation hearings that will take place over the next two months. At the start of every term, the parliament insists on claiming a scalp and rejects at least one commissioner. This is a power move by MEPs to show their relevance—and has become so entrenched over the years that for the past three terms European Commission presidents now set up “decoy” commissioners who are designed to be eliminated. That’s to distract MEPs from rejecting commissioners that the president wants to keep. One example was Slovenia's Alenka Bratušek, rejected in 2015 when she controversially nominated herself after being voted out as prime minister and was absurdly named as a vice president by President Juncker.
The consensus in the parliament seems to be that this year’s scalp is Oliver Varhelyi, the Hungarian commissioner who von der Leyen has put in charge of health. Varhelyi served in von der Leyen’s first commission and MEPs are still furious with him for his unilateral announcement last year that the EU would cut off aid to all Palestinians, something that he didn't have the authority to do and was quickly walked back by von der Leyen. The expectation is that they will reject Varhelyi entirely. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will then have to nominate someone else, at which time it seems likely that von der Leyen will reshuffle the portfolios (particularly if anyone else has been rejected). If past is prologue, some of these assignments are only decoys.
As her second term begins, von der Leyen seems to have snatched victory from the jaws of her gender-balancing defeat by making a power move against Paris, outmaneuvering Rome, placating MEPs, and skillfully dispatching the men who have challenged her authority. She is already rid of Council President Charles Michel with whom she so frequently and notoriously butted heads, who was replaced by national leaders in July with the likely more pliable Antonio Costa from Portugal. She has the wind at her back. But how she chooses to use that momentum is anyone’s guess.
Dave Keating is an American journalist based in Brussels covering European politics for France24.
