Jean-Claude Juncker’s 70th birthday last month went largely unnoticed. If not quite a forgotten figure now, Juncker has largely faded from international view having for many years been the leading politician in his home country of Luxembourg, and a key player in EU affairs, especially in regard to crafting the Maastricht Treaty, later crowning his career as President of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019. In recent years probably his most noteworthy contribution – going against the emerging conventional wisdom of the powers that be – was to express strong criticism of moves to admit Ukraine to the EU, having to do with his deep concerns about corruption there.
The ‘not formally codified’ aspect was a bone of contention back in 2014 for the then UK Prime Minister David Cameron who opposed Juncker’s candidacy but who failed to block his appointment”
Juncker’s Commission mandate generated considerable interest among schxolars of European integration because it was very much bound up with the development of the so-called ‘political Commission’ and the related introduction of the Spitzenkandidaten system. Anyone wishing to read ‘chapter and verse’ about all this can consult the recently published book The Politicisation of the European Commission’s Presidency – Spitzenkanditaten and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
ChatGPT is quicker. Briefly it explains that
The Spitzenkandidaten system is a process used in the EU to select the President of the European Commission, describing it as a somewhat informal system that emerged after the 2014 European Parliament elections, although not formally codified in the EU’s treaties. The term “Spitzenkandidat” (plural: Spitzenkandidaten) roughly translates to “lead candidate” in English.
The ‘not formally codified’ aspect was a bone of contention back in 2014 for the then UK Prime Minister David Cameron who opposed Juncker’s candidacy but who failed to block his appointment. In human terms, if you were Juncker, and that same PM later needed all hands on deck in trying to head off Brexit, how strongly would you go to bat for him? The episode showed waning British influence when one remembers, for example, how then PM Major had managed to block Belgian PM Jean-Luc Dehaene’s appointment twenty years previously.
Journal Articles About Juncker’s Commission
One of the best articles was by Prof Daniel Sarmiento in the European Journal of International Law in 2020 entitled The Juncker Presidency – A Study in Character. Sarmiento wrote that the Commission benefitted from Juncker’s personality and independence of mind but also alluded to ‘several communications and management tribulations’. He cites an article by Hussein Kassim and Brigid Laffan – now Chancellor of the University of Limerick – to indicate that Juncker’s ‘political Commission was perceived by the Commission’s own staff as a successful period of time’. A cynic might observe that staffers would say that, wouldn’t they?
Noting that ‘During his tenure, Juncker had had to manage many crises – Brexit, the war in Syria and the consequent mass migrations, as well as growing international tensions with Russia and the US’ (remember that Juncker’s time overlapped partially with Trump 1.0) Sarmiento concluded that it was still too early to say what Juncker’s legacy would be.
Lux Leaks
Given the fact of Juncker’s nationality, Lux Leaks deserves a mention. This refers to a scandal in 2014 relating to revelations by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
For this article I reached out to Pascal Saint-Amans – formerly Director of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration at the OECD in Paris where he played a leading role in efforts to combat international tax evasion. He is now a partner at the Brunswick Group. Saint-Amans deals with Luxembourg and Juncker in his book Paradis Fiscaux (Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2023). In the book Saint-Amans notes how under Juncker’s reign the Grand Duchy – as Luxembourg is also known – a small enclosed territory, was transformed into a world-ranking financial market. Beyond banking secrecy, the Luxembourg market offered a very favourable framework for the funds industry.
Also, like its Dutch neighbour it made a specialty of proposing to companies letters of comfort which secured in complete confidentiality their fiscal schemes, including the most aggressive ones. Saint-Amans relates how Lux Leaks put Juncker ‘on the grill’ at the crucial moment when he had just been appointed Commission President. [The luck of the Irish is a phrase often attributed to us, but in this case could one say that in this regard, timing-wise Juncker had ‘the luck of the Luxemburgers’?].
Saint-Amans told me that Juncker was instrumental in developing Luxembourg as a ruling centre where ’tax certainty’ was a way to secure massive profit shifting. He added that transparency on rulings was one of the priorities of the BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) action plan to kill this harmful practice and that Luxembourg had gone a log way to be now BEPS compliant.
Brexit
Peter Spiegel, currently US Managing Editor of the Financial Times, was formerly the paper’s Brussels bureau chief and wrote a brilliant ‘explainer piece’ in June 2014 just prior to Juncker’s nomination to the Commission Presidency. In this Spiegel noted that ‘the ascension of a largely unknown middle-aged politicians from a country less than half the size of the US state of Delaware had opened old wounds and created a few new ones.’ Spiegel credited Juncker, while Luxembourg’s Finance minister, with being a key architect of the Maastricht Treaty which laid the groundwork for the creation of the euro, and that as long-time President of the Eurogroup of EU Finance Ministers Juncker had played a key role in crucial bailout negotiations. Concluding his piece – written two years before the Brexit referendum, don’t forget – with very considerable prescience, Spiegel said that ‘Many in London and Brussels fear Mr Juncker’s election (as Commission President) could be remembered as the beginning of the end of Britian’s membership of the EU’.
Barroso always had a special place in his heart for the “new member states” in central and Eastern Europe who had gone through a similar democratic transition as Portugal”
I contacted Spiegel to see if he had any further reflections. He told me that he always felt that José Manuel Barroso – Juncker’s predecessor – had believed deeply that the Commission president was responsible to all Member States. Spiegel continued ‘That was partly because of his background as a former Portuguese Prime Minister who was raised under a dictator, so he saw the EU as the protector/advancer of democratic principles. Barroso always had a special place in his heart for the “new member states” in central and Eastern Europe who had gone through a similar democratic transition as Portugal. And he believed deeply he had to keep Britain in – partly because of Portugal’s historic ties to Britain (he was definitely an Anglophile) but also because of the importance of having a big country like Britain in the fold.’
Juncker struck Spiegel as ‘almost a completely different animal. He was from a founding member state, and there was a perception (which Spiegel thinks was warranted) that he paid far more attention to the Original Six than the Brits or the Eastern Europeans. Juncker was old school. And it was exactly the wrong time for the EU to go old school.’
What Spiegel recalls from that time is that ‘we had just had European Parliament elections where anti-EU parties had made some very significant gains on both the left and right. Part of this was because of the immigration crisis, but there was also the fallout from the eurozone debt crisis and Russia’s first Ukraine war in Crimea and the Donbas’.
Spiegel continued ‘So you have rising anti-EU sentiment, voters clearly voting for a change in the way Brussels operated…and yet they choose the most old school, institutional European on the planet as Commission President? It just completely ignored voter sentiment. Also, Juncker had recently been forced to resign as Luxembourg Prime Minister because of a scandal involving the personal political use of the country’s intelligence agency. Why would anyone paying attention to trends in EU politics think he was the man for the job? As it turned out, he dealt roughly with Britain and didn’t seem to care if they left. Greece almost crashed out of the eurozone because he failed to understand the financial markets. And the EU was too slow to realize the threat immigration posed to the internal political credibility of the project. Oh and Putin emerged emboldened because of a feckless response to his “Little Green Men” in Ukraine. It’s quite a list.’
Conclusion
In Spiegel’s opinion Juncker should be celebrated as one of the giants of the 20th century generation of European leaders who helped build the EU from an idea to a properly functioning political power. However, he thinks Juncker’s tenure as Commission President was an unfortunate coda on an otherwise historic political career.
This seems justified in that, without wishing by any means to pin all the blame on Juncker, given constraints on the power of any Commission President, the handling of a number of really important dossiers could have been a lot, lot better. There is also a certain irony that the Spitzenkandidaten system under which he came to office was not used to select his successor, Ursula von der Leyen. Meanwhile, Britain was out.
On Juncker’s role in the European politics of his era, not least his term-of-office as Commission President, so much more remains to be written.