A democratically elected president or another Brussels backroom deal? : en utvärdering av förfarandet att utse Europeiska kommissionens ordförande post-Lissabon

Författare

Elin Gafvelin

Summary, in English

One of the latest, and maybe the most innovative, institutional changes in the EU is that the president of the European Commission should be nominated after taking the result of the EP-elections into account.
This is said to create a democratic link between the EU-voters and the president, stir EU-wide debate as presidential candidates emerge and hopefully result in higher voter turnout and a president that is “the result of a democratic election”.
In this thesis this new procedure is evaluated based on democratic theory. Firstly a democratic model, based on what a procedure of this kind should live up to, is established. The model is then applied to the procedure of 2014 to see if it fulfils the democratic criteria of: publicity, clear definition of mandate, enlightened understanding and political participation.
The result was that three of these criteria were not fulfilled. The procedure remained largely unknown among voters, the voters also had limited knowledge of the EU political system necessary to understand the possible outcomes of this procedure and the procedure allowed for almost no individual political participation. Only the third criterion was partly fulfilled.
The conclusion is that the procedure therefor will not result in a democratically elected president, nor will it address the problems of democratic deficit or result in a higher voter turnout.

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