Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by matthewdgreen 959 days ago
I believe that the EU Council (elected heads of state) gets to appoint the EU Commission President, with an approval required from the Parliament. The remaining 26 Commissioners are selected by the Council of Ministers (appointed ministers for each EU member state, and hence an additional layer of indirection away from the actual electorate.) Then Parliament has some substantially more limited ability to review these appointments, but I don't think they get an outright veto.
2 comments
realityking 959 days ago
The European Parliament does get an outright veto or rather the opposite, without explicit approval from the EP commissioners can‘t be appointed.

The catch, they can only approve (or not approve) them as a group. Usually the parliament will indicate which nominated members they find unacceptable and those respective countries nominate new candidates.

Reference: https://www.europeactive.eu/news/european-parliament-gearing...

Arguably this is more democratic than how we appoint government ministers in Germany. The chancellor gets elected by parliament and then appoints (and fires) ministers on their own authority without any check by parliament.

link
denton-scratch 959 days ago
> The catch, they can only approve (or not approve) them as a group.

OK, that's what I thought, but I had doubts, because I read something contrary recently. Thanks for clarifying.

Can German chancellors appoint anyone they like as ministers, or do they have to appoint someone who has been elected to the Bundestag? Because commissioners are not elected.

So, as I recall, there's been exactly one instance in which the EU Parliament has rejected all the Commissioners; they sacked the lot, because it was evident that they were mostly corrupt. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

link
realityking 956 days ago
> Can German chancellors appoint anyone they like as ministers, or do they have to appoint someone who has been elected to the Bundestag?

They can appoint anyone to ver the age of 18 with German citizenship. It‘s common that several ministers are not members of the Bundestag.

In fact, the chancellor doesn‘t even have to be a member of the Bundestag. Though he obviously gets elected by the whole parliament.

link
denton-scratch 959 days ago
> selected by the Council of Ministers

I don't think that's right, is it? Apart from anything else, the Council of Ministers isn't a fixed group of people; if the meeting is about fisheries, then it's the fisheries ministers from the member governments, and so on. Each meeting of the Council of Ministers is a different group of people. And anyway, they can't select anyone they like, because each member country gets an allocation of commissioners (one or two, I think).

I believe there are plans afoot to remove that rule, so that countries like Liechtenstein no longer get one commissioner. About time too.

link
matthewdgreen 959 days ago
This is what the Wikipedia article says. The EU itself has a series of websites that describe the various EU institutions and their selection processes, but they are much less descriptive about the appointment process.
link