Unpacking decision-making dynamics in the European Union: How intersecting roles shape the Spitzenkandidaten process

The Lisbon Treaty substantially reformed the procedure to appoint the President of the European Commission: Article 17(7) instructs the European Council to take into account the election results and it makes the appointment of the proposed candidate subject to a confirmatory vote by the European Parliament. After the 2014 elections, the European Parliament put this reform into practice and successfully pushed for the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker, the Spitzenkandidat of the strongest party, as the new President of the European Commission. Overall, the process was widely perceived as a success to be repeated in the future. Consequently, pundits and observers assumed that one of the Spitzenkandidaten would head the European Commission after the 2019 European elections. However, instead of Manfred Weber, Frans Timmermans, or Margrethe Vestager, Ursula von der Leyen, the German Minister of Defence at the time, emerged as the top choice of European Heads of State and Government after a record-long summit. To fully understand this phenomenon, it is essential to distinguish between formal rules and the dynamic process of how these rules are put into practice. The EU institutions, including the Council and the Parliament, are populated by actors seeking to assert their vision of how formal rules, such as Article 17(7), should be interpreted and implemented. In order to understand the success of the Spitzenkandidaten process in 2014 and its failure in 2019, it is, instead, necessary to develop a framework accounting for the complexities of this process. To this end, this paper combines theoretical insights from two strands of research in an eclectic manner. First, it draws upon social constructivism and sociological institutionalism to outline how the actors populating EU institutions hold overlapping and intersecting roles and identities at the same time. These roles and identities emanate from their institutional, national, and political positions and embeddedness. Their overlap, however, gives rise to role conflicts which these actors cannot easily resolve. Second, it utilises approaches which seek to understand the behaviour of political leaders and parties when they need to choose between different objectives, such as vote, office, and policy. These approaches facilitate the operationalisation of relevant role conflicts and provide an indication of how political actors deal with these situations. Building on this framework, this paper not only demonstrates how intersecting national, institutional, and political roles shape the process of appointing the President of the European Commission but also how actors deal with role conflicts. It does so by examining decision-making processes through a comparative case study of the events unfolding after the European elections in 2014 and 2019. The analysis draws upon primary sources, such as speeches, press statements, reports, and official documents, and existing secondary sources. In sum, this analysis helps to understand the different outcomes of the Spitzenkandidaten process in 2014 and 2019 by highlighting the importance of intersecting roles and identities of key political actors. Thereby, the paper adds to the understanding of the dynamic process how formal rules established by the Lisbon Treaty are interpreted and put into practice.