Spitzenkandidatur Reloaded – Deciphering the 2019 European Commission President Election Process

The Lisbon Treaty obliges the European Parliament (EP) and the Council to jointly organize the process leading to the election of the President of the European Commission, and to consider the election results in doing so. This ‘side-effect’ of EP elections has received considerable public attention as so-called ‘Spitzenkandidatur’ process in which, since 2014, the EP encouraged political groups to each put forward Commission President candidates. This entailed electoral campaigns for EC Presidency as part of the general EP election campaign and televised European candidates debates. The whole Spitzenkandidatur process caused a clear power struggle as it is still formally the Council that holds the power to nominate the final candidate for EC Presidency, which became more than evident in 2019 when Ursula von der Leyen was nominated and elected despite not having been part of the Spitzenkandidatur process. Thus, the two Spitzenkandidatur processes of the 2014 and 2019 EP elections differed considerably regarding their processes and outcomes. In this paper, we compare the two Spitzenkandidatur processes of 2014 and 2019 and trace the interinstitutional micropolitics between the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission. Furthermore, we also ask about gendered aspects of the process since these have been underresearched so far. Here, we start from the feminist institutionalist premise that political institutions are gendered and that new institutions such as the Spitzenkandidatur are particularly apt to allow deciphering the role gender plays in the formation of new formal and informal rules. We investigate the explicit and implicit role of gender in both processes and reflect upon what we can learn from the different political group’s procedures and for European integration more generally.