Leadership and Informality. The Role of European Commission President in Rule of Law Crisis

The European Commission has a specific institutional position within the EU as it fulfills numerous roles, most notably, it is the ‘engine of integration’ and the ‘guardian of the Treaties’. It is especially the Commission’s ability to perform the role of the guardian that has become a subject of lively discussions in both academia and EU politics. The deepening democratic backsliding EU member states experienced in the last decade puts the Commission’s performance of the law enforcer in a poor light (Pech & Scheppele 2017). Some authors even argue that the Commission ‘sacrificed its role as the guardian of the Treaties’ in favour of gathering more support for its policy agenda (Kelemen & Pavone 2022). In other words, the Commission slowly lost its prestige both as the engine of the integration and the enforcer of the treaties. This change is frequently attributed to the Commission’s leadership. In this article, we build on this scholarship and examine the leadership style of Commission’s Presidency and the role of informality in the regulation of Commission’s internal governance in how it is executed. The role of the Commission was always very strongly associated with the personality of its President. Despite some institutional constraints (for example, a lack of autonomy in selecting the College members), the President is placed in a unique position that allows her to decide on almost every aspect of the Commission’s functioning such as the allocation of portfolios within the Commission as well as its internal organization. We zoom in on Commission’s approach to the rule of law backsliding in Hungary, Romania, Poland and Slovakia and analyse what degree of the changing position of Commission rests in the informality allowed by internal regulatory framework of the Commission and what role does the leadership of the Commission play in how it executes its dual roles inside the EU.