The Failed Promise of the Spitzenkandidaten System: How the EC President Selection Influences Citizens’ Satisfaction with EU Democracy

The European Union, and even more so the European Parliament (EP), is facing an ongoing institutional and political legitimacy challenge. In this context, the 2014 European elections marked a decisive step towards bringing the EU closer to its citizens by increasing the personalization of EU politics. Following the slogan ‘this time it’s different’, the idea was that the ‘winning’ lead candidate of the EP elections would become the new President of the European Commission (EC), the so-called Spitzenkandidaten process. While this expectation was fulfilled in 2014, the selection of von der Leyen as EC President after the 2019 EP elections neglected this process. In this paper, we first examine the extent to which this overruling of the Spitzenkandidaten system by the member states has affected people's satisfaction with the Spitzenkandidaten process and EU democracy more broadly. We take advantage of an `unexpected event during survey design' by using a panel wave data collection (from 10 EU member states) that was in the field when the (unexpected) selection of von der Leyen took place. Second, we examine how the (failed) Spitzenkandidaten process can be salvaged in order to increase citizens' satisfaction with EU democracy. We focus on two aspects, namely the earlier involvement of citizens through a primary system to select potential Spitzenkandidaten and the binding nature of the EP elections result to determine the EC President. To this end, we collect original experimental data (in 6 member states) in early 2024 in the run-up to the next EP elections.