What drives the application/non-application of the Spitzenkandidaten System? Lessons from four EP elections

For long time, in the European Economic Community (EEC) and in the early days of the European Union (EU), the selection of the President of the European Commission (EC) was a matter exclusively reserved to the heads of governments of member-states, who needed to find a unanimous decision in the European Council. Since the Treaty of Amsterdam, the European Parliament (EP) has gained the power to approve the nominee selected by the European Council (Hix, 2002). In addition, since the Treaty of Niece, the selection of the nominee by the European Council can be done by qualified majority. Finally, the Treaty of Lisbon, besides making more explicit the power of the EP to elect the European Council’s nominee, has called for the nominee to be selected, in the first place, taking into consideration the results of the EP elections (Mayoral, 2011). The flow of the above-mentioned institutional reforms has contributed to launch the idea of the ‘Spitzenkandidaten system’ as a general procedure for choosing the apical figure of the EU executive (Hobolt, 2014; Westalke, 2016; van Hecke et al., 2018). This system, following informal conventions developed in national parliamentary democracies (particularly in Germany), prescribes that each European party selects and declares its own candidate for the post of President of the EC, that the selected candidates participate in the EP elections as Spitzenkandidaten (lead candidates), and that the Spitzenkandidat of the winning party is selected by the European Council as nominee and then elected by the EP as President of the EC (Dinan, 2015). The new system was meant to be a stable procedure as it allegedly addressed a structural issue of the EU - its ‘democratic deficit’ (Hix and Follesdal, 2016) – by strengthening the electoral/partisan dimension in EU politics. Yet, since the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, the Spitzenkandidaten system has not been consistently applied, leading to different scholarly interpretations for its application/non-application (Christiansen, 2016; Dawson, 2019; Crum, 2023). The paper provides a systematic investigation of the conditions under which the Spitzenkandidaten system has been applied/not applied, distinguishing between the pre-election phase (declaration of party candidates) and the post-election phase (choice of the winning party’s candidate as President of the EC). The paper proceeds deductively, deriving competing hypotheses from various strands of New Institutionalism (March and Olsen, 1984), as well as from theories of party politics in the EU (Hix, 2008). It then tries to identify the most convincing causal mechanism by ‘Comparative Hypothesis Testing Via Process Tracing’ (Rohlfing, 2009). The paper uses a border-line EP election (2009) and three fully post-Lisbon elections (2014, 2019 and 2024) as cases falling in the different test-categories: ‘straw in the wind test’, ‘hoop test’, ‘smoking gun test’ and ‘double decisive test’.