The Spitzenkandidaten Process 15 Years On: Lessons from the 2024 Experience

The purpose of this paper is to build on Christiansen’s framework (Christiansen 2016) as well as recent work on the Spitzenkandidaten process (Ceron et al. 2024) and draw lessons from the 2024 experience of this controversial reform. This can be seen as a test case after the fundamentally different experiences of 2014 and 2019 that have been hailed, respectively, as a ‘success’ and the ‘demise’ of the Spitzenkandidaten process. Has the demise thesis been confirmed? Has the process been reinvigorated? Or is reality a bit more complex and nuanced? If so, can one speak of a rebalancing (along both the interinstitutional politics and the party politics dimensions that Christiansen identified back in 2016) after the high point of 2014 and the low point of 2019? What are the implications for the EU’s political system more broadly? These are the central questions that the proposed paper will seek to address and that link it to the growing literature on the broader theme of the EU’s politicisation.