“Do you remember what the PSOE did with Cañete? “We won’t do that.” It was September 17 and the PP spokesperson and right-hand man of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Miguel Tellado, suggested the support of his MEPs for Teresa Ribera, whom that same day Ursula von der Leyen placed as vice president of Competition and Fair and Clean Transition of the new European Commission, making it the Spanish one with the most power in the EU in history. But he fair play It lasted just a few minutes, the time it took for Genoa to disavow Tellado. From there, Feijóo’s men launched a war of attrition against Ribera which, together with Von der Leyen’s decision to place the extreme right for the first time at the top of the community government, has caused one of the biggest crises. policies in the EU.
And, in an unprecedented strategy, the Spanish right found in DANA a battle against the Spanish candidate, sowing doubts about her management of the tragedy in which 220 people died with the purpose of “internationalizing” a crisis in which responsibility lay. in the hands of the Generalitat of Carlos Mazón. One of the first to target Ribera for the catastrophe was precisely the EPP MEP Esteban González Pons through the social network X (formerly Twitter) ten days after the floods when Mazón was already on the ropes for his lies. “He does not deserve to represent Spain in the European Commission,” he said.
Feijóo’s short-term play
The message went practically unnoticed since Feijóo’s PP had already adjusted its strategy of rejecting Ribera. What no one expected is that, just when the vice president was facing the key moment of her nomination in the European Parliament, Feijóo achieved in her strategy an alliance with the leader of the European People’s Party, Manfred Weber. Genoa brought all the artillery to Brussels to spread the message that his family was blocking the Spanish family. It was a half truth. Weber betrayed an agreement reached with his socialist counterparts, Iratxe García, and liberal, Valérie Hayer, to evaluate all vice presidents at the same time – thereby minimizing the risk of taking candidates hostage – by deciding “unilaterally.” delaying Ribera’s evaluation to the following week under the pretext that he first had to account for DANA’s management in Congress.
With that move, what Feijóo’s PP achieved was a short-term victory: delaying the evaluation of Ribera for a week and, with it, the other five vice presidents. In Genoa they recognized at the same time that Ribera was being examined before the Environment, Economy and Industry commissions that would not be able to overthrow Sánchez’s candidate, but they were satisfied that “newspapers throughout Europe” knew about the ‘Ribera case’. The truth is that the international press paid little attention to national politics in its analysis and the ones that did mention it did not do so in a good way: “radical delegation”, “right-wing campaign” and “circus”they said about Feijóo’s game.
But it was good for Weber to cover up Feijóo not only to please the second largest delegation in his parliamentary group, but also to strike a blow at the table of Von der Leyen, who has been sworn in for five years. years was anointed for the position to which he aspired. Weber’s message to the German is clear after in his first term he dedicated himself to seducing the heads of government, on whom his re-election depended: he needs the European Parliament and, therefore, him, who is capable of putting together majorities to their left and now also with the extreme right.
Weber’s victory
And, above all, it gave him greater negotiating power with socialists and liberals, who continued to refuse to vote for Meloni’s candidate in the part of the process in which the nominees are evaluated individually. In this phase, the coordinators of the parliamentary committees approve with two-thirds and, if this is not achieved, all the MEPs who are part of these committees vote and a simple majority is required. The EPP could get Fitto and the Hungarian forward with the votes of the extreme right forces, but it did not want that photo and even less at the gates of the elections in Germany, one of the few places where the sanitary cordon is still respected . But the socialist and liberal candidates absolutely needed the votes of the EPP. Weber had the upper hand.
The socialists’ threat to overthrow the entire European Commission in the plenary vote of the European Parliament if Ribera did not succeed was not enough. The complex parliamentary process ultimately allowed the EPP to maintain the Spanish blockade until the last consequences. It was not something that García counted on, who had not predicted the move and had assumed that he had Ribera’s support until the day of his exam in the European Parliament.
The delicate situation of the socialists
When everything blew up last week, the socialists went home convinced that they would maintain their veto of the extreme right and that the new European Commission was looking into the abyss.
However, the decibels dropped substantially on Monday. The socialists, through the Spanish Government, were open to letting Fitto pass. The next day, Pedro Sánchez himself reaffirmed that message from Rio de Janeiro, where he was participating in the G-20 and addressed the crisis unleashed in the EU with Von der Leyen and the rest of the leaders present: “All countries have the right to a commissar”. Nobody had doubted it, but what they opposed in their ranks was giving the vice presidency to Meloni’s Italy.
In parallel, negotiations between popular, socialists and liberals in Brussels had intensified. The three spokesmen met twice on Tuesday, although they did not close the agreement. Before, they had to prepare the ground with their corresponding parliamentary groups that they had led to the total clash.
García has faced a complicated meeting with the socialist MEPs, who had been refusing to approve Fitto for months. The French have let off steam and, in fact, have announced that they will vote against the entire College of Commissioners. But they already opposed Von der Leyen’s election in July and they have nothing at stake because the French commissioner is a liberal. The German socialists, on the verge of elections with a struggling Olaf Scholz, have also raised objections. Without a definitive approval from the group, García has signed the agreement with Weber and Hayer.
The socialist and the liberal pressured to have a text of the agreement that would serve as a landing pad before their own. But they were not able to extract from Weber the commitment not to agree with the extreme right in the remainder of the legislature after having already broken the sanitary cordon several times in recent months. “The rule of law, a favorable stance towards Ukraine and a pro-European approach are fundamental aspects of our cooperation,” states the document, which basically summarizes the political lines that Von der Leyen presented in July.
Weber, for his part, has also told his people that they would accept Ribera. According to the EFE Agency, it has had the support of all the delegations, with the exception of Feijóo’s PP. The decision was made early in the morning, ignoring the demands that Weber himself imposed on Ribera’s evaluation: waiting for her explanations in Congress, which had not yet begun, and the commitment that she would resign if she were prosecuted by the DANA management.
“I believe that everyone must respect the European Commission’s code of conduct,” said Weber after signing the agreement. That is precisely Ribera’s argument, who will rely on this text that only provides for the resignations of commissioners if requested by the president. Even so, the European PP has pressed until the last moment to include this issue in the evaluation letter of Ribera that the European Parliament will send to Von der Leyen. The effort has caused a delay in the evaluation of the Spanish, the Italian and the Finnish Henna Virkkunen (from the EPP), who have been blocked until the solution has arrived. Finally, an annex without any legal effect is included in which the right asks Von der Leyen to make Ribera resign if she is prosecuted by the DANA management. Socialists and liberals have included a similar opinion in the case of Fitto, who they say should not be vice president.
After a day of comings and goings and meetings, the matter was resolved at around 11 p.m. Now the situation goes into rest mode again until next week, when the 719 MEPs will have to endorse the entire European Commission, with Ribera, Fitto, Varhely, and the other 23 candidates nominated by the member states. After so much noise, it is one of the first times in which the initial proposal of the community government passes through the European Parliament without changes.
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