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Commission concerns

Tuesday 13 July 2010 - by Ben Collins

President Barroso’s European Commission has been in place for almost six months but commentators are not convinced by its leadership or the action it has taken to tackle the sovereign debt crisis

Leading think tanks have slammed the European Commission’s slow legislative response to the financial crisis saying it is weaker now than it has been in a long time.

Bruegel senior fellow Nicolas Veron says the fast adoption of the Dodd-Frank Bill in the US “puts a harsh spotlight” on the slow pace of the EU’s legislative response to the crisis.

But he says this is not simply down to President José Manuel Barroso’s five-month-old College of Commissioners; it more generally highlights shortcomings in the EU policy formulation process. He says: “The Commission has also been at fault for poor initial drafting, especially in the case of the AIFM directive but perhaps in other projects as well.”
Open Europe research director Mats Persson says the Commission is politically weaker now than it has been in a long time.

He says: “It has been somewhat sidelined by the crisis, with the bigger states having to take the lead, while the Commission has been more involved in the more boring, day-to-day running. It has pushed the legislative agenda quite aggressively, but at the moment, it is politically weak.”


But Centre for European Policy Studies chief executive Karel Lanoo says he thinks the Commission has responded fairly well to the crisis in forcing regulation through.

He says Europe was to some extent earlier in forming policies and legislation than the US but that this was held back because of the more complex legislative mechanism of the EU.

However, Lannoo says the subsequent sovereign debt crisis has been a “rude wake-up call” for the Commission.

“It was not really doing its job properly in terms of budgetary surveillance, so there was a finger pointing game, but in the end I think the Commission was to blame for not having followed that up sufficiently.

“You had the whole sovereign debt crisis, and they said the surveillance was diminished by the French and German action to water down the growth stability factors in 2004.”


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