MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — The Socialist and Liberal candidates for Commission president struggled to differentiate their views on the economy, climate change, social policy and other issues during a high-profile debate on Monday, but they joined forces in urging voters to ditch the conservatives who have long dominated EU politics.
The mostly tepid exchanges between the Socialist, Frans Timmermans, and the Liberal, Guy Verhofstadt, and their jabs at conservative Manfred Weber, who was absent from the debate, were punctuated by impassioned statements from a Greens candidate, Bas Eickhout, whose proposals clearly pleased an audience filled mainly with university students.
Despite their efforts to draw contrasts, Timmermans, a former Dutch foreign minister now serving as Commission first vice president, and Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister now serving as a member of the European Parliament, agreed far more than they disagreed. They are two of the most outspoken EU federalists and ardent defenders of the European project, and that shared vision was evident — especially in their responses on trade, migration, and regulation of big technology companies.
Timmermans stood out as the most poised and eloquent speaker on the panel of candidates, which also included Jan Zahradil, a Czech MEP who is a nominee of the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists, and Violeta Tomić, a member of the Slovenian National Assembly who is a candidate of the Party of the European Left.
“Because the rest of the world wants to be on the European market,” Timmermans said, swatting away a question about how the EU could lead on climate change when it has only 7 percent of the world’s population.
“We have seen it before — whenever we create higher environmental protection standards, higher social standards, parts of the economy say ‘don’t do it, we’ll lose our competitive edge.’ The opposite is true,” he said. “Higher standards means better competitiveness, means the rest of the world wants to abide by our standards.”
He then used the question to trumpet his own role in devising EU regulations on plastics, and to deliver a crowd-thrilling shot at U.S. President Donald Trump.
“We came up with a plastics strategy that is unique in the world and it’s something other parts of the world are going to copy,” he said. “We are going to reduce single-use plastics in the oceans by 70 percent. It starts in Europe but it has a huge effect on the rest of the world if we take the lead. And if we don’t take the lead, nobody will, because there is a man in Washington who is trying to break all this, and only a united Europe can stop Trump and his idiocy on climate change and on the environment.”
According to a snap poll by Slido, 42 percent said Timmermans, of the Party of European Socialists (PES), performed best in the debate, followed by Eickhout with 35 percent and Verhofstadt with 11 percent. Only 6 percent favored Zahradil and 5 percent sided with Tomić.
Weber, who as nominee of the European People’s Party (EPP) is widely considered the front-runner for the EU’s top job, was notably absent from the stage. Also missing was any voice from among the disparate far-right populist forces that have roiled politics in countries across the Continent but who have not fielded a candidate for Commission president.
Hovering in the background, however, was the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, who at the very moment the candidates were on stage in Maastricht delivered his own speech at the Catholic University of Leuven that underscored his continuing ambitions to claim the EU’s top job.
“The real urgency for Europe is not Brexit,” Barnier said. “Looking carefully at the world around us, we are in the middle of large-scale geopolitical, geoeconomical, geotechnological shifts. Changes that disrupt our lives … and require our union to reinvent themselves.”
Among the challenges he cited were climate change, rising authoritarianism, terrorism and Europe’s absence from the “tech race” between China and the U.S.
In an interview published over the weekend, Barnier said: “I am not a candidate, today” but he is widely viewed as a potential replacement for Weber should EU leaders reject the German MEP, who has no previous executive experience.
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While Weber is the EPP nominee, the Council has already said it will not be bound by the Spitzenkandidat, or “lead candidate” process by which it is expected to put forward the nominee of the party winning the most seats in the European Parliament election. The process was used for the first time in 2014 to select Jean-Claude Juncker, but French President Emmanuel Macron and others have voiced resistance to it.
As his opponents laid out their views on stage, Weber was in Germany at an 80th birthday party for his mentor Theo Waigel, a former chairman of Weber’s Christian Social Union in Bavaria.
Monday night’s debate was organized by a coalition of organizations called Maastricht: Working on Europe, which includes Maastricht University, the city of Maastricht and the Province of Limburg, along with the European Youth Forum and the European Journalism Centre. POLITICO was the event’s media partner. Maastricht University’s rector, Rianne Letschert, and POLITICO’s political editor, Ryan Heath, moderated the discussion.
Verhofstadt, who is part of a slate of candidates from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, appeared eager to distance himself from the Socialist and Green candidates. During the debate, he called for a “new force, centrist pro-European force” which is “a little bit away” from the EU’s two-party establishment — the EPP and PES. Addressing Timmermans, he said the Liberals “are going to make a new group” with Macron.
After the debate, Verhofstadt repeated his pushback against the two-party system. “This Europe we know today has been created by the two traditional parties, the EPP and the S&D, which since 1979 have always had the majority in the Parliament,” he said in an interview with POLITICO. He said he regrets that in the debate, the need for a “deep change” of the EU had not been discussed enough.
As Verhofstadt accused the Socialists of being part of the EU’s status quo, Timmermans expressed doubt about the Liberals’ commitment to improving social policy, such as more consistent minimum wages and social security protections. He also questioned ALDE’s willingness to put environmental policy ahead of economic and trade interests.
Timmermans delivered what was perhaps the debate’s most dramatic moment by briefly urging voters: “Go vote Green!”
The audience laughed and Heath, the co-moderator, declared news had been made because it seemed Timmermans had abandoned his own party. But Timmermans was making a different point. “Green is not the sole property of the Green party,” he added when the noise died down. “We are not in a competition here. This is not a beauty contest. This is about your future.”
Later, Timmermans answered a question about EU communication by stressing his work trying to uphold the bloc’s rule-of-law standards in a dispute with Poland.
“Poland is a case in point,” he said. “After all the hatred I’ve got from the Polish government over the last three years, the support for the EU in Poland today is higher than three years ago.”
Eickhout held his own against the two higher-profile candidates by refusing to let them co-opt Green party views on the environment and climate change, and insisting that the mainstream parties should not be allowed to maintain business-as-usual with a world facing an environmental emergency.
He said the EU still lets major polluters off too easily and “prices for carbon,” he said, “are way too low.”
And he said taking action is an economic imperative for Europe. “Sorry, if we don’t do green policies, we will not have the jobs. The only way to have the jobs of the future is to make credible and very ambitious climate policies,” he said. “Otherwise we will be importing cars from China instead of producing them here.”
Eickhout also joined in the criticism of the conservatives and set out his own red lines for any future alliance with Weber. “Is he going to build a majority with the progressive parties that really want a different Europe that needs to deliver on democracy … or is he going to [be] … working more and more with the right?” he asked.
Timmermans made repeated references, during and after the debate, to the Socialists’ big win on Sunday in the Spanish national election, in which Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Workers’ Party made major gains. Timmermans said it is proof that EPP affiliates like Spain’s Popular Party are paying a political price for siding with even harder right-wring forces.
Projections suggest the election, to be held May 23 to 26, will yield the most fragmented Parliament in modern EU history, requiring pro-EU parties to reach out wider than ever to form a majority coalition.
“If you want to be relevant, you also have to achieve a majority in the European Parliament and Council,” Timmermans said after the debate. “And I’m trying to get a progressive majority.”
Lili Bayer, Eline Schaart and Zia Weise contributed reporting.