European Council to meet ‘two days after Parliament elections’

Van Rompuy says EU leaders will discuss presidency of Commission just after May’s election.

Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, will host a meeting of EU national leaders shortly after the European Parliament elections, to discuss candidates for the presidency of the European Commission.

In an interview with Le Soir newspaper, Van Rompuy said: “The European Council will meet two days after the European elections, from Tuesday evening.”

The Parliament elections take place from 22-25 May, so the Council meeting would be on 27 May. Van Rompuy said that he would try to see if there was a candidate who could command majority support in the Parliament based on the election results.

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Under EU treaty rules, the European Council, which appoints the president of the Commission, should take into account the results of the Parliament elections. The Council’s choice of Commission president has to be approved by a majority of MEPs in a formal vote.

The Parliament cannot vote to approve a president of the Commission until the second plenary session in July, after the assembly has been constituted for the 2014-09 term. Van Rompuy has suggested that the process of discussing candidates could start as soon as the election results are known. The Parliament could also propose a candidate if it was clear that the person would get majority support in the assembly, he suggested.

“If the Parliament comes with a candidate who has a stable and credible majority, not a mixed-up combination of all the negative votes, that will be an extremely important element,” he said. He stressed that he would still need to get the support of members of the European Council for the candidate to be nominated.

Van Rompuy stressed the importance of Council and Parliament agreeing on a candidate, rather than each institution trying to impose its preference on the other. “We have to get out of the game of rivalries,” he said.

Asked whether he had any names in mind to be his successor as president of the European Council, Van Rompuy said that he did but added that those people had to “leave their countries and their governments, which is not straightforward”. He was referring to the assumption that the head of the Council should be a serving prime minister. Van Rompuy is a former prime minister of Belgium.