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Jean-Claude Juncker and Frans Timmermans, the president and first vice-president of the European Commission, are facing a backlash from the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers against an attempt to alter the balance of power between the institutions.
Juncker this week published the Commission’s annual work programme for 2015, which made a clear departure from the practices of the Commission under José Manuel Barroso.
The work programme that commissioners approved on Tuesday lists only those initiatives to be taken in 2015 and is much shorter than Barroso’s work programmes, which included longer-term objectives. In accompanying material, the Commission stressed that the 23 new initiatives and the 80 proposals flagged for withdrawal contrasted sharply with the average of 130 new initiatives and 30 withdrawals put forward each year by Barroso.
Timmermans, who played a big part in shaping the programme, borrowed the slogan that the European Parliament used for this year’s elections, declaring: “This time, things really are different.”
The pared-down list of initiatives and bulked-up list of proposals to be withdrawn alarmed MEPs, who are concerned that the Commission’s deregulation agenda will diminish the Parliament’s legislative opportunities.
“We are breaking with the practice of listing everything for fear of being incomplete,” Timmermans told MEPs in Strasbourg on Tuesday (16 December). “Just because an issue is important doesn’t mean that the EU has to act on it,” said the commissioner, who used to be the Dutch foreign minister.
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