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The two positions were left vacant in August when Frans Timmermans, the EU’s Green Deal and climate commissioner, quit his job in Brussels to run for the November general election in the Netherlands.
Following Tuesday’s decision in Parliament, his portfolio will now be split between former Dutch foreign minister and conservative politician Wopke Hoekstra, and a socialist from Slovakia, Maroš Šefčovič, who is currently European Commission vice-president for interinstitutional relations and foresight.
Their confirmation into their new roles was announced on Wednesday morning after their candidacy gathered the required majority from political group leaders in the European Parliament’s environment committee.
“Two-thirds of coordinators of the environment committee confirmed Wopke Hoekstra and Maroš Šefčovič as commissioners,” announced Pascal Canfin, a French liberal who chairs the Parliament’s committee.
Both candidates are now set to be formally confirmed by the Parliament’s 705 MEPs during a simple majority vote on Thursday – with backing from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the centrist Renew Europe, and the Greens.
The two appointments bring to an end a political struggle between the Parliament’s two largest parties, the centre-right EPP and the centre-left S&D, which both had a candidate in the running.
The EPP’s Hoekstra was heavily criticised by the socialists for his past jobs at oil major Shell and McKinsey consultancy, while the conservatives took aim at Šefčovič for his ties to the new Slovak prime minister, Kremlin-ally Robert Fico – with the two parties effectively neutralising each other.
As a consequence, this left the liberal Renew Europe and the Greens as kingmakers and both were all too ready to leverage their position to extract political commitments from both candidates.