The double promotion of Martin Selmayr to secretary-general of the European Commission (EC), the highest position in the EU’s civil service, has caused a stir in Brussels, angering even the most ardent Europhiles of the European parliament.
EC president Jean-Claude Juncker appointed Selmayr as deputy to the then secretary-general, Alexander Italianer. But, after just nine minutes, Juncker announced Italianer’s resignation, elevating Selmayr to the top job and handing him the keys to the EU machine. Within his first few days Selmayr announced to the 33,000 staff he now oversees that the EU civil service ‘must not be satisfied with being the machine to run our institution’, but should instead be ‘the heart and soul of the Commission’. In other words, the civil service he now heads should run the EU. As one EC official put it, Selmayr is now ‘in effect, the president’.
Selmayr is known to be a remarkably uncivil servant. He has been dubbed the ‘beast of Berlaymont’ and ‘the monster’, even by his longtime ally Juncker. His abrasive manner and ruthless careerism has earned him numerous enemies in Brussels. According to The Economist, he is alleged to have bullied commissioners and to have threatened journalists with violence. One of Juncker’s aides resigned over Selmayr’s ‘despotic behaviour’.
Sophia in ‘t Veld, leader of the Democrats 66 party in the European parliament, is spearheading the campaign to investigate Selmayr’s promotion. She gave an impassioned speech, accusing Juncker’s commission of being ‘led by the nose, by a civil servant’. ‘Selmayrgate destroys all the credibility of the European Union’, she added. Werner Langen of the European People’s Party (EPP), Selmayr’s own party, complained that ‘the whole procedure was anything but transparent, it reminds us of the 19th-century secret bureaucracy’. Françoise Grossetête, another EPP MEP, is worried the power grab would be ‘grist to the mill’ of Eurosceptics.
The handwringing over Selmayrgate in the European Parliament appears to be less concerned with how the EU actually functions than with safeguarding its reputation. Surely it cannot have escaped their notice that, even before his promotion, Selmayr has for many years been one of Brussels’ most powerful officials. This latest move merely formalises that power. ‘He takes all the power – completely,’ one EC official told Politico, ‘but he now has more legitimacy and rules-based authority for using this power’.