Oettigate: Juncker’s depressing spectacle

It is barely two years since Jean-Claude Juncker took office as president of the European Commission, promising a brave new way of conducting Commission business.

The new administration, we were told, would be “more political,” with a clear sense of priorities — “big on big things, small on small things.”

Yet already, the Commission bears the hallmarks of a lame-duck administration, buffeted by even the smallest of events, unable to take charge of its own destiny.

The controversy now raging about the conduct of Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for the digital agenda, is an unedifying and depressing spectacle.

Oettinger denies there was anything improper about his taking a lift in a private jet to fly from Brussels to Budapest to attend an event hosted by Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to discuss the digitization of industry.

The lift was provided by Klaus Mangold, a German businessman with interests in Russia, who happens to be an honorary consul to Russia and has a record of mediating between German energy companies and Russia.

Oettinger’s explanation is that no scheduled flight on May 19th fitted with his own meeting schedule and the lift was arranged by the Hungarian government.

To his critics, however, the cozy proximity of Oettinger and a Russian-friendly businessman is suspiciously convenient, particularly given that Oettinger ran the energy portfolio in the previous Commission administration, and the future of a Hungarian nuclear energy plant has been up for discussion.

The conspiracy theories multiply as the days go by, and the Commission’s unconvincing responses fail to put the fire out.

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As Oettinger struggles to extricate himself from an ethical swamp, his task is made much harder by his own behavior. The issue of Mangold and Oettinger traveling together was raised in a Hungarian online magazine 444.hu as long ago as June, which in turn prompted a question to the Commission from the European Parliament, submitted on July 7 by Benedek Jávor, a Hungarian Green MEP and Rebecca Harms, a German Green MEP.

Improbably, it took the Commission until November 3 to come up with an answer. But by that time Oettinger was embroiled in an entirely different controversy, over what he had or hadn’t said in a speech to a business audience in Hamburg. After initial denials that he had said anything untoward about the Chinese or quotas for women or gay marriage, he issued a grudging apology, apparently at the behest of Juncker.

If the Commission’s spin-doctors are right to protest that the Hungarian episode is a storm in a media teacup, they must take some responsibility for the strength of the brew.

It was Juncker who announced three weeks ago that he intended to promote Oettinger to take over the responsibilities of Kristalina Georgieva, who is resigning as vice-president of the Commission to become chief executive of the World Bank.

I wrote at the time that Oettinger was the wrong choice for the budget portfolio. What has emerged since suggests that Oettinger might not be the ideal candidate to take on another of Georgieva’s portfolios — administration, including, as it does, responsibility for the Commission’s department for human resources (guardians of equal opportunities and non-discrimination, and the policing of ethics and conduct) plus the recruitment office.

By promoting Oettinger, Juncker has compounded what might otherwise have been a minor political embarrassment. The proposed change of portfolios necessitates that Oettinger must submit to a hearing before the European Parliament. Although the MEPs do not have the power to block Oettinger’s appointment, they do have the power to humiliate him (and indirectly Juncker) by asking impertinent questions.

That is why both Oettinger and the Commission should have defused questions about the flight long ago. Sitting on the parliamentary question without answering it (the normal deadline for an answer is six weeks) now looks decidedly unwise.

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More than 40 years ago, the Watergate scandal delivered one of the basic tenets of politics: the cover-up can do more damage than the initial offense. By unhappy coincidence, Thursday was the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s declaration to a gathering of journalists in 1973: “I am not a crook.”

Oettigate will not challenge Watergate as the archetype of how an administration can be blown off course by a seemingly inconsequential event. But it’s still an intriguing miniature. One need go back in the archives only two years to find Frans Timmermans, the first vice-president of the Commission, standing before the television cameras to proclaim a new era in Commission transparency.

He announced that commissioners would be making public their meetings with lobbyists and other stakeholders. So, too, would the members of their private offices and the heads of Commission policy departments (the directors-general).

Timmermans said: “We have moved from a time when the government used to have an attitude towards the public of ‘Trust me’ … to a situation now where the public says to government, ‘Show me’ … We want to be fully transparent about the meetings we have.”

At his right hand on that occasion was Margaritis Schinas, Juncker’s spokesman. Today, when he hoped to be taking credit for the successful negotiation of the EU’s budget for 2017, Schinas was assailed with questions about Oettinger. And in his increasingly desperate efforts to evade those questions, he argued that meetings need be declared only where they concern a commissioner’s specific policy portfolio.

In Oettinger’s case, he argued, the flight was neither a meeting nor a gift. It was a travel arrangement and did not concern his policy portfolio. “It was not a meeting that falls under the very specific terms of the code of conduct and the transparency register. It was not a meeting on the commissioner’s competence.”

That narrow restriction of transparency applying only to a commissioner’s individual portfolio is hardly consistent with the letter Juncker sent out to commissioners at the start of their mandate: “I expect all of us to make public, on our respective web pages, all the contacts and meetings we hold with professional organisations or self-employed individuals on any matter relating to EU policy-making and implementation” [emphasis mine].

Schinas’ legalistic nit-picking would be laughable were it not so sad, exposing how quickly those brave words of Timmermans at the outset of the Commission mandate have withered under fire. Their administration is in beleaguered, embattled, defensive mode — and there are still three years to go.

Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.

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