State of Juncker’s union

By Ryan Heath

The Commission president gets ready to address a defining moment in European history.

The EU’s political credibility will take center stage along with one of its leading politicians when Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker delivers the “State of the Union” address Wednesday, an annual event taking on heightened importance this year as Europe grapples with several ongoing crises.

Unlike his predecessor José Manuel Barroso, who leaned on a small team to craft the speech, Juncker has been crowdsourcing to prepare for the event, officials said. He has sought input in recent weeks from party leaders in the Parliament and all 28 Commissioners, along with a range of colleagues, politicians, experts and advisers. The commission has even been testing messages on the more controversial issues, such as migration.

Juncker’s inspiration marathon appears to be an attempt to fireproof a speech that needs to inspire a fragile union.

A two-day retreat outside Brussels last week gave Commissioners the chance to influence the speech. Some opted to shape the visionary aspects of the speech while others focused on securing a prime slot for their own policy files.

It’s likely that the speech will focus on the four key themes discussed at the seminar: the Commission’s legislative priorities for 2016, the EU response to the refugee crisis, the bloc’s seven-year budget, and efforts to save the euro by strengthening the economic and monetary union.

Juncker’s fellow commissioners also advised him to strike a balance between highlighting EU successes and failures, according to a source at the meeting.

In the speech, set for Wednesday morning in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Juncker will lay out his vision for EU policy for the coming year and assess the current state of affairs. More importantly, he will try to show that the EU can deal with and move beyond several crises that have consumed it for months now: Greece, migration and security.

Juncker will also unveil a new proposal for dealing with the migration crisis, one that will create a permanent mechanism for relocating refugees throughout the EU. In doing so, he will face opposition from some politicians whose governments oppose mandatory quotas on accepting asylum-seekers, and also criticism from others who say Europe has not done enough to respond to the crisis.

The speech will be followed by a debate among parliamentarians, including short responses from the leaders of each of the Parliament’s party groups and a final rebuttal from Juncker.

As a political event, the State of the Union is a relatively new phenomenon, having been held yearly since just 2009, when it was established by the Lisbon treaty. Only one other Commission president, Barroso, has ever given one. While it does not approach the mass-media phenomenon that is the U.S. president’s annual State of the Union address, the EU version is gaining in prominence.

The EU institutions launched a promotional campaign to create some buzz. The commission set up a new website soteu.eu with video livestream and Twitter dashboard that will go live Monday. Officials are also promoting the hashtag #SOTEU to engage the online community.

With the Parliament often a forum for populist voices that promote national interests over European unity, the stakes are particularly high for Juncker to appeal to a wider EU audience than just the 750 MEPs and European leaders.

Juncker is already looking to put his personal stamp on it, and the outreach effort has been part of that process.

“As President Juncker has a very large network of contacts, he is permanently speaking to former politicians, current decision-makers and key players in the European Parliament and reading a lot as you know — getting ideas and inspiration from many different people and sources,” said Mina Andreeva, a Commission spokeswoman.

But the end product, aides said, will be Juncker’s. Rather go through dozens of draft versions, as Barroso did, Juncker will keep his options open and finalize the speech himself the night before in his hotel suite, “putting his personal style and vision into it. We can thus for once be safe from leaks, I believe,” Andreeva said.

For the two-day retreat last week, the commissioners traveled by bus to the small Belgian town of Genval, just outside the Brussels bubble, to strategize about the speech.

The discussion at the Commission seminar partly revolved around how many positive and negative aspects to include in the speech, according to a source in the room. “There was a feeling in the room that you need balance,” the source said.

Juncker has also met with other top EU politicians in preparation for the speech. Last Monday night, he consulted leaders from Parliament’s two main party groups at their recurring “G5″ dinner.

The gathering included Martin Schulz, the Parliament president; Gianni Pittella, president of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats; Manfred Weber, the European People’s Party Group president; and Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the Commission. According to a parliamentary source, they asked Juncker to raise the issues of migration, the situation in Ukraine, the Paris climate summit in December and single market issues.

They also agreed that Juncker should attend the Parliament’s Conference of Presidents in Strasbourg on Tuesday to sound out concerns from leaders of the assembly’s other political groups — who will also make their concerns heard more vocally after the speech itself.

It’s likely to be a rough meeting. Nigel Farage, leader of the Euroskeptic Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, is promoting his message about the speech around the idea that “Europe is in a state of disunion.”

Powerful voices in Juncker’s inner orbit are also weighing in. His political advisor Ann Mettler, who heads the Commission’s internal think tank, the European Political Strategy Centre, submitted 10 papers to the president in early August for inspiration.

Sources familiar with the process said Mettler and Juncker’s chief of staff Martin Selmayr will have a strong hand in the editing of the speech.

The Commission has already been testing some of its potential soundbite messages — for example in an op-ed by Juncker published in various daily papers across Europe last week on the migration issue. In the article, Juncker stressed the humanitarian angle of the crisis while calling for a permanent relocation mechanism in emergency situations and a higher figure than just 40,000 refugees currently in Greece, Italy and Hungary.

“When we talk about migration we are talking about people,” he wrote.

The expected announcement of a new plan to relocate an additional 120,000 refugees will be sure to provoke debate in the parliamentary chamber — where political group leaders have already been voicing strong criticism of the European response to the crisis so far.

“We’d like to see some leadership on migration that’s not reactionary,” said European Conservatives and Reformists Group spokesperson James Holtum. “We’re hoping to hear something on fingerprinting.”

Meanwhile an EPP group spokesperson said that on migration the party wants to hear new legislative proposals and initiatives, and for the Commission to send the signal that “Europe takes action.”

The party groups are also not shy about expressing their wish lists for other things they’d like to hear in the speech.

The EPP, for example, wants a “roadmap on concrete proposals for energy union and digital union,” according to spokesperson Christian Huegel.