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Martin Schulz, the Socialists’ candidate to become president of the European Commission, warned this week that the European Parliament would resist any attempt by member states to appoint as president anyone who is not an official nominee of one of Europe’s political parties.

“No one can be a candidate for the European Commission except the official candidates that were put forward before the elections,” said Schulz, who is currently the president of the European Parliament.

Schulz was speaking on Tuesday (4 March) at a discussion on Europe’s future organised by Emily O’Reilly, the European Ombudsman.

Member states are expected to choose their nominee for Commission president in June, to be put to a vote of the European Parliament. Schulz implied that majority approval would be withheld if the Council nominated someone who was not an official candidate during May’s elections.

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, said he was in favour of the innovation that European parties put up candidates for the Commission presidency as part of the Parliament’s elections. But asked whether the candidate of the party with the most seats in the Parliament should be nominated by the Council, Barroso replied: “It is more complex than that.”

“It is for the EP [to decide] – for the first time we will have a real European debate but also the European Council [will decide],” he said. “The Council has also some competence, it is also a European institution. So we have to respect the powers and competences of all these institutions.”

A former centre-right prime minister of Portugal, Barroso will be attending the convention of the centre-right European People’s Party that is to decide its candidate for the Commission presidency tomorrow (7 March).

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