When something goes wrong, the blame gets passed around
AT THE END of December, a smiling Ursula von der Leyen appeared in front of a camera to hail the beginning of the eu’s vaccination programme. The president of the European Commission boasted that from Sofia to Helsinki Europeans were being jabbed with drugs bought collectively and then divvied up by the commission. It was, she beamed, “a touching moment of unity and a European success story”. A month later, the smiles have vanished. The EU has vaccinated a much smaller proportion of its people than America, Britain or Israel has done. The programme has been dogged by a lack of doses and clunky roll-outs. Supply problems hit when AstraZeneca, an Anglo-Swedish drug firm, warned that it would provide less than half of the 80m doses it had pledged to the eu in the first quarter of the year. A touching moment has become a tortuous one and the blame game has begun. Where does the responsibility lie?
Start with the body Mrs von der Leyen heads: the commission. It took months to sign contracts for covid-19 vaccines, something that could have been done in weeks. Shrugging off liability—ensuring that the drug firms were on the hook should anything go wrong—was prioritised over speedy delivery. The row with AstraZeneca was badly handled. In a mix of institutional panic and fury, Mrs von der Leyen demanded export controls on any vaccines heading out of the EU. This threat of a blockade led to concern from Tokyo to Ottawa, rather undermining the eu’s claim to be the doughtiest defender of the rules-based trading system. A plan to block exports to Northern Ireland using a mechanism in the Brexit deal that is widely seen as a nuclear option was revealed and then dropped via a midnight press release. To cap it all, while trying to apologise for blundering into Northern Ireland’s conflict between Protestants and Catholics, the commission’s spokesman uttered a world-class gaffe: “Only the pope is infallible.”
But no one forced national governments to put the commission in charge. Legally, EU institutions have barely any responsibility for the health care of the continent’s citizens, which is left to national governments. Rather than deal with the tricky politics of some eu countries buying more vaccines than others, governments outsourced the job to the commission. Commission negotiators, used to arguing over simpler things like beef quotas in trade deals, were tasked with dealing with makers of novel pharmaceuticals. Reshuffling institutional responsibilities while in the middle of a crisis is risky, yet surprisingly normal in the eu. The job of overseeing a project costing €2.7bn ($3.35bn) to vaccinate 450m people was handed to a department whose main previous concern was food labelling—all at the behest of national capitals.
Mrs von der Leyen’s clumsy handling of the crisis casts the spotlight on the national leaders who gave her the job in the first place. Picking the European Commission president is not a meritocratic process. Mrs von der Leyen, who was having a rough patch as German defence minister at the time, ended up with the job because she raised the fewest objections, rather than due to wild support among leaders. Convenience trumps track records when it comes to divvying out top jobs in the eu. (And explains why three of the past four prime ministers of Luxembourg—a country of 600,000—have led the commission, among the biggest roles in Europe.) Ultimately, the last thing the eu’s 27 heads of government want is someone with too much ambition or political star power in the role. After all, the eu’s treaties are littered with unused tools that could reshape the continent in the hands of someone with the right mix of political nous and ambition. By contrast, Mrs von der Leyen’s main qualification for the job was an expectation that she would do what she was told by her main backers, who include Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Angela Merkel, her former boss. After the past few weeks’ performance, leaders may wish they had opted for other qualities.
In the EU, no one can hear you scream
When it comes to complaining about the EU’s management, avenues of dissent are limited. A typical government has opposition parties waiting on the sidelines, loudly explaining why it is bad and why they would do much better. In Brussels, there is no such public political competition. The commission can be kicked out if meps so choose, but the European Parliament—the main democratic organ of the eu—is weak. Schemes to turn the club into something resembling a parliamentary democracy, with the commission president chosen on the basis of election results, were shelved in favour of the private haggling between leaders that resulted in Mrs von der Leyen’s selection. Lawmakers spinelessly played along. The result is that opposition is left to fringe parties with the teleological belief that the eu will, at some point, implode. Attacks on the current management are cast as opposition to the whole project, argues Hans Kundnani of Chatham House, a think-tank in London. This makes for an unhealthy political scene, where criticism is regarded as illegitimate, and anything short of outright collapse is seen as vindication.
And thus, complaints about the vaccination programme have been overridden. Rather than apologising to voters for the fact that European pensioners are less protected than American, British or Israeli ones, the EU reminds them that things could be much worse. In this telling, purchasing collectively has enabled EU countries to avoid fighting each other over scarce supplies. Other countries took risks by more quickly approving the very drugs that will be injected into European arms, runs another defence. A noble intention is, apparently, enough to forgive faulty execution. Mrs Merkel summed up this attitude on the vaccine roll-out in an interview: “On the whole, nothing went wrong.” When it comes to the eu, voters are left in a no-man’s land, unsure how to air their anger, where to aim it or even if they should be upset at all. For a democratic club, this is not a healthy place to be.
By The Economist
