Stop the music

Stop the music
Every six months the Council of the European Union gets a new president. This is a recipe for dysfunction


MOBUTU SESE SEKO, the late dictator of Zaire, used to reshuffle his cabinet every six months or so to show ministers who was boss. (To reinforce the point, he sometimes also slept with their wives.) Brussels is no Kinshasa. Yet it shares Mobutu’s love of musical chairs. The presidency of the Council of the European Union, the forum where national governments discuss and negotiate EU laws, rotates every six months. On January 1st the Netherlands took the chair from Luxembourg (see Charlemagne). Brussels creates a song and dance about each handover, but the system makes no more sense than Mobutu’s.
Each country that assumes the presidency sends lots of civil servants to Brussels, plus various nationally flavoured goodies and trinkets. (The Cypriots gave away 650kg of halloumi cheese.) But the greater cost is to the quality of EU lawmaking. Some countries that take up the presidency lack the diplomatic experience and political clout to broker agreements. And the six-month term is typically too brief for the tortuous process of European consensus-building.
Worse, a recalcitrant president can slow down or derail talks. During its presidency Luxembourg, eager to protect its financial-services industry, shelved critical moves to implement regulations on Europe’s shadow banking that had been drawn up by the G20 group of big economies. Spain delayed discussions on banking supervision to avoid exposing the flaws of its national supervisor; it was only after Belgium took over that a deal was quickly sealed. The Dutch, who want to grapple with the refugee crisis, will have precious little time to do so. After them come the Slovaks, whose prime minister, Robert Fico, opposes any Europe-wide deal on migrants.
Defenders of the status quo make a couple of arguments. National governments, they say, gain a greater sense of responsibility for EU affairs when they are periodically placed in charge of them. Their civil servants get a chance to become familiar with the machinery of Brussels. These points were valid when the EU had just six members. They no longer hold in a union of 28 where each country must wait 14 years to take the reins. Enlargement has made the old system unworkable.
The EU’s Lisbon treaty, which came into force in 2009, recognises this. It has sensibly taken away some of the tasks that used to be handled by the rotating presidency. The European Council, the gathering of the EU’s national leaders, now elects its own president (currently Donald Tusk). It also appoints the EU’s foreign-policy chief. Still, from home affairs to finance, energy, telecommunications and the budget, plenty of areas are left to the rotating presidency’s wheel of dysfunction.
Cure the hangover
The rotating presidency is one of several stubborn relics of the EU’s past. Like the European Parliament’s wasteful second chamber in Strasbourg, scrapping it would require a treaty change. Some new member states have yet to enjoy presidential status, but by 2020 only Croatia will remain, and it should get a turn soon enough. Europeans are sure to tweak the treaties again; they do so every five years, on average. Ending this self-defeating system will then be possible.
A better alternative would be for each council working group to elect its own chairman. The European Parliament’s committees pick their heads this way, as does the Eurogroup of euro-zone finance ministers. Council bosses with mandates from their peers and direct lines to European capitals would have greater clout, and be more accountable. The inevitable horse-trading might mean that the best candidate would not always win. But, although Mobutu was no fan of elections, they work better than any plausible alternative.