Models of EU Democracy and the Politics of Leadership (S)election

The way one evaluates leadership selection in the European Union very much depends on how one sees the EU as a polity and the kind of democratic standards that polity is to meet. This chapter seeks to explicate the relations between different models of EU democracy and the criteria for democratic leadership selection that follow from them. At the same time, the chapter also suggests that different ideas about leadership selection are highly instructive about the different understandings of EU democracy. The chapter departs from four prominent models of the EU as a democratic polity: an intergovernmental polity, a regulatory polity, political union, and demoi-cracy. For each of these models, the chapter elaborates its understanding of the structure of the EU demos, the main mechanisms of democracy, the place of EU executive leaders—specifically the Commission President—in these mechanisms, and the way they are to be (s)elected. The second part of the chapter uses these models to evaluate the way EU leadership selection processes have evolved historically, with an emphasis on the developments since the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009. This analysis helps to be more concrete about the institutional implications of the competing models and it underlines that the EU is certainly not teleologically destined towards a full-fledged parliamentary democracy.