EPP wants to cancel EU top diplomat job, create dedicated Defence Commissioner post

A new make-up of the next Commission team should include a reshuffle of the foreign policy and defence portfolio, according to a draft European People’s Party (EPP) manifesto, seen by Euractiv.

The EPP’s 2024 election manifesto draft goes further than the electoral ideas presented ahead of the 2019 European elections.

The largest political party in the European Parliament, also the political home to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, has traditionally been in favour of investing in European – as well as transatlantic – defence industries and armed forces.

According to the EPP’s 2024 election manifesto draft, the next European Commission should completely change the way it handles the bloc’s foreign and defence policies, by creating, on the one hand, a separate post of Defence Commissioner and transforming the post of the EU’s chief diplomat, currently held by Socialist Josep Borrell.

The post should be replaced with that of “an EU foreign minister, and appoint a European Security Council to support them so that the EU can react quickly to international crises, and coherently follow through on its foreign policy decisions”.

The manifesto does not specify how the selection process would work in practice.

“The representatives for foreign policy so far appointed by the Social Democrats have often failed to fulfil their role,” the document states.

The EU top diplomat position, currently held by Spaniard Josep Borrell, has since the beginning been in the hands of Social Democrat (S&D) candidates, while the centre-right EPP has held the helms of the European Council, the European Parliament and the European Commission.

The European centre-right party, however, wants to give the EU executive a larger role in defence policy, with a Defence Commissioner tasked with work currently shared by both the EU diplomacy boss Borrell as well as Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who has been in charge of the bloc’s defence industry.

“We need to establish a Commissioner for Defence”, the document reads. This role would “better coordinate defence issues within the framework of EU competencies, promote cooperation and, at the same time, ensure that there is an EU defence budget of at least 0.5% EU GDP, in addition to the national budgets,” it continues.

Investing 0.5% of the bloc’s GDP into defence would come up to around €100 billion – the same figure Breton said the EU should invest in the defence industry.

Adding the need to invest more into defence industries while reducing the fragmentation of armies, the EPP writes that the next EU seven-year budget should “provide the resources to innovate and meet our military needs”, adding the EU must “step up our armament production capabilities” and military mobility.

The call is not new or exclusive to the centre-right, other European policymakers, like Dutch Defence Minister Kajsa Ollongren, called for the new position, so did the European Defence Agency (EDA) chief Jiří Šedivý, who is likely to have his own eyes on the job.

Doing ‘more together’

“Ultimately, we should create a Single Market for Defence,” the draft manifesto states. The idea is similar to those put forward by the European Commission ahead of its presentation of the new EU defence strategy proposal presentation.

It also goes further than the EU leaders calling for an “effective and integrated market for defence” at their last December summit.

However, the EPP is not forgetting its cooperation with the US, the only partner mentioned in the agenda for several initiatives such as a European missile defence and nuclear shield, a European version of the US defence research and development agency DARPA and the increasing of production capacities.

They also support the ongoing discussion of replacing the unanimity voting in foreign and defence policy decisions with qualified majority voting (QMV).

A group of nine member states has previously pushed for the move, in a bid to make decision-making easier and faster by bypassing inconvenient vetoes.

As it did in 2019 for the last European elections, the EPP calls for a “European Defence Union with integrated European forces on land, sea and air by 2030” and “gradually extend towards a ‘European Corps'”.

It calls for a group that is similar to the Rapid Deployment Capacity scheme, but not an EU army.

**Additional reporting by Max Griera

[Edited by Alexandra Brzozowski/Nathalie Weatherald]

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