MEPs lack will for full-scale confrontation

Romano Prodi had MEPs' measure from the start. By early this week it was game, set and match.

The parliamentary hearings on the new commission were always less about the new individual commissioners and more about bringing the commission under the wing of the parliament. But the tool available, the "nuclear option" of full rejection, was simply too crude and the will to use it was lacking. There was a lot of talk by the European Parliament's militants - the British Tories, some of their German partners and the Greens - that they would give the new team an unmerciful grilling. But for most of the new commission it was like, in Denis Healey's memorable words, "being savaged by a dead sheep". Even the Trade Commissioner-designate, Pascal Lamy, the devil incarnate from the Delors days, must have asked himself what all the fuss was about. Neil Kinnock brushed off a Tory attack like one would swat a fly. Chris Patten was so laid back he cracked jokes all the way through the hearing.

Trouble with Lamy, he was asked? "Whoever heard of an Englishman and a Frenchman not getting on?" he riposted.

And Gunther Verheugen, the German nominee for the Enlargement dossier, got the better of Green erstwhile revolutionary street fighter, Danny Cohn-Bendit, when asked whether he would not find it difficult to move from being a minister to commissioner. "Some of us manage to change as we get older," he replied, adding to laughter: "Even you . . . "

David Byrne played a straight bat, well prepared but uninspiring, yet with a few concessions to sweeten the MEPS.

Admittedly, some of the new intake were distinctly uneasy. Ominously, it took the new Commissioner for Relations with the Parliament, Ms Loyola de Palacio, repeated, increasingly bad-tempered questioning before she got the message and came up with the desired response. And the Belgian, Philipe Busquin, got a drubbing over his inability to speak Dutch. Part of the problem with the hearings was the unfocused format: a series of brief disconnected questions, with no real opportunity to pursue an evasive answer, before a questioner passed the baton on to a colleague who had entirely different preoccupations. But the truth is that they knew they could not win. Prodi had the support of 15 member-states which wanted him to start work immediately. Any real challenge to that would result in him heading back to Bologna and an unmerciful clash between MEPs and the capitals.

Far from extending the parliament's powers, such a battle to the end, evidence of inveterate, irresponsible oppositionism, would have resulted in calling even the rights the parliament has already secured into question.

It was the Liberal leader, Pat Cox, who warned his European People's Party counterpart, Hans-Gerd Poettering, early last week, as soon as it became clear that MEPs had no appetite for a full-scale confrontation, that they needed an exit strategy.

And very quickly wish lists on future inter-institutional relationships were being produced by all the groups. They bore a remarkable similarity, though the Socialists insisted on calling theirs "a contract with the people". No one was fooled.

In Prodi's camp the possible formulations for a political accord were already being refined. It was the scenario which one senior adviser had already outlined to me the weekend before the hearings.

And it was made all the sweeter by some ill-considered thinking aloud by Poettering about the possibility of giving Prodi's team three months' probation.

That gave Prodi the chance to show he would be no pushover. Poettering might protest forlornly afterwards that he had never really intended to threaten any such thing, and that Prodi's resignation threat was unnecessary. True perhaps, but, hey, that's politics. And Prodi comes out looking like the tough guy. On Tuesday a less than impressive Poettering was putting as good a gloss on the result as possible. The battle was not won in the last 10 days, but last January.

There is no doubt that the resignation of the commission has both brought about, and been brought about by, an irreversible shift in the balance of institutional forces in the EU. Parliament, traditionally the poor relation in the EU triumvirate with the Commission and Council of Ministers, is now their equal, and acknowledged as such.

But the shift is to equality, not beyond. The face-saving agreements entered into by Prodi, to make his commissioners more available for questioning or to take the parliament's views into account in making his own decision whether to sack a commissioner, do no more than recognise that. He is by no means under their thumb, and the next battle, to make the commission the servant of the parliament, has barely begun. It will meet far more formidable obstacles. But even the limited shift in the balance of forces does not impact only on the Commission. It is something the member-states will have to take account of in the Council of Ministers.

They will not have taken any pleasure in Prodi's discomfort and some of them will have noted that when the natural allies of parliament and commission make common cause in the future - as, for example on the scope of the next treaty-changing conference - it is the Council that will find it more difficult to have its way.