He was Brussels\u2019 \u201cchief psychoanalyst,\u201d reminisces one EU official who was there at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe would talk to prime ministers in a personal, insider way,\u201d said the official, granted anonymity to talk in confidence even after all these years. \u201cIn the Commission, it was the same. \u2018What does this one want?\u2019 \u2018What is he asking for?\u2019 \u2018Can we make a deal?\u2019 \u2018Call them up!\u2019 he would say. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe was the boss, but he won people over. The commissioners were allowed to talk. This was a truly collegial college \u2014 people were allowed to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
But even under Juncker, the Commission had already started to swing to a much more centralized, presidential system. This was largely thanks to the aforementioned Selmayr, who was chief of staff to Juncker before becoming the Commission\u2019s secretary-general in 2019. Described in a POLITICO profile from those days as an \u201carmored bulldozer,\u201d Selmayr ran Juncker\u2019s Commission \u2014 the \u201cpolitical\u201d Commission, as they called it \u2014 like a piece of heavy machinery, ramming through political talking points and crushing dissent.<\/p>\n
Even so, it was still, relatively speaking, a more open place. When she left the Commission, Bulgaria\u2019s then commissioner (now managing director of the International Monetary Fund), Kristalina Georgieva, still felt free enough to criticize Selmayr by name, calling his management style \u201cpoisonous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of this freewheeling style may have survived into current Commission President Ursula von der Leyen\u2019s first term. But by the time she came back for a second stint last year, any hint of the old ways had been extinguished. The incoming class was, by and large, younger, more female, and less politically experienced than its predecessors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He was Brussels\u2019 \u201cchief psychoanalyst,\u201d reminisces one EU official who was there at the time. \u201cHe would talk…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187,1699,12072,53,1201],"class_list":{"0":"post-37345","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european","11":"tag-european-union","12":"tag-foreign-affairs","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-trade"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114373951754006215","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}