44 Europe The EconomistFebruary 6th 2021
A
t the endof December, a smiling Ursula von der Leyen ap-
peared in front of a camera to hail the beginning of the eu’s
vaccination programme. The president of the European Commis-
sion boasted that from Sofia to Helsinki Europeans were being
jabbed with drugs bought collectively and then divvied up by the
commission. It was, she beamed, “a touching moment of unity and
a European success story”. A month later, the smiles have van-
ished. The euhas vaccinated a much smaller proportion of its peo-
ple than America, Britain or Israel has done. The programme has
been dogged by a lack of doses and clunky roll-outs. Supply pro-
blems hit when AstraZeneca, an Anglo-Swedish drug firm, warned
that it would provide less than half of the 80m doses it had pledged
to the euin the first quarter of the year. A touching moment has be-
come a tortuous one and the blame game has begun. Where does
the responsibility lie?
Start with the body Mrs von der Leyen heads: the commission.
It took months to sign contracts for covid-19 vaccines, something
that could have been done in weeks. Shrugging off liability—en-
suring that the drug firms were on the hook should anything go
wrong—was prioritised over speedy delivery. The row with Astra-
Zeneca was badly handled. In a mix of institutional panic and fury,
Mrs von der Leyen demanded export controls on any vaccines
heading out of the eu. This threat of a blockade led to concern from
Tokyo to Ottawa, rather undermining the eu’s claim to be the
doughtiest defender of the rules-based trading system. A plan to
block exports to Northern Ireland using a mechanism in the Brexit
deal that is widely seen as a nuclear option was revealed and then
dropped via a midnight press release. To cap it all, while trying to
apologise for blundering into Northern Ireland’s conflict between
Protestants and Catholics, the commission’s spokesman uttered a
world-class gaffe: “Only the pope is infallible.”
But no one forced national governments to put the commission
in charge. Legally, euinstitutions have barely any responsibility
for the health care of the continent’s citizens, which is left to na-
tional governments. Rather than deal with the tricky politics of
some eucountries buying more vaccines than others, govern-
ments outsourced the job to the commission. Commission negoti-
ators, used to arguing over simpler things like beef quotas in tradedeals,were tasked with dealing with makers of novel pharmaceu-
ticals. Reshuffling institutional responsibilities while in the mid-
dle of a crisis is risky, yet surprisingly normal in the eu. The job of
overseeing a project costing €2.7bn ($3.35bn) to vaccinate 450m
people was handed to a department whose main previous concern
was food labelling—all at the behest of national capitals.
Mrs von der Leyen’s clumsy handling of the crisis casts the
spotlight on the national leaders who gave her the job in the first
place. Picking the European Commission president is not a merit-
ocratic process. Mrs von der Leyen, who was having a rough patch
as German defence minister at the time, ended up with the job be-
cause she raised the fewest objections, rather than due to wild sup-
port among leaders. Convenience trumps track records when it
comes to divvying out top jobs in the eu. (And explains why three
of the past four prime ministers of Luxembourg—a country of
600,000—have led the commission, among the biggest roles in
Europe.) Ultimately, the last thing the eu’s 27 heads of government
want is someone with too much ambition or political star power in
the role. After all, the eu’s treaties are littered with unused tools
that could reshape the continent in the hands of someone with the
right mix of political nous and ambition. By contrast, Mrs von der
Leyen’s main qualification for the job was an expectation that she
would do what she was told by her main backers, who include Em-
manuel Macron, the French president, and Angela Merkel, her for-
mer boss. After the past few weeks’ performance, leaders may wish
they had opted for other qualities.In the eu, no one can hear you scream
When it comes to complaining about the eu’s management, ave-
nues of dissent are limited. A typical government has opposition
parties waiting on the sidelines, loudly explaining why it is bad
and why they would do much better. In Brussels, there is no such
public political competition. The commission can be kicked out if
meps so choose, but the European Parliament—the main demo-
cratic organ of the eu—is weak. Schemes to turn the club into
something resembling a parliamentary democracy, with the com-
mission president chosen on the basis of election results, were
shelved in favour of the private haggling between leaders that re-
sulted in Mrs von der Leyen’s selection. Lawmakers spinelessly
played along. The result is that opposition is left to fringe parties
with the teleological belief that the euwill, at some point, im-
plode. Attacks on the current management are cast as opposition
to the whole project, argues Hans Kundnani of Chatham House, a
think-tank in London. This makes for an unhealthy political scene,
where criticism is regarded as illegitimate, and anything short of
outright collapse is seen as vindication.
And thus, complaints about the vaccination programme have
been overridden. Rather than apologising to voters for the fact that
European pensioners are less protected than American, British or
Israeli ones, the eu reminds them that things could be much
worse. In this telling, purchasing collectively has enabled eu
countries to avoid fighting each other over scarce supplies. Other
countries took risks by more quickly approving the very drugs that
will be injected into European arms, runs another defence. A noble
intention is, apparently, enough to forgive faulty execution. Mrs
Merkel summed up this attitude on the vaccine roll-out in an in-
terview: “On the whole, nothing went wrong.” When it comes to
the eu,voters are left in a no-man’s land, unsure how to air their
anger, where to aim it or even if they should be upset at all. For a
democratic club, this is not a healthy place to be. 7Charlemagne Looking for someone to blame
When something goes wrong in the eu, responsibility is passed around