Wrong questions, right answers

Campaign veterans

Toby Vogel

Many of the hearings were formulaic and superficial. The rigid format being applied did not encourage an in-depth debate. MEPs were often more interested in pet issues than in extracting meaningful answers from commissioners-designate. The candidates aimed above all to steer clear of anything potentially controversial or difficult. This mixture was a recipe for boredom. The momentum of the hearings fizzled out after a while but nonetheless continued to fill out the allotted three hours.
Hearings attended: Catherine Ashton, Karel De Gucht, László Andor, Androulla Vassiliou

Simon Taylor

Members of the budgets committee welcomed Janusz Lewandowski like a popular family member whom they had not seen for years – he used to be chairman of the committee. As one MEP put it, Lewandowski could have read out the telephone book and the committee would have clapped. Lewandowksi did perform well but you felt that the committee had decided to approve him before he had started. Algirdas Šemeta, Lithuania's commissioner-designate for budgetary control, tax and customs union, got a rougher ride, but then members of the budgetary control committee tend to be more aggressive, especially on issues close to their heart, such as member states' controls of EU spending and the effectiveness of OLAF, the EU's anti-fraud office.
Hearings attended: Janusz Lewandowski, Algirdas Šemeta, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Günther Oettinger, Johannes Hahn, Dacian Ciolos, Maroš Šefcovic, Cecilia Malmström

Jennifer Rankin

An “intense grilling” was how the Parliament's website described the hearings, although that was a misplaced metaphor to describe sessions that were gruelling, but rarely challenging. The limits of the rigid format were apparent during Rumiana Jeleva's hearing, a chaotic session in which the chairman struggled to keep order as documents on Jeleva's financial interests were circulated round the room.
Hearings attended: Andris Piebalgs, Rumiana Jeleva, Janez Potocnik, Siim Kallas, John Dalli, Connie Hedegaard, Maria Damanaki

Jim Brunsden

The economic and monetary affairs committee was one of the major culprits in the Parliament's seemingly never-ending quest for flattery. At least five of the perhaps 30 questions posed by committee members to Olli Rehn, the commissioner-designate for economic and monetary affairs, and Joaquín Almunia, the commissioner-designate for competition, were on co-operation with the Parliament. The committee should have used at least some of those (essentially wasted) questions to probe the commissioners' policy plans.
Hearings attended: Olli Rehn, Viviane Reding, Joaquín Almunia, Michel Barnier, Neelie Kroes

Andrew Gardner

Most MEPs had clearly decided that the past was another country and should not be re-visited. When it was, their displays of partisanship – the applause, the drumming on tables – suggested that many still feel the ideological passions of their youth, little tempered by the lessons of the past. Those who attended the hearings will generally have emerged little wiser about a candidate's record in public office, the positions he or she had taken – and why – or about the value of that experience for the post to which they were nominated.
Hearing attended: Štefan Füle

Peter O'Donnell

For anyone beyond the charmed circle of Brussels courtiers, the spectacle provoked pity and mirth in equal measure. Pity for the half-billion EU citizens whose fate over the next five years is going to be influenced – on this showing – by a Parliament and a Commission content to favour form over substance, undemanding in questioning, imprecise in answering, and all too frequently all too complicit. And mirth at the solemn inanity of much of the proceedings, at the constant confusion and serial misunderstanding, as mediocre questions, often indifferently interpreted, provoked mediocre answers that frequently bore on utterly distinct subjects.
Hearings attended: John Dalli, Antonio Tajani