Two months before the European elections, ex-chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel (ÖVP) sharply criticized the top candidate of his conservative party family, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, accusing her of over-regulation: “Under Von der Leyen it is: one out, five in.”
“One out, five in,” he criticized Thursday during a panel discussion in Vienna, a variation on the EU’s motto for cutting bureaucracy, which is to scrap an old regulation for every new regulation (“One in, one out ‘).
Schüssel recalled that this principle was introduced and put into practice under the former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker.
“You don’t have to give everyone a competency”
“I am in favor of each Member State retaining a commissioner, but you do not have to give everyone authority,” said Schüssel. For example, the area of foreign policy could be divided among different commissioners who would have different regional responsibilities. On the other hand, he questioned the Commissioner for Multilingualism. Every commissioner with his own department must ‘prove that he has brought something together’.
The EU institutions are “terrible at selling their own successes,” Schüssel complained. There is also no point in them carrying around a ‘belly shop’ of countless topics that they want to work on continuously. “You have to concentrate on the three or four really important issues,” the ex-chancellor demanded.
Source: Krone
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