Leaders of the European Parliament's political groups will meet on Wednesday (2 October) to consider a proposed plan for the scrutiny hearings, ultimately deciding who is allowed to join the European Union's next cohort of influential commissioners.
Bernd Lange, chair of the chamber’s Conference of Committee Chairs (CCC), is finalising the proposal after a closed-door meeting on Tuesday. He is expected to send the proposal to group leaders, either late on Tuesday or early on Wednesday.
Competing representatives of the chamber's various committees made last-ditch efforts to persuade Lange to incorporate their preferred division of labour in his forthcoming recommendation to parliamentary chiefs.
Lange now faces the difficult task of drafting a final recommendation to group leaders, taking the discordant views of his CCC colleagues into account while remaining coherent.
Political group leaders – officially called the Conference of Presidents (CoP) when they sit together – normally rubber-stamp CCC recommendations without argument.
But on Tuesday, the CCC agreed that Lange will ask the CoP to choose between two alternative timelines for the hearings: one starting on 14 October and another starting on 4 November.
However, Lange is expected to tell the political group leaders that most committee chairs prefer the later timeline, parliamentary sources told Euractiv.
They also agreed that the written questions for all Commission candidates should include one relating to Europe's youth. Ostensibly, there will be only two standard questions, although these will comprise multiple sub-questions.
The most controversial matter discussed in the meeting on Tuesday was how the various committees should share responsibility for questioning the candidates.
The 26 commissioners-designate will be questioned by different committees depending on the policy area that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has decided they should cover.
In some cases, multiple committees will have to share responsibility, or one committee may be put in charge while others are invited to ask a single question each.
European Parliament committees regularly fight for control over even quite obscure draft regulations. Therefore, competition over these high-stakes scrutiny hearings is to be expected.
The overlap in job descriptions for von der Leyen's 26 commissioners-designate makes their allocation to parliamentary committees more complicated than usual.
