The Commission reform: between efficiency and legitimacy

The EU is facing challenges of major scale that first call for accurate policies, but it’s also important to focus on the functioning of the European institutions in charge of delivering such policies, and among them the European Commission, whose missions are of key importance.

This is the purpose of this Policy Paper by António Vitorino and Yves Bertoncini, which develops three sets of analyses and recommendations on the organisation of the Commission, focusing on the key political issues underlying any successful reform and proposing some functional developments mainly based on the political game.

They insist in particular on the need to put 'the right commissioners in the right place', within a more political college whose president and 6 vice-presidents should assert their leadership, on the basis of a cluster system.

They conclude their Policy Paper by underlining that these functional proposals could be completed by some legal adjustments and that they would give the Commission all the strength it needs to address the challenges the EU is facing.