With flashes of wit, much earnestness and a certain reluctance to go
for the jugular of their opponents, four candidates for the European
Commission presidency broke new ground on Monday night by holding a live
televised debate designed to drum up public interest in the May 22-25
elections for the European parliament.
If social media are one measure of that interest, the debate may have
worked. Halfway through the 90-minute programme, broadcast from the
Dutch city of Maastricht, an organiser announced that 10,000 tweets a
minute were coming in.
The harder question to answer is whether any
candidate did enough to convince potential voters that the elections
will truly make a difference in a EU blighted by a long recession, mass
unemployment and a squeezed welfare state.
Although the debate never turned nasty, Ska Keller, the Greens
candidate, got in a sharp jab at Jean-Claude Juncker, the centre-right
candidate, when she accused him of “presiding over a tax haven” during
his time as prime minister of Luxembourg. An indignant Mr Juncker
rejected the charge and managed later to slip in the image-softening
remark that one reason why he favoured a EU-wide minimum wage was that
he remembered his father’s tough life as a steelworker.
Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who is the centrist,
liberal candidate, turned his fire on José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing
Commission president, saying Mr Barroso had never taken a decision
without first flying to Berlin and Paris to get the green light. “The
Commission needs to lead,” he thundered.
He also put Mr Juncker on the spot by challenging him to explain why
his centre-right group still included Silvio Berlusconi, the former
Italian prime minister, who caused outrage last weekend by suggesting
Germans denied the existence of Nazi concentration camps. But Mr Juncker
hit back with the succinct sentence: “I was sickened by the statements
of Mr Berlusconi.”
Martin Schulz, the centre-left candidate, made a valiant effort to
distinguish himself from the other three by repeating on several
occasions that he was against a Europe of “banks and speculators”.
When
the debate moved on to Europe’s insurgent far-right parties, he spoke
with some passion in saying he found it “unimaginable” as a German that
“a Nazi party could sit in the European parliament and make propaganda
for the party of Adolf Hitler”.
Read more: Candidates spar in live EU TV debate | Brussels blog