Second von der Leyen era on track to start Dec. 1

BRUSSELS — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s second term is on course to begin Dec. 1 after the bloc’s political families on Wednesday struck a long-awaited deal to complete her top team.
“Under control!” shouted Parliament President Roberta Metsola, stepping out of a room where members of the European Parliament had sealed the deal. Metsola preemptively invoked the meetings, in which the final commissioners were to be approved, to prevent the timetable from slipping into next week, a Parliament official said.
Von der Leyen herself was in the Parliament for high-level talks Wednesday, added the official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the meeting. 
Since September, von der Leyen has carefully curated her 26 commissioners (one from each of the European Union’s 27 member countries; she is Germany’s commissioner), to consolidate her own hold over the Commission and the EU’s policy-making. She assigned six executive vice presidents (Estonia’s Kaja Kallas, Italy’s Raffaele Fitto, Romania’s Roxana Mînzatu, France’s Stéphane Séjourné, Spain’s Teresa Ribera and Finland’s Henna Virkkunen) to manage the “regular” commissioners. 
The decision to include right-winger Fitto as her minister of EU affairs upset the European Parliament’s second-largest group, the Socialists and Democrats, who rebuked von der Leyen’s center-right European People’s Party for giving someone in the European Conservatives and Reformists group such a coveted position. In turn, the EPP threatened to topple S&D’s Ribera.
In a show of EPP power, the S&D’s fretting was ultimately for naught as they conceded to von der Leyen on Fitto, clearing the path for a Dec. 1 start. Ribera will become the EU executive’s de facto No. 2 commissioner, with a brief covering competition and climate.
“Everybody can have a strong say for the future of Europe. Socialists have strong dossiers. Liberals have strong dossiers, EPP is in the lead and [has] a lot of commissioners. And also Italy should be part of all the future Commission leadership,” said EPP leader Manfred Weber Wednesday after the deal was announced.
With this new makeup, the Commission reflects the EU’s tilt to the right since June’s European election, where the right and the far right made gains in key member countries such as Italy, France and Germany. The EPP and von der Leyen remain on top with 14 commissioners while continuing to forge deals on both the left and the right. 
“This was a bluff of EPP,” said Greens lawmaker Thomas Waitz, who is also the chair of the European Green Party, referring to the threats against Ribera. “But they were obviously successful in making Social Democrats believe that they might risk the whole Commission just for rejecting Madame Ribera.”
Some Renew, Greens and Socialist lawmakers opposed the confirmation of Fitto, who is politically aligned with the hard-right ECR, arguing that his leadership position would lead the EPP to break the cordon sanitaire, the wall between mainstream parties and those on the far right.
In the end, the EPP won and ultimately didn’t have to give up much.
One of their demands in exchange for accepting Ribera was that she face questioning by the Spanish parliament over her ministry’s management of the deadly flooding in Valencia, which she did. The other was that she commit to resigning if she was indicted by a court over the management of the floods. Although she refused, the EPP ultimately backed her.
The impasse halted the vetting process not only for the six Commission executive vice presidents, but also for Hungary’s far-right commissioner nominee Olivér Várhelyi, who was stripped of some of his responsibilities in talks following the hearings. Várhelyi was in charge of the bloc’s enlargement policy during von der Leyen’s first term, and was already facing a much weaker portfolio covering health and animal welfare.
The socialists, who are only in power in a handful of EU countries, have been on the back foot since von der Leyen’s September announcement of her team structure, which left them with less important portfolios and inflated job titles, apart from Ribera’s mega portfolio, which includes the powerful competition job. Little-known Romanian socialist nominee Roxana Mînzatu will be the executive vice president for people, skills and preparedness. 
“Like the members of the French delegation of the S&D group, I am pleased with the confirmation of the two socialist [executive vice presidents], Roxana Mînzatu and Teresa Ribera, but I can only condemn the validation within the European Parliament of a far-right executive vice president of the Commission, which will lead me to vote next week against the Commission proposal as a whole,” said S&D MEP Christophe Clergeau.
In a final attempt to assert dominance, the fate of those seven nominees was held up for more than a week by political squabbling between the EPP and S&D after the last hearings took place Nov. 12.
The deal ends a relatively tame power game between two EU institutions, in which not a single commissioner was rejected or even asked to return for a second hearing. 
It’s the first time since 1999 that no country’s nominee for the Commission has been rejected. It’s a step backwards for the Parliament, which has typically kept a check on the Commission’s hold on power by rejecting or sending back a nominee for further questions in years past.
This story has been updated.