There was a time when Frans Timmermans was supposed to be the EU’s Next Big Thing.
As Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s declared “right-hand man,” he was going to be the most influential official in Brussels, the power behind the Eurocratic throne.
One gushing profile predicted 2014 to 2019 might actually end up known as the Timmermans Commission. Another called him a “rising star.” A Spanish political blogger, describing the hype, said Timmermans was billed before a visit to Madrid in 2015, as “a decision-making machine, that everything goes through him, that he was Juncker’s hands, ears, eyes, hands and feet.” A Star Wars-themed skit in the annual Brussels “Press Revue” in early 2016 portrayed him as the hero “Frans Solo,” defying the evil Galactic Empire.
And then, suddenly — faster than you could say Le Chief Brexit Negotiator Michel Barnier — Timmermania was over.
Passed over for the high-profile Brexit file in favor of Barnier, the veteran French politician, and held tightly in check by Juncker’s controlling chief of staff, Martin Selmayr, Timmermans, as first vice president, has ended up more the president’s right-hand plumber than a co-star on the EU stage.
As Barnier and Juncker enjoy the Brexit spotlight, Timmermans has been left on clean-up duty with some of the most excruciatingly difficult, and often thankless, files: especially migration, the rule-of-law dispute with Poland and relations with the European Parliament.
Or as Timmermans, in an interview, said with uncharacteristic understatement: “I don’t always get the easiest jobs, let me put it that way.”
But even some fans say he has put loyalty to Juncker ahead of his own ideals.
“It’s a pity,” said one Commission Cabinet chief who has watched the internal dynamics first-hand. “He has become like a henchman-in-chief.”
Trouble begins
The inflection point for Timmermans, when he began to drop out of a starring role, may ironically have been the moment of his greatest policy achievement.
In March 2016, a month after the Frans Solo bit, Timmermans, a former Dutch foreign minister, helped seal the deal with Turkey widely viewed as crucial to bringing the EU’s migration crisis under control.
In theory, the first vice president’s official duties are to serve as designated survivor and, under more mundane circumstances, to step in as a replacement in the president’s absence. Timmermans was expected to be much more — a hands-on and aggressive No. 2 to Juncker, who is famous for preferring to keep at least one hand free to hold a glass of wine.
Even now, Timmermans is viewed as arguably the EU’s best communicator of the 21st century. He can thunder about the merits of the European project in seven languages, and hurl rhetorical lightning bolts at capitals like Warsaw that flout the club rules.
“His oratory skills are way beyond most of us,” said Diederik Samsom, the former leader of the Labor Party in the Netherlands who is a longtime friend and political ally. “That bears some risks, but the advantages of it are far greater … We need people who can tell a story. And at the same time if they can govern a bit, it’s quite a good combination.”
“If there’s one person who wants to conquer a room, it’s Frans Timmermans,” Samsom added. “He is devastated when it’s not successful.”
By delivering on migration, Timmermans eased the pressure on Juncker, who had faced persistent speculation that poor health would lead to his resignation. Then the U.K. voted in June 2016 to quit the EU, sealing Juncker’s fate and perhaps Timmermans’ as well. A leadership change would have signaled chaos in Brussels. The seemingly doddering Luxembourger would not need a designated survivor after all.
As it turns out, Juncker also had not yet given out his most crucial assignment, and it would not go to Timmermans. In the stunned frenzy that followed the British vote to quit the EU, Juncker tapped Barnier, a fellow member of the center-right European People’s Party, as chief Brexit negotiator.
It was a fast decision pushed by Selmayr in part because of fears that the European Council was angling to take the lead in the talks, and it blindsided top commissioners including the Vice President for Budget and Human Resources Kristalina Georgieva.
“Frans Timmermans and I looked at each other and said the same thing: ‘I can’t take it anymore,’” Georgieva told POLITICO at the time, describing the moment when they learned of the decision. Georgieva, who also called the situation with Selmayr “poisonous” resigned to take a senior position at the World Bank, where she had spent much of her career.
Timmermans has never confirmed nor disputed Georgieva’s account but, through a spokesman, he said he never felt blindsided.
Asked about Selmayr in the interview, he replied curtly: “I never comment on civil servants, and I will not comment on this civil servant either.”
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Thankless portfolios
Clearly, Timmermans could and did keep on taking it. That’s in part because of his direct, personal relationship with Juncker who often shows his affection for his Dutch lieutenant by kissing him on the head (“All bald men run the risk of getting a head kiss,” Timmermans chuckled), and in part because friends and confidants say there is no job he would prefer — other than perhaps that of the Commission’s high representative for foreign affairs.
He readily professes to loving his job, and he has said he would like to stay on in the next Commission. “I have started a quite fundamental transformation process of this organization and the way we work together with the European Parliament and the Council,” he said. “I believe this transformation we are going through is fundamental for our future, and I enjoy being part of that transformation and I would love to continue.”
As migration receded from the top of the EU’s agenda, replaced by the rising urgency of Brexit, Barnier took over the prominent role that had been predicted for Timmermans. To make matters tougher, where Barnier’s visits to national capitals and firm stand against cherry-picking by the U.K. made him the poster-boy of EU27 unity, Timmermans new most prominent file — the rule-of-law dispute with Poland — put him at the center of one of the bloc’s bitterest fights.
Pressuring Poland to reverse changes to its court system is far from the only seemingly un-winnable file on which Timmermans’ main job seems to be to take bullets for his boss. He was also sent out to defend Madrid’s squashing of the Catalonian independence referendum.
To the governing Law and Justice party in Warsaw and its supporters, he is an unrelenting scold. To Catalans demanding a breakaway from Spain, he is a democracy-preaching hypocrite. To the European Parliament, he is the agent of an over-reaching executive body eager to bypass the legislature.
In the interview in his office at the Berlyamont, Timmermans was every bit the professor-politician he projects on the public stage. His English exquisite and erudite, his blue eyes piercing, he seized on a visitor’s personal details to build bridges, illustrating his interest in the lessons of World War II and the Holocaust. He has a penchant for quoting writers and philosophers, like the Spanish writer Jorge Semprún and the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
But he is also not shy about drawing distinctions. He told an American: “That you can have more sympathy for the right to bear arms than for the right to have universal health care is just beyond me, just beyond me. I can’t grasp it.”
In the interview, Timmermans described Juncker as a close pal, but also conceded that the assignments he gets as the president’s chief fixer don’t exactly help him win more friends.
“Given the responsibilities he gives to me, I think I am a useful tool in his hands,” Timmermans said.
But being useful also carries costs, particularly on the issue of Poland.
Over and over again, Timmermans has been dispatched to set deadlines and threaten tougher enforcement for Poland, only to be undercut as Juncker and other EU leaders repeatedly backed away from the fight for fear of causing a deep rupture.
When Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, whose country now holds the EU’s rotating presidency, made clear this month that no punitive action was likely to succeed against Poland, a headline on one Dutch news site quickly blared: “Failure for Timmermans.”
Timmermans takes Warsaw’s criticism in stride, given his firm conviction that the Polish government’s reshaping of the judicial system poses a grave threat to the rule of law. Still, he would not mind a bit of back-up.
“The completely false image has been created in Poland by the government that this is the obsession of one idiot, unelected faceless bureaucrat in Brussels and we’re fine with everybody else,” he said. “It’s just Timmermans that causes a problem. And I think it is important that the wider Polish public are made aware of the fact that also other member states care about their rule of law, and not just the Commission.”
Timmermans’ newest assignment is another that is unlikely to win friends — heading a task force on subsidiarity, essentially to figure out ways the EU can do less, more efficiently. The European Parliament, which was supposed to name three members to the panel, has refused to participate, with Parliament President Antonio Tajani angrily noting that his institution is not some junior adviser to the Commission.
‘Potential for personal tragedy’
Timmermans is an unapologetic defender of social democratic ideology, and does not hesitate to criticize political rivals — even the most prominent and powerful, including those who might hold sway over his own future.
As an example, Timmermans expressed some annoyance at traditional center-right politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, claiming victory in recent elections in which they also suffered losses to far-right nationalists.
“It’s strange victory,” he said. “Like Merkel pretending she won an election where she lost more than ever before, but because others lost even more or gained less, then she comes out a winner. A bit more modesty would not have been misplaced.”
While he acknowledged that voters’ apprehensions spurring a nationalist revival are genuine, Timmermans defended the core social welfare philosophy that is a pillar of his politics and that he believes is the essence of European democracy, past and future.
And he said he would continue to challenge right-leaning politicians, including Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, who in Timmermans’ view put too much faith in capitalist markets.
“I was in government when the banking crisis started, I was the Europe minister. I can tell you this is an experience I never ever ever want to go through again, Timmermans said. “I will never accept the argument by Rutte or anybody else once again [that] the market takes care of itself. It doesn’t. It does not. There is not enough morality in the market.”
He continued, “I challenged Mark Rutte directly on this in Davos, when he said, ‘no, no, no government, no Europe, just market.’ I said, ‘yes, this attitude got us into the banking crisis. This attitude leads to Apple paying no taxes. This attitude leads to tech saying in a libertarian way: Leave us alone, we take care of ourselves, and look how some of the social media were weaponized by a foreign force in elections.’ Governance is necessary and will remain necessary.”
But it remains far from clear that voters want or trust politicians like Timmermans to provide that governance.
Back home in the Netherlands, his social democratic Labor Party has collapsed — crushed in the March 2017 general election and ousted from the governing coalition.
Unless the party makes a stunning rebound in upcoming municipal and provincial elections, Timmermans’ desire to serve a second five-year term in Brussels will depend on political rivals like Rutte viewing him as a national asset. That remains to be seen, but some Dutch political analysts say it is a realistic possibility.
Notably, Rutte did not promise the commissioner’s post to any of the parties now part of his coalition government, giving him the option of reappointing Timmermans.
“The Netherlands is a small country; it doesn’t happen too often that a Dutchman is veep [vice president] of the European Commission,” said Tom-Jan Meeus, a Dutch political columnist and commentator. “From that perspective it makes sense to try to maintain Timmermans in that position.”
But there is also a good chance party loyalties will get in the way, potentially ending his career. “The whole thing has the potential of a personal tragedy,” Meeus said. “To him, his current job is something of a dream come true.”
Timmermans suggested betting against his party would be a mistake. “Politics have become so volatile that what happens in 2019 is light years away, and predicting the complete demise of social democracy might be a wrong prediction,” he said.
But for critics who see his passion veering into pomposity, and a lifelong career in public service that has sheltered him from the hard realities of the business world he seeks to tax and regulate, the end of Timmermania was neither a surprise nor a day overdue.
“Those high expectations were always kind of laughable,” said one official who has followed his career. “The bigger the words compared to the relatively small results, the more painful it becomes … He was going to be Super Commissioner. What’s left of that? It’s kind of like a cartoon idea, like a superhero. We all know those don’t exist.”