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The first leg of the EU top jobs race is underway.
Before the most senior jobs in the EU institutions are doled out, which will take place after the European election in June, a number of key European diplomats — including the chief of staff of European Council President Charles Michel — are already being reshuffled or have secured new jobs.
For many EU staffers, they need to move quickly to avoid being linked to a politician who might be on the political scrapheap in a few months. Others have to move because their time in the current role is up.
Although there’s a diplomatic reshuffle every year, this time was more complicated than usual because of the EU election, officials said.
By the fall, the EU will (hopefully) have decided who will lead the European Commission, Council, Parliament, and European External Action Service (EEAS).
But first, this week the Commission is set to sign off on its yearly rotation of top diplomats, with 43 new European ambassadors and 11 deputy ambassadors to be named. After some haggling between EU foreign policy chief Josep Borell and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the nominations are set to get the green light on Wednesday, according to a senior EU official who, like others in this piece, could not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic.
Some big names within the Brussels bubble will be getting new business cards printed soon, including top advisers to Michel, whose term as Council president comes to an end in November.
Frédéric Bernard, Michel’s chief of staff, is poised to become the EU’s ambassador to Canada, according to three other senior EU officials. Simon Mordue, Michel’s top foreign policy adviser, is set to join the EEAS as deputy secretary general. And then there’s Martin Selmayr — the former chief civil servant of the Commission and a man once dubbed the ‘Monster of the Berlaymont’ by his colleagues — who is set to be EU ambassador to the Vatican, the Order of Malta and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Officials mentioned above dismissed rumors that von der Leyen — who has had a difficult working relationship with Michel — was blocking future jobs for his current top aides. The bigger challenge, the officials said, was finding the right balance between genders, geographical balance, and institutions.
Geneviève Tuts, the chief of staff of Belgium’s European Commissioner Didier Reynders, has also put her name forward to be moved to a new role. Reynders is running to become the next secretary-general of the Council of Europe, a job for which he’d have to leave the Commission.
An EU spokesperson said the process leading up to the rotation “is internal and not public, in line with the usual diplomatic practice.”
Getting the balance right
In particular, the top of the EEAS is already a very masculine environment, and Mordue’s nomination to take over a job previously held by a woman, Helena König, would only increase that.
According to two EU officials in principle the aim was to replace König with another woman, but Mordue did a very good job interview.
If Mordue is appointed, the big four jobs at the EEAS, the EU’s diplomatic arm, will be men: , Borrell, top civil servant Stefano Sannino, and the current two deputy secretaries-general, Enrique Mora and Charles Fries.
“That would look awful,” another EU official said.
The overall gender balance of the EU’s staffers and ambassadors has always been a priority for Sannino, who has a rainbow flag in his office, and to von der Leyen, the first female Commission president, who in 2019 insisted on a gender-balanced Commission. Some 36 percent of the bloc’s ambassadors are now female and the goal is to achieve 40 percent of women at all levels of the diplomatic service at the end of Borrell’s mandate.
While the figure is higher than the global overage, which is about 20 percent, there is “clearly room for improvement,” said Karen Smith, who leads the project Women in Diplomacy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Smith also pointed out that it’s not just the overall gender balance that matters, but also whether enough female ambassadors are given prestigious postings with a sizeable geopolitical impact.
Gender diversity in diplomacy matters for decision-making, said Smith. It is also key to how other countries view the EU, she added.
“The ambassador is the face and the voice of the EU. Representation literally is what the EU looks like to the outside world. If all the heads of delegation are mostly white men … it doesn’t look particularly representational for the population of the EU.”
Stuart Lau contributed reporting.
