BELGIUM: The vice-president of the European Commission has launched a scathing attack on the bureaucracy that serves him, claiming high-ranking EU civil servants are far too powerful, have their own little fiefdoms and sometimes put forward their own opinions as the official position of the commission.
In an interview with German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung yesterday, Günter Verheugen, who is in charge of the important industry portfolio, said "there is a permanent power struggle" between commissioners and high-ranking bureaucrats.
"Some of them think: the commissioner is gone after five years and so is just a housekeeper, but I will still be there," he said.
"The whole development in the last 10 years has brought the civil servants such power that in the meantime, the most important political task of the 25 commissioners is controlling this apparatus," he continued.
The commissioner said the power struggles all occurred "under the surface", adding that "the commissioners have to take extreme care that important questions are decided in their weekly meeting and not decided by the civil servants among themselves.
"Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that in communication with member states or parliament, that civil servants put their own personal perspective across as the view of the commission," he told the newspaper.
He also indicated that his personal hobby horse, deregulation and making EU laws simpler, was falling foul of stubborn unelected bureaucrats.
He maintained that some of the units in the commission "evidently did not want to take the head of the commission's aim to reduce bureaucracy seriously because it did not fit in with their own ideas".
Mr Verheugen's views have been tacitly supported by head of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, also a great believer in a lighter regulatory touch.
Evidently prepared for the barrage of questions that the criticism would raise, a commission spokesman said Mr Verheugen's remarks were part of the "very normal, necessary creative tension you get when change is deemed to be necessary".
He added that they were "proof of a real passion to go further and show that the European political process is coming out of the political morass".
Mr Verheugen's controlled outburst follows months of dissatisfaction among certain commissioners over the state of the 20,000-strong commission bureaucracy headed by the extremely powerful, hard-to-move director generals.
Some of them have alluded to the rigidity of the bureaucracy in past interviews but none has been as outspokenly critical as the twice-serving German commissioner.