Jean-Claude Juncker yesterday vowed to lead Europe’s centre-right parties to victory in May’s European elections after the 59-year-old former Luxembourg prime minister was selected as the European People’s Party (EPP) candidate to head the European Commission.
Mr Juncker beat EU internal markets commissioner Michel Barnier for the position having secured the support of the main centre-right parties in Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain.
The third candidate, former Latvian prime minister Valdis Dombrovskis, withdrew from the race on Wednesday.
Despite being the strong favourite since confirming his candidacy, the result was tighter than expected, with Mr Juncker winning by 382 votes to 245. Some 627 valid votes were cast in the Dublin ballot.
Mr Juncker has impeccable euro credentials having led the influential group of euro area finance ministers for 10 years, steering euro zone policy during the height of the euro zone crisis.
Yesterday he defended the euro area's handling of the crisis. Though conceding that "not everything was done properly in terms of overcoming the crisis," he stressed that key decisions had been taken at a pace that had been unprecedented. "We have to protect this single currency, we have to better co-ordinate our economic policy, and we need to build up a social dimension to the European Union," he told close to 2,000 delegates at the EPP Congress in Dublin.
European project
Mr Juncker vowed to highlight the historical perspective of the European project in the coming months.
“I would like us to use the electoral campaign to talk about the real Europe again, the Europe that was crafted and imagined by those who after the second World War came back from concentration camps and battlefields and created this political programme. We must talk about this Europe.”
He also warned of the challenges ahead for the EPP, currently the largest political grouping in the European Parliament.
"We have to win these elections," Mr Juncker said, noting that the EPP was lagging behind socialist parties in the electoral campaign.
Economic crisis
The achievement of centre-right parties in dealing with the economic crisis was a theme of yesterday's plenary session, which saw a number of centre-right politicians address delegates.
Earlier, EPP secretary general Antonio Lopez-Isturiez said centre-right governments had shown “great political courage” in correcting the “mismanagement of the socialist governments of the past who had borrowed and spent recklessly and suffocated the economy” .
Warning that citizens across Europe were frustrated, he said Europe “cannot afford to have a parliament populated by populist nonsense”.
The EPP was the third political grouping in the European Parliament to select its candidate, with the Socialist and Democrats (S&D) group opting for current European Parliament president Martin Schulz, and former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt the choice of liberal group Alde, the third-largest group in the Parliament.
While some countries are unenthusiastic about the process of selecting a candidate ahead of elections, Mr Juncker said yesterday it was important the election results were taken into account by states when the European Commission president was selected.
