The Juncker Commission: Politicizing Eu Policies

The primary goal of this book is to trace the European Commission’s strategies of dealing with the politicisation of EU legislation. In a case study on President Jean-Claude Juncker’s term of office, the authors of this volume analyse how the EU Commission set and advanced certain political priorities between 2014 and 2019. The analysis focuses on the ten political priorities which the Juncker Commission retained in all of its annual work programmes from its inception onwards, starting with its self-proclaimed role as a ‘political commission’. However, this study’s assessment of the ‘politicisation’ of integration policy is ambiguous: On the one hand, the Juncker Commission deliberately adopted politicised issues and tried to use them as opportunities for political leadership as well as to hone its own institutional profile. On the other hand, controversies and crises repeatedly forced the EU Commission to resort to damage control.