room lobbying and three days of tortuous negotiations at their summit in Brussels, European leaders have finally come up with nominees for the top posts in the EU. Two key jobs, the head of the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) are slated for German and French nationals. Ursula von der Leyen, currently Chancellor Angela Merkel's defense minister has been put forward to replace Luxembourg's Jean-Claude Juncker as European president, while Christine Lagarde, a former French finance minister and currently head of the IMF, is to take over the ECB from the Italian Mario Draghi. Belgium's premier Charles Michel has been selected to succeed Poland's Donald Tusk as president of the European Council and Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell has been slated to take over from Italian Mogherini as high representative for foreign affairs. But it is not yet a done deal for the new team, who must still be approved by the legislators in the European parliament. The protracted bargaining among the leaders of the 28 EU heads of state, which included a delegation from the soon-to-depart UK, reflects the divisions that have appeared throughout the Union. These have in turn been mirrored by the way in which the new European parliament has been constituted. The liberal center-right consensus politics that has long dominated the corridors of power in Brussels has suffered its first serious challenge in decades. Of most obvious concern is the rise of far-right nationalist parties with their openly racist and Islamophobic agendas. Now strongly represented in the new parliament, they also bring with them varying degrees of Euro-skepticism. Less threatening, but still upsetting the once-cozy status quo, are the Greens who will seek to commit the EU to a range of new environmental policies, regardless of cost. There are those who argue that it is high time that the EU's parliament became more than just a talking shop with minimal powers. If Europe is to succeed, its elected legislators have to be seen to be holding the Brussels executive to account. Unfortunately, some of the neo-Nazi political agitators, who for the next five years will have well-remunerated parliamentary seats, are likely to use the platform to grandstand and peddle their obnoxious views. How well the majority of the members and the European Commission handle this threat will say a great deal about the future of a more integrated Union. What they need to understand is that electorates throughout the 28 member states have become distrustful of the European vision. They question the ability of Brussels and EU legislators to represent the views of the Union's 518 million citizens. In the 2016 referendum, British voters rejected the loss of sovereign power to an increasingly didactic Brussels. The EU's tough leaving deal with London was clearly designed to discourage further secessions. But for many observers, it also demonstrated the arrogance at the top of the Union. The concept of there ultimately being a single Europe is alluring. But it can only be achieved by convincing 400 million EU voters that they have some real control over the superstate, rather than the superstate acquiring even more control over their day-to-day lives, not least in terms of insisting on conformity with rules and regulations on which they were never consulted.
