The Spitzenkandidaten system arrived after the 2014 European Parliament elections. The idea was straightforward: European political parties would nominate lead candidates before the vote, and the party that could assemble a parliamentary majority would see its nominee installed as Commission President. In 2014 and 2019 the system worked, after a fashion. Both Juncker and von der Leyen had campaigned as lead candidates. The European Council, which had previously selected Commission Presidents through opaque consensus, suddenly looked accountable to an electoral result.

That changed in 2024. The EPP won a plurality and had von der Leyen as its Spitzenkandidat. But when the Council met in June 2024, her nomination was treated as one option among several, not as the automatic consequence of the election. The Council secured Socialist and Liberal support through portfolio deals and policy concessions. There was no formal link between the ballot box and the appointment. Von der Leyen got her second term. The process that delivered it was the same pre-2014 backroom bargaining that Spitzenkandidaten was supposed to kill.

The Parliament had championed the system to strengthen its own legitimacy. In 2024 it found itself rubber-stamping a candidate chosen by Council bargaining. Socialist and Green groups complained that the process had been hollowed out. The majority coalition disagreed, judging that a procedural fight was less damaging than blocking a sitting President during a geopolitical crisis. The result is a second von der Leyen Commission whose mandate rests not on a popular vote but on the intergovernmental deal-making that has always selected EU executives.

The damage goes beyond symbolism. When voters cast ballots in European elections, they are rarely choosing between coherent EU-wide platforms. National parties dominate the campaign, and European party federations remain loose alliances with limited capacity to coordinate messaging. The Spitzenkandidaten process was supposed to change this by forcing parties to nominate recognisable faces and campaign on their behalf. In 2024, even this modest ambition failed. Von der Leyen barely campaigned. Her name appeared on EPP materials, but she spent more time in bilateral meetings with member state leaders than in public debates.

Comparisons with other parliamentary systems are instructive and mostly unflattering. In Germany, the chancellor candidate is chosen by the party months before the election and becomes the focal point of the campaign. In the United Kingdom, the leader of the largest party becomes prime minister through a process that, while imperfect, has a clear causal chain from voter preference to executive appointment. The EU has no such chain. EP elections determine the composition of the Parliament, but the executive is selected by a body — the European Council — that is itself composed of people no European voter has ever directly elected.

Some defenders of the 2024 outcome argue that the Spitzenkandidaten process was never legally binding, only a political convention. This is technically true but misses the point. Conventions matter in constitutional systems precisely because they constrain behaviour without requiring legal enforcement. The British prime minister cannot dissolve Parliament at will since 2011 not because of ancient statute but because a convention was codified. When conventions are discarded casually, the institutions that relied on them are left exposed. The Parliament's authority, already weak compared with national legislatures, took another hit in 2024.

The turnout data from 2024 adds another dimension to the story. At 51 percent, participation was the highest since 1994, which suggests that European voters are paying more attention than they have in decades. But attention to what? The campaigns were dominated by national issues: migration in Germany, cost of living in France, rule of law in Poland. The Spitzenkandidaten were invisible to most voters. When citizens turned out in record numbers, they were not voting for or against von der Leyen. They were voting on issues the Commission President has limited control over. The democratic disconnect is structural, not merely procedural.

Several MEPs have proposed alternatives that do not require treaty change. One idea is to strengthen the Parliament's role in the investiture vote by requiring a formal nomination hearing before the European Council makes its choice. Another is to create a binding commitment in the European Council's own rules of procedure that the lead candidate of the largest parliamentary group will be nominated unless a qualified majority explicitly decides otherwise. These are modest reforms, but they would at least restore some predictability to a process that now resembles arbitrary selection. Whether the Council would accept even this minimal constraint is doubtful.

Ahead of 2029, no political force seems eager to revive Spitzenkandidaten. The EPP has no reason to: it gained from the ambiguity in 2024 and values flexibility. The Parliament has set up a working group on electoral reform that includes institutionalising the process, but without treaty change it remains a convention that can be discarded whenever it suits the Council. Treaty change needs unanimous approval from all member states. That unanimity is the same reason every other democratic reform in the EU stalls.