It’s time to rethink who gets the top jobs in the EU executive. We have ideas.
Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
Now that we know Ursula von der Leyen won’t be seeking a third term as president of the European Commission — which you should have read about in Brussels Playbook — it’s surely almost time for a radical overhaul of the way the top jobs are handed out.
Instead of there being one commissioner from each member country, we propose the Commission should instead hire people who are ideally suited to the job in question, just like in the private sector. The net should be cast wide — even beyond Europe.
The next Commission president could therefore be former U.K. Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson, as he knows the place, is well-connected and… What? Too soon? Okay then, how about bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger? He’s got a lot of qualities that would make him well-suited to the role: experience in politics, speaking more than one EU language, thinking U.S. President Donald Trump is a fool, and if you disagree with him, he could beat you to a pulp. Hard power, not soft power!
There are two strong candidates for health commissioner. The first one may be down to recency bias, but it’s hard to ignore the results: Nana Kwaku Bonsam.
The Ghanaian, who describes himself as “the most powerful spiritualist in the whole world,” claimed to have “cursed” England football captain Harry Kane before the Ghana vs. England match in the World Cup. Lo and behold, Kane (and his teammates) were as toothless as most European Council conclusions in a 0-0 draw. Bonsam also claimed to have been behind Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo’s knee injury at the 2014 tournament.
Imagine how great he would be at, say, cursing Russian President Vladimir Putin or rolling out a mass vaccination program?
Bonsam’s main competition for the role is Didier Raoult, the controversial French physician who held a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in the early days of Covid-19.
Raoult attracted attention for touting the use of an antimalarial drug as a treatment for the coronavirus and looking like an old hippy, maybe one who played synth in a mid-1970s band called something like Le Syndicat des Nuages Inutiles or Camembert sur Mars.
We won’t go through all 27 jobs — because of time constraints and, let’s be honest, interest — but the foreign policy chief should be Shakira, who is multilingual, internationally respected, experienced in global advocacy and, most importantly, has hips that don’t lie, which is essential in the world of diplomacy.
Of course, not every member of the College of Commissioners needs to be a celebrity. It’s written in the EU treaties that Maroš Šefčovič must be a commissioner until the end of days.
CAPTION COMPETITION
“…and then I’m going to prank call Trump, and then spend a month on the beach, and then…”
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by Eschel Alpermann