A Euromassacre

Sch

adenfreude may not translate easily into all 11 official languages of the European Union, but people know it when they feel it. And schadenfreude--pleasure at another's misfortune--was what many Europeans felt last week when the European Commission was dramatically humbled. Less than seven hours after a five-member Committee of Independent Experts delivered a devastating report on fraud, cronyism and mismanagement at the Commission, President Jacques Santer called a press conference to announce that all 20 commissioners had resigned. The press, long frustrated by the Commission's collective unwillingness to demonstrate what the report called "even the slightest sense of responsibility" for the growing crisis, applauded.

Down the street at the European Parliament, where deputies had been baying for blood since the report's release, there was similar relief, plus satisfaction that a power struggle that had been brewing for months had been resolved in its favor. But in E.U. capitals the Commission's resignation provoked as much apprehension as applause. The committee report may have cleared out the Commission stables, but it also left leaders fumbling for purchase in a fundamentally altered political landscape. British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for "root and branch reform." German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder insisted it was "more vital than ever" that this week's Berlin summit conclude the reforms needed to trim E.U. finances in preparation for enlargement.

But with every stop of Schroder's whirlwind tour of E.U. capitals last week, the prospect grew that the question of who will run the Commission would move to the top of the Berlin agenda. And while European parliamentarians reveled in their newfound power, they fretted over how to reconcile the need to get a working interim Commission quickly into place with their insistence that it be a different animal entirely from the last one. Says Irishman Patrick Cox, leader of the European Parliament's Liberal deputies: "Constitutionally and institutionally, we are in uncharted territory."

The E.U. arrived in this terra incognita almost by accident. The Parliament threw down the gauntlet last March when, troubled by the Commission's inadequate responses to queries on financial irregularities, it refused to sign off on the Commission's 1996 accounts. Parliamentarians' anger mounted after the Commission suspended a whistleblower, auditor Paul van Buitenen, who had come forward in December with evidence of widespread mismanagement. But it took the Committee of Independent Experts' damning 145-page report, mandated in January to examine fraud allegations after Parliament failed to pass a censure motion against the beleaguered Commission, to bring matters to their dramatic head.

In a bizarre twist the day after the mass resignation, Santer rejected the report's conclusions as "unbalanced," suggesting that he still had the "credibility and dignity to continue" to lead a caretaker Commission. That was perceived in the Parliament and elsewhere as further evidence that the courtly Luxembourger just didn't get it. The following day, the commissioners issued a joint statement saying they "have no desire or intention of remaining in office a moment longer than we have to."

How long that will be is now the question. Elections for the European Parliament take place in June, and those new parliamentarians will have to approve the next group of commissioners for a full five-year term scheduled to begin in January. For the interim, the current Parliament would roundly reject any caretaker team that included Santer or French Commissioner Edith Cresson, whose failure to resign months ago in the face of serious charges of mismanagement and favoritism brought on the crisis (see box). And it may go even further: the notion of collective responsibility makes any former member anathema to many European parliamentarians. Says Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, a German Socialist member: "What answers would candidates from the old Commission give at parliamentary hearings when they are asked what they have done in the last months since the mismanagement charges have been on the table?"