The European Union’s opaque leadership nominations diminish its democratic credentials

It is not Europhobic or Eurosceptic to ask some questions about the way the bloc’s institutions work

More than ever in its often momentous six-decade history, the choices for the top jobs in the European Union matter. For Europe’s traumas are far from over. There is not only the unfinished business of Brexit to contend with for the new team, where frustrations are growing as acute on the other side of the Channel as they are in Britain. There is also the migrant crisis, and the failure of European states to assist those on Mediterranean, such as Malta, Italy and Greece, with naval patrols and relocation.

Financial instability, affecting institutions large and small, from Deutsche Bank to Banco Popolare di Vicenza continue to haunt the euro, as does the ever-present risk of Italian national insolvency. To the west, there’s the small matter of an incipient trade war with Donald Trump’s America, and to the east the threat of Russian aggression and an international relations version of cyber bullying. The greatest trading bloc on the planet is also exceptionally exposed to a global economic slowdown.

Never before, then, has the EU faced so many intractable challenges to its very future, internal and external. Nor, despite some impressive all-night wranglings in the past, has the union found it so difficult to provide itself with fresh leadership of its institutions. The nominees for the four big EU jobs so far announced seem to have been met with apathy at best.