He was Brussels’ “chief psychoanalyst,” reminisces one EU official who was there at the time.
“He would talk to prime ministers in a personal, insider way,” said the official, granted anonymity to talk in confidence even after all these years. “In the Commission, it was the same. ‘What does this one want?’ ‘What is he asking for?’ ‘Can we make a deal?’ ‘Call them up!’ he would say.
“He was the boss, but he won people over. The commissioners were allowed to talk. This was a truly collegial college — people were allowed to exist.”
But even under Juncker, the Commission had already started to swing to a much more centralized, presidential system. This was largely thanks to the aforementioned Selmayr, who was chief of staff to Juncker before becoming the Commission’s secretary-general in 2019. Described in a POLITICO profile from those days as an “armored bulldozer,” Selmayr ran Juncker’s Commission — the “political” Commission, as they called it — like a piece of heavy machinery, ramming through political talking points and crushing dissent.
Even so, it was still, relatively speaking, a more open place. When she left the Commission, Bulgaria’s then commissioner (now managing director of the International Monetary Fund), Kristalina Georgieva, still felt free enough to criticize Selmayr by name, calling his management style “poisonous.”
Some of this freewheeling style may have survived into current Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s first term. But by the time she came back for a second stint last year, any hint of the old ways had been extinguished. The incoming class was, by and large, younger, more female, and less politically experienced than its predecessors.
