JOBS FOR THE GIRLS
For centuries, millennia even, European men have excelled at the subtle art of helping out a brother (or elbowing him out of the way), whether among the Free Masons, in the Vatican or, more recently, in the College of Commissioners.
So it’s refreshing to see women finally getting in on the action.
Avid readers of The Chattering Classes (and who isn’t one?) may recall the rumours that Annalena Baerbock, her forced retirement as Germany’s foreign minister inching ever nearer, has been spinning her proverbial Rolodex to secure a plum job in international diplomacy.
New York, New York. This week, it emerged that she would become president of the United Nations General Assembly, a one-year assignment with big perks and prestige and little responsibility. For Baerbock, who is perhaps best known for her expertise in international law, that means a move to New York City, daily dealings with representatives from 193 countries, and cocktail hour on the Upper East Side.
Thanks for the Birkenstocks. Little wonder, then, that Baerbock, who led her party’s campaign in 2021, announced earlier this month she would not lead her Green compatriots in the opposition trenches in the new Bundestag.
Old white woman. We now know that Baerbock’s move was straight out of the Old White Man’s Handbook. In announcing her decision to step back from the Greens’ leadership in early March, she referred to the “private cost” of her tenure as foreign minister, an apparent reference to her recent divorce and the time she spent away from her small children. “That’s why I’ve decided to for personal reasons to step away from the bright lights,” she added.
If only. It turns out that she was manoeuvring all along in the background for the UN job. Germany had secured the job a while ago and already picked someone to fill it: the experienced career diplomat Helga Schmid, formerly secretary general of the EU‘s external action service and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Schmid, the doyenne of Germany’s diplomatic corps, had been preparing for the post for months.
‘Little ol' me?’ Baerbock’s justification for pushing out her rival was not exactly compelling. Many of her predecessors had been former prime ministers and foreign ministers, she said, and Germany’s decision to pick her was meant to reflect the UNGA‘s important role.
Old boy outrage. “It is outrageous to replace the best and most internationally experienced German diplomat with a has-been,“ fumed Christoph Heusgen, the outgoing chair of the Munich Security Conference.
Pot meet kettle. Heusgen, Germany’s former ambassador to the UN, knows a thing or two about getting ahead in the New York job market. After the German's appointment to the UN job in 2016, he contacted a close aide of Secretary-General António Guterres to see about a job for his wife.
“Considering Germany's contribution to the UN, it might be attractive for you to have someone on your staff (at the P5 salary level, which I understand would suit Ina) who has both: a direct line to the Chancellery and the Foreign Minister's office (and to Germany's future ambassador to the UN, who has ambitions to sit on the Security Council in 2019/2020),” Heusgen wrote at the time. For whatever reason, Ina, his wife, got the job.
Lex Croatia
We should all be so lucky to have an EU pension. Put in a few years – 10 to be precise – at the Commission or some random EU agency and off to the beach you go.
Croatia, for example, has lovely beaches. Just ask Maja Markovčić Kostelac, executive director of the Lisbon-based European Maritime Safety Agency. EMSA is what’s known as a ‘decentralised’ EU agency, which means that it is semi-independent, but really not because we’re all ultimately paying for it.
Article 43. Every once in a while, the EU rejigs the rules of maritime safety, a process that is currently underway in trilogue. Nothing strange about that. But a few diplomats engaged in the process were surprised to see Croatia lobbying for a specific paragraph (article 43, paragraph 2), in which the European Commission proposed that the EMSA executive director's term, i.e, Kostelac’s, be extended.
5+5. Currently, it’s a five-year mandate that can be extended for another four years. The Commission proposes to amend it to “5+5 years." The reason? After ten years, the office holder would be eligible for a generous EU pension.
Kostelac was appointed by the agency’s administrative board for a first mandate in 2019. An EU spokesperson said that the Commission proposed to extend her mandate for a further four years at a meeting on 26 April 2023, which was adopted by the Board. The Commissioner for Transport at the time, Adina-Ioana Vălean, submitted the proposal to the College for adoption.
But Euractiv has learnt that the initial proposal to the Board to extend her mandate was made by another Croatian, Maja Bakran Marcich, deputy director general of the Directorate General Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE).
Taking a closer look at the Commission’s proposed regulation reform, we also noticed that the executive wants to make sure that the “5+5” mandate will apply retroactively and not only for the future:
“If a decision extending the mandate of the executive director […] is adopted prior to the entry into force of this Regulation, the duration of the extended mandate shall be for five years. The other conditions of her contract shall remain unchanged.”
In other words, the Commission wants to apply the “5+5” years retroactively in order to cover Markovčić’s current mandate. Usually, a revised regulation applies for the next mandate.
The EU spokesperson told Euractiv that the most usual mandate length for an Executive Director of a decentralised agency is 5+5 years, “with more than 70% of decentralised agencies following this approach”.
Euractiv double-checked and, indeed, most EU decentralised agencies’ mandates are extended for another five-year term.
Yet that is not the case at EMSA, nor is it what was agreed for Kostelac in 2023. The fact that diplomats and Commission staff members from Croatia are lobbying for the 5+5 change retroactively, thus granting Kostelac pension rights, creates what is known in EU-speak as ‘interesting optics’.
