November marks the beginning of the five-year term of the new European Commission headed by Jean Claude Juncker, former Luxembourg Prime Minister. For quite some time, he also headed the eurogroup, the committee of eurozone finance ministers which oversaw the euro crisis that started in 2008.

Since its inauguration in July, the also "new" European Parliament focused mostly on the establishment of the Juncker Commission, for a number of reasons. In the first place, the longer serving Members of Parliament were insistent on the need to ensure that the candidate of the party which "won" the European elections of last May becomes Commission President. This they considered as an achievement because no matter who won the European elections, the EP would at last have started to wield decision making and breaking powers.

Secondly, as summer merged into autumn, it seemed that a window of opportunity had opened for the Parliament to fashion future EU policy orientations. The EP would condition its approval of the new Commission by extracting guarantees regarding market regulation, investment strategies, environmental safeguards and energy policy among others. Juncker was prepared to play this game. After all, he had to field a slate of candidates for Commissioners that were not of his choosing. They were picked by the governments of member states. By any standards, defining a "Cabinet" of 37 people of different nationality and political background, who all need to be given something worthwhile to do, is not an easy task.

The new Commission President showed he is a past master in the art of playing the EU's complex bureaucratic games. The matrix design he set for assignments and reporting relationships in the Commission outfoxed most insiders, confused many outsiders and will allow him much leeway in the future to fudge as he budges to right or left (if these directions still have meaning in EU politics).

Last chance

For different reasons, many governments as well as many MEPs (among the socialists, the centre right and the liberals) were sceptical about the Juncker Commission and what it stood for. Yet, also for different reasons, they ended up giving it their support. It wasn't just for effect that Juncker stressed once or twice that this could be the last chance Commission - it needed to convince European public opinion that the Union could make a difference in their lives; otherwise there would be no reason to keep it going on its present basis. Curiously, this has been a recurring theme in the arguments made by major spokespersons of the mainstream parliamentary groups.

What can they be afraid of? In the European Council and in the Parliament there effectively exists a grand coalition between the centre right and the centre left. Along with many others, before the European elections I predicted it would happen. The coalition is now effectively in force and with greater strength than could have been foreseen, even if it lacks the detailed coalition "treaty" that defines the grand coalition of CDU/CSU - SPD in Berlin.

To be sure, national differences persist and go a long way in defining the horse trading that goes on at Council level as well as at EP level. For the latter, it is compounded by a jobs for the boys syndrome, sometimes camouflaged as the need to place a friend from one's political "family" in this or that position in order to ensure support for the "family's" policies. This time round, the horse trading has also been determined by a decision to keep out of visible parliamentary posts MEPs from the so-called populist, extremist or "anti-European" parties. So these have now an even greater stake in badmouthing what the present majority is doing, while casting themselves as victims of an anti-democratic effort to stifle their voice.

Stagnation and unemployment

So will the Juncker Commission be making a difference? It benefits from the advantage that the Barroso Commission from which it has taken over, was subject to wider ranging criticism for its immobilism, for pandering to the whims of the stronger governments and for an inability to follow up on major policies. During his last weeks in office, Barroso came out to defend his record. Not unreasonably, he stressed as a major achievement the fact that the EU's political institutions had remained intact and had functioned despite the long years of deep political and economic stress.

Most people however wanted more. Many now seem to believe that unless it is delivered, the EU could shatter. Economic stagnation and widespread unemployment have remained seemingly intractable problems. On the right, the basic belief is that there can be no alternative to continued fiscal consolidation, by which governments keep their budgets in trim and thus allow space for business confidence and investment to pick up. On the socialist side, greater emphasis is being given to more public investment which will generate through multiplier effects, new growth and new jobs.

This is where the Juncker Commission is poised to act. The promise made by the new President, and which the socialists in the European Parliament intend to ensure that he implements, is to set up a €300 billion investment fund, largely financed from public sources, in order to kick-start growth through targeted infrastructural investment Europe-wide. The model once proposed by Jacques Delors a score of years ago is held up as a shining hope for Europe.

Delivery

Will it work? I hope it will. But I have my doubts. For one thing, there have been too many hesitations about how such a fund will be financed. Most public budgets in the EU are under strain and subject to controls by the EU itself to ascertain they do not lapse again into unwanted deficits. Some ideas that have been launched, like tapping through guarantees the European Stability Mechanism, which was set up to underwrite the eurozone system, appear to me to be on the crazy side.

Significantly, the fundamental problem posed by the EU's chronic underperformance compared to its worldwide competitors does not date from the 2008 financial crisis but started much earlier. "More" Europe was persistently claimed to be the remedy for this. It was applied and huge political capital was invested in "more" Europe by mainstream political forces in Europe. Yet it has not delivered the goods. This is why disillusionment has grown at the grassroots, as shown by the May European Parliament elections.

Worryingly, it is only the "extreme" parties which are confronting this phenomenon (or riding on it), basically because they have invested least political capital in "more" Europe. However, especially on the right - at least as evidenced in the European Parliament - these "extreme" parties are too shrill and too single-minded to appear as of now to have a longstanding chance of capturing the political centre. But things can change.

So the Juncker Commission has to be effective on the political and economic fronts if it is going to make a difference. Politically, it will need to show that EU institutions are not only functioning but are making decisions that European citizens feel are directly beneficial to them. And economically, it will need to show that it is contributing successfully to a strategy that is leading Europe out of stagnation and towards a job driven renewal.

Both are daunting challenges. They involve factors that, in truth, lie outside the remit and powers of the European Commission. Yet, people will not make allowances for this. A major conclusion arising from the results of the May European elections was that a growing mass of citizens wanted meaningful change in the running of the EU, perhaps the start of a new era.

p to now, on the whole it has been more of the same. On this point too, the performance of the Juncker Commission will come up for scrutiny.