EUROPEAN POLITICS FUNDAMENTALS — Chapter 2, Exercise 2
Convention vs. Treaty
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QUESTION:
Using the real 2019 Weber/von der Leyen case, explain the real,
structural difference between a political convention (like
Spitzenkandidat) and a binding treaty rule (like the
Council-proposes/Parliament-approves procedure). Which one actually
determined the outcome, and why?

SOLUTION:

A political convention is an informal, widely-followed expectation
that carries no legal force — nothing in the EU treaties requires the
European Council to nominate the winning party's own lead candidate.
A binding treaty rule, by contrast, is a formal legal requirement
that a proposed action must satisfy to be valid.

In 2019, the Spitzenkandidat convention pointed clearly to Manfred
Weber, whose party (the EPP) won the most seats. But the actual
binding treaty rule only requires the European Council to propose A
candidate "taking into account" the election results — not
necessarily the specific lead candidate — by qualified majority, with
Parliament then voting to approve or reject whoever is proposed.

The treaty rule is what actually determined the outcome: the European
Council, led by Emmanuel Macron, used its own real legal discretion
under that rule to propose Ursula von der Leyen instead, and
Parliament's own real vote (383–327) then satisfied the treaty's own
approval requirement. The convention was overridden because it was
never legally binding in the first place — it only ever described a
common practice, not a legal obligation.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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The key move in a strong answer is naming precisely where the real
legal force actually sits: in the qualified-majority Council proposal
and the Parliament majority vote, not in the informal convention
layered on top of them. A weaker answer might simply say "politics
overruled the convention" without identifying that the treaty itself
never made the convention binding to begin with — the 2019 outcome
wasn't really a violation of any rule, since the only rule in force
was always the more flexible one.