Věra Jourová: Feisty commissioner

Profile of the European commissioner for justice.

For 33 days, a Czech prison was home for the woman who is now the European commissioner for justice, Vĕra Jourová. It was a scarring period. It was harder still for her daughter: she ended up in psychiatric care. Once released, Jourová struggled to find work, even though she had been a deputy minister.

She responded by forming her own company, becoming an international consultant on European Union funding. In the meantime, she sought to clear her name and put the legal effort to extra use by gaining a law degree. In 2008, her name was cleared – she had been accused of accepting a bribe to secure EU funding for a building project, allegations which police finally admitted were groundless; in mid-2014 she won nearly €100,000 in compensation.

The fall and rise of Jourová is a tale of resurrection. For Andrej Babiš, this tale of injustice made Jourová an ideal recruit for his anti-establishment movement, ANO, and in parliamentary elections in 2013 she was one of the faces of the party, with a title to match: deputy leader. The political dividend for Babiš was great. Jourová’s popularity ratings remained consistently high, helping to drive the party to second place in national elections in 2013 and to victory in last year’s European elections. Her popularity is understandable, and not just for the story. Open, humorous, warm, friendly, frank, honest, modest, raw, vulnerable, tough: those are some of the adjectives applied to her. She is also very articulate in her native Czech, twinkling and smiling as she plays with words and phrases.

Jourová’s tale has the makings of a dark version of “Borgen”, the television drama in which a liberal becomes Denmark’s first female prime minister. But while Jourová has a compelling story and winning personality, does she have the political skills and the right environment to become a successful European commissioner and, as some suggest, a future prime minister?

The beginnings of an answer lie in her native Moravian uplands. Jourová studied culture in Prague, but she was shaped most by Třebíč, a small town in which her parents, a kindergarten teacher and caterer, ran a folk troupe. Married young, she studied in Prague while raising two children, returning afterwards to work in Třebíč’s local council.

Jourová found she had a mix of creativity, feistiness and discipline that was useful as the public sector restructured itself after the Velvet Revolution. She became the deputy council leader, and Třebíč became a progressive town, seeking American, Israeli and eventually EU money to help restore its Jewish quarter, now listed by UNESCO. In the early 2000s, Jourová headed the region’s development department, and in 2003 she moved to Prague, soon becoming deputy minister for regional development, trying to help the country absorb more EU funding.

Things were going well for the cheerful, music-loving Jourová in her life as a divorced working mother. But in 2006, after a visit to Belarus, she was arrested at the airport in front of television cameras and spent more than a month in pre-trial detention. The episode also contributed to her leaving the Social Democrats. She had joined in 2003, thinking that, under Vladimír Špidla, later a European commissioner (2004-09), the party could follow a Blairite ‘third way’; instead, she found it stifling in its old ways.

In the midst of her legal travails, she was invited by Jana Hybášková, then an MEP and now an EU ambassador, to join her European Democratic Party (EDS), an organisation that saw itself as picking up the torch from Václav Havel, the dissident who became the first Czech president. “If it were still around, I would still be a member,” says Jourová.

Fact File

CV

1964: born Třebíč, 18 August

studied at Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, department of the theory of culture; Law Faculty, department of law and legal science.

1991: deputy director, civic cultural centre, Třebíč

1995: secretary, city council, Třebíč

2000: human resources, regional development, economic policy, EU fund projects

2001-03: head of regional development, regional office of Vysočina region.

Deputy head, ministry of regional development, leader European integration section

2006: set up consultancy on EU grant aid

Oct 2013: deputy leader, ANO party, elected to Czech parliament

Jan-Oct 2014: Minister for regional development

Nov 2014-: European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality

 

 

It is easy to see why the EDS might be a more natural home than ANO. A movement that grabs votes from all corners, ANO’s political stance seems more amorphous than hers. Jourová reveals a sudden steeliness as she leaps to the party’s defence, but acknowledges that it still needs a clear, long-term programme, and that it cannot rest on one person.
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In Prague, the perception is that Jourová’s independence of mind has sapped her influence on Babiš. The two certainly come from different worlds – Babiš from business, Jourová from the public sector. And while Babiš, a billionaire and media mogul, is an insider, Jourová is viewed as an outsider.

What unites Prague’s insiders and outsiders is their remoteness from the EU’s inner circles. They failed last year to follow the Brussels game closely enough after they nominated Jourová, minister of regional development since January 2014, as commissioner. For Jourová herself, it was a “shock” when, instead of her, Romania’s Corina Creţu was given the post of commissioner for regional development.

Jourová suddenly had to expand her EU knowledge to include justice, consumer issues and gender equality. Again, her powers of recovery are being tested. Now, she herself says that she is drawing on her own experience of learning to “protect myself from the právní stát” – the Rechtsstaat or ‘state of justice’. She volunteers that the creation of a European Public Prosecutor’s Office, an anti-fraud initiative, and work with prison services are parts of her brief that animate her.

A plain-speaker herself, she wants the EU to speak clearly to consumers and small businesses. “It is important to get rid of the ballast of phrases,” she says. Where her predecessor, Viviane Reding, was a bulldozer, Jourová prefers consultation. While Reding spoke out against the expulsion of Roma, the Roma complained that she barely spoke to them. Jourová reaches out to the community, but opposes positive discrimination.

While Reding championed quotas for women on boards, Jourová is reluctant to single out women (though, as some argue, her gender helped her nomination). A favourite phrase, “freedom for the enterprising, security for the vulnerable”, translates into a preference to reduce poverty and increase life chances for all.

In these respects, Jourová sounds like a typical Czech liberal of the 1989 generation: tolerant and keen on individual empowerment, but instinctively wary of imposed equality and state diktats. More personally, Jourová studied cultural anthropology, and says she is therefore cautious about changing cultural patterns through law. In office, Jourová is showing a project manager’s approach to justice – identify the problem, objective, tasks, timelines and output – and is getting out, listening and explaining.

But while Jourová seems to have identified her preferred issues and working methods, some question her political backing and depth of EU knowledge. The Commission’s new structure – based on clusters of commissioners working on related issues – should help on both fronts.

She may find it harder to educate and lead the Czech political elite on EU issues, as Maroš Šefčovič, the vice-president for the energy union, does in Slovakia. But her experience at the heart of the EU could be a major boon in efforts to reduce the Czech public’s Euroscepticism. Some may still view her as a lightweight, but Jourová’s time in Brussels could be a prelude to a heavyweight role in Czech public life.