committee . The then President of the Parliament , Klaus Hänsch , explained the background to these hearings as follows :
It was necessary to get a procedure to make out of the installation of the Commission a sort of installation of a government , not a copy of what happens in most cases in the national parliaments but a procedure appropriate to the European Parliament … it was clear to me that it had to go in the direction of the American Congress hearings … It was not easy to get it through … Delors was absolutely against in the beginning because he feared that the College of the Commission would be destroyed or endangered at least , because he saw that there would be votes on single designated Commissioners and that was exactly what a lot of colleagues wanted to have … So the challenge was to find a procedure at least for the first time … to convince colleagues that they will not have a vote on single Commissioners and to get from Delors and specially also from the national governments the agreement that they would support the procedure … So we had for the first time … those hearings of the designated Commissioners . We had no votes but we had impressions … I had the idea to inform the press immediately after the meeting of the appropriate committees … giving a general impression of the result of the hearing . By this , we could say afterwards where Parliament … had a certain reluctance of the quality of the designated Commissioners and in the next five years this reluctance was justified .
Hänsch was therefore successful in setting up a procedure which was not in the Treaties but which has stood the test of time . As he suggested , the pressure grew to have votes on individual Commissioners and this led to President Barroso having to modify the composition of the Commissions he had submitted for approval in
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