As the European Council convenes Thursday to try to select a new slate of EU leaders, one thing is clear: Nobody has the upper hand.

In years past, the center-right European People’s Party was strong enough in the Council and the European Parliament to muscle in many of its candidates. This time around, the political divisions are stark. Power in the Council is split roughly into quarters — between the EPP, Socialists, Liberals and none of the above.

What makes the political math so ugly is that while no single political force can dominate the discussion, there’s no shortage of veto points. Both the EPP and the new alliance between the Liberals and French President Emmanuel Macron control enough votes in the Council to block its most important decision: the appointment of a new European Commission president.

“I’ve never before seen the political families playing such a strong role within the Council,” said Reinhard Bütikofer, the co-president of the European Greens party.

In theory, even the countries whose representatives in the Council don’t belong to any of the major political families — Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Poland — could wield a veto, in the unlikely case that they were willing to work together.

For some countries, like Italy, the leadership negotiations are also an opportunity to simultaneously press other interests.

To send a nomination to the European Parliament for approval requires a “reinforced qualified majority” in the Council — meaning the consent of at least 21 of 28 EU countries, comprising 65 percent or more of the bloc’s population.

Things are no less unsettled in Parliament. The institution’s leaders have insisted that the Commission president be a Spitzenkandidat — or one of the “lead candidates” put forward for the European Parliament election by the major political groups. But they haven’t been able to agree on which one — German MEP Manfred Weber for the conservatives; Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans for the Socialists; and Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager for the Liberals.

That leaves the Council in a strong position to eliminate all three at Thursday’s summit, effectively setting the search back to square one.

The result is a deeply unsettled, potentially volatile selection process that could drag on through the summer or beyond, even as European Council President Donald Tusk said he is still hoping to get a deal by the end of this month.

Franco-German stumble

When it comes to what Tusk and other Brussels insiders are calling Plan B — choosing a Commission president from a small pool of eligible and interested prospects — nothing gets easier.

Germany and France, the EU’s big two, have traditionally spearheaded the decision-making process, and the support of Chancellor Angela Merkel and Macron is widely regarded as a prerequisite for any deal.

Merkel, however, is now serving her last term, and her influence so far has been undercut by her need to show allegiance to Weber, both as a German and member of her EPP family. Meanwhile, Macron has stumbled in his initial efforts to upend the EU establishment, with Nathalie Loiseau, his choice to lead the new centrist-liberal group in Parliament, forced to withdraw from contention after she angered the group's rank-and-fil.

Even if Germany and France remain the most influential voices, the stakes of the leadership talks are so high that the interests and views of all EU countries must be taken into consideration — including the outliers that under other circumstances might be more easily pressured into accepting a plan.

While the U.K., which is consumed by Brexit, has pledged to play a constructive role, and essentially go along with whatever majority decision is reached within the Council, it is unclear a consensus will be reached. It is also unclear if the new British prime minister, who could take office before the EU deliberations are complete, will take the same approach as Theresa May.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose Fidesz party has been suspended from the EPP, has voiced loud opposition to Weber, his one-time ally. Meanwhile, Poland has signaled it would never accept the selection of Timmermans, who has led the EU’s efforts to punish Warsaw over alleged rule-of-law violations. The Central European Visegrad Four group, which also includes the Czech Republic and Slovakia, has indicated it could support the EU's Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, as a compromise candidate for Commission president.

For some countries, like Italy, the leadership negotiations are also an opportunity to simultaneously press other interests. Italy is set to lose the three top EU jobs that it currently holds — the high representative for foreign affairs, Parliament president and president of the European Central Bank.

The current populist, Euroskeptic government in Rome makes it unlikely Italy will come away with a big prize. Still, Italian officials are working on two fronts — in the hopes of securing at least one prominent job, but also avoiding a Commission-imposed disciplinary procedure for running an excessive budget deficit.

Diplomats said it is unclear whom Italy would support for the EU’s top jobs, but that it is clear who could never win Rome’s backing: notably the Belgian MEP and former Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who is aiming to become Parliament president.

Verhofstadt drew Italy’s ire by calling Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte a “puppet” of the country’s populist deputy prime ministers, Matteo Salvini of the League and Luigi Di Maio of the 5Star Movement.

In any case, the deficit issue seems to be Rome’s higher priority. Italian media reported that Conte used a summit of Southern European countries, the so-called Club Med, in Malta on Friday to try to strike a deal with France: offering to back a French candidate for president of the European Central Bank in exchange for help from Paris in preventing the deficit procedure.

Diplomats from both countries told POLITICO they have no indication of such a request.

Time pressure

The Council is also facing extraordinary pressure to come to an agreement on the top jobs before the new Parliament sits for its first plenary session in Strasbourg on July 2 — a fact that many EU leaders, including Merkel, only seemed to fully digest in recent days.

The Parliament is obligated to select its president, and if the Council has not settled on its broader package by then, the legislature’s decision will severely restrict EU leaders’ options, particularly in terms of whom it chooses to succeed Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The EU treaties require the Council to take into account the Parliament election result, but also to seek balance among political parties, geography and demography. The leaders have also said they want to improve gender parity in the EU’s upper ranks, meaning their ideal scenario would place women in two of the top four posts.

Adding even more complexity to the process is a simultaneous effort in Parliament by the three big party alliances, along with the Greens, to negotiate a joint policy agenda.

“At the Council, they are scratching their heads, searching everywhere for candidates" — Anonymous EU minister

The Greens, despite a surge in numbers, don’t have any leader on the European Council and are still smaller than the others, so they are unlikely to end up with a top job even as their priorities, particularly in relation to climate change, are increasingly resonant with voters. As a result, the Greens have dug in their heels in the negotiations, demanding more ambitious environmental policies, including more aggressive efforts to cut emissions.

In his formal invitation letter to Thursday’s summit, Tusk could only restate his hope for quick agreement, while noting that his own consultations, which included phone calls on Tuesday with 14 of the 28 leaders, highlighted continuing divisions.

“These consultations have shown that there are different views, different interests, but also a common will to finalize this process before the first session of the European Parliament,” Tusk wrote to national leaders. “To this end, I will continue to consult you one by one up until the summit starts. I remain cautiously optimistic, as those I have spoken to have expressed determination to decide swiftly.”

“I hope we can make it on Thursday,” he added.

Prime ministers’ club

Many EU officials and diplomats think a deal Thursday is unlikely, and discussions will have to continue, including at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan next week, where Tusk, Juncker, Merkel, Macron, May, and Conte will be in attendance, along with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Rutte is one of the negotiating coordinators for the Liberals, while Sánchez is a coordinator for the Socialists.

Tusk’s main challenge in the process so far has been to identify qualified candidates willing to take on the EU jobs — and to get them to admit their interest openly. Council officials have long complained that one of the main flaws in the Spitzenkandidat process is that sitting prime ministers and presidents are unwilling to publicly declare their interest for fear of criticism at home, even though they are the most qualified and obvious candidates for EU posts.

“At the Council, they are scratching their heads, searching everywhere for candidates,” said an EU minister based outside of Brussels, who is closely following the process and spoke on condition of anonymity.

This minister said Council members are clearly putting a priority on finding candidates who have served within their own ranks, and this has led to some unusual suggestions, including former Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, who led the government that lost power to the populists, former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and outgoing Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė.

“They are searching for names among the ex-prime ministers’ club,” the minister said. “They are focused on prime ministers and they’re stuck in the spirit of an exclusive club.”

“It reminds me of the dead poets’ society or royal marriages,” the minister added. “It is a pity because the best Commission presidents have not come from the old PMs’ club. Look at Jacques Delors.”

Delors, the veteran French statesman appointed in 1985, is the last Commission president named to the post without previously serving as a head of government.

Other names batted around Brussels include Barnier and former Commission Vice President Kristalina Georgieva, a veteran Bulgarian official now serving as chief executive officer of the World Bank in Washington. Georgieva made a brief bid to become United Nations secretary-general in 2016 and some of the advisers who helped her in that effort are now in Brussels testing her chances as a potential successor to Juncker.

The rejection of all three lead candidates from the European election could prompt an outcry in Parliament, but Macron and other critics of the Spitzenkandidat system have said that it was always intended to work in tandem with a new system of transnational candidate lists for Parliament, which the EU has not yet adopted. Should the transnational lists be adopted for the 2024 cycle, it could easily resurrect the Spitzenkandidat process.

With Brussels consumed by gossip and guessing about the leadership talks, this week’s summit seems to be shaping up more as an exercise in elimination than in selection.

“We can easily find ourselves with a tabula rasa at this council,” the EU minister said.

Lili Bayer contributed reporting.