Update: This is the new European Commission

Eight existing commissioners are hoping to return for another five years, according to official statements and media reports.

They are: Latvia's Valdis Dombrovskis; Mariya Gabriel from Bulgaria; Austria's Joannes Hahn; Phil Hogan from Ireland; the Czech Republic's Vera Jourova; Maros Sefcovic from Slovakia; the Netherlands' Frans Timmermans; and Margrethe Vestager from Denmark.

Some of the other candidates are also familiar faces in the EU capital.

Spanish foreign minister Josep Borrel, who is to be the next EU foreign affairs chief, is a former European Parliament president.

Didier Reynders is Belgium's foreign and defence minister and Margaritis Schinas from Greece is the current chief commission spokesman.

Italian former PM Paolo Gentiloni Silveri, is a founder member of the Italian Democratic Party - of which he became president in March 2019.

The next commission president, German politician Ursula von der Leyen, the first woman ever to hold the post, has 12 other women to choose from so far.

Some are former ministers: Helena Dalli (Malta); Ylva Johansson (Sweden); Rovana Plumb (Romania); Kadri Simson (Estonia); Jutta Urpilainen (Finland) and Sylvie Goulard (France). One, Portugal's Elisa Ferreira, is a central bank chief.

But von der Leyen's gender target, of having 13 women out of the next 27 EU commissioners, was reached after the nomination of the French politician Sylvie Goulard.

"Since 1958, there have been 183 commissioners. Only 35 were women. That is fewer than 20 percent. We represent half of our population. We want our fair share," she said in the EU parliament in July after her own nomination.

"If member states do not propose enough female commissioners, I will not hesitate to ask for new names," she added.

The upcoming president of the European Commission is currently holding informal interviews and "working really hard on reaching this target", a commission spokeswoman said in Brussels on Monday (2 September).

"The process of proposing candidates is still ongoing," the spokeswoman added, adding that "not every candidate proposed or interviewed will eventually form part of the final team that the president-elect [von der Leyen] will present to the EU parliament."

Allocation of portfolios and EU parliament hearings and votes will come later down the line.

Meanwhile, two EU countries - Hungary and Slovakia - have never proposed female candidates.

But Hungary and Poland, whose nationalist governments have clashed with the EU repeatedly in the past few years, did not propose ruling-party hardliners, at least.

Hungary's Laszlo Trocsanyi is a former judge and diplomat, while Janusz Wojciechowski is Poland's member of the Court of Auditors, the EU financial watchdog in Luxembourg.

The centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and centre-right European People's Party (EPP) dominate the field - more so than they did in the EU parliament election in May, although the socialists have ten candidates and the EPP only nine.

The liberals have six names, while both the Greens and the conservatives of ECR have one candidate commissioner.

The numbers are slightly skewed because Romania has proposed two alternative people - Plumb, a socialist minister, as well as Dan Nica, a socialist MEP.