Balanced choices from an imbalanced European Union

At a special summit in Brussels, government leaders put together the new leadership of the European Union. Simon Taylor and Tim King assess the outcome of the horse-trading

The decisions to appoint Herman Van Rompuy as the president of the European Council and Catherine Ashton as the EU’s foreign policy chief reflect the relative strengths of Europe’s political parties.

The centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) is running Europe. The Socialists are also-rans, a pale shadow of their former selves.

Van Rompuy, Belgium’s prime minister, was the considered choice of the EPP. Ashton, who was about to board a train from Brussels to London when she was hastily summoned to the Council meeting, was the surprise choice of the Socialists who had struggled to find plausible candidates.

Emboldened centre-right

In retrospect, the decision that emerged from the last summit of 29-30 October and the conclaves that immediately preceded it – that the EPP should put forward a candidate for Council president while the Party of European Socialists (PES) nominated a candidate for the high representative for foreign affairs and security policy – was crucial. Emboldened by the results of the European Parliament elections, the EPP had no qualms about simultaneously holding the presidencies of the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament.

The EPP consolidated, from the end of October onwards, around the candidacy of Van Rompuy who had the backing of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. To win round other centre-right leaders, he had the help of José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, and of his compatriot Wilfried Martens, Belgium’s prime minister for almost all of 1979-92 and now president of the EPP.

Problematic head-hunting

The Socialists’ head-hunting was much more problematic. David Miliband, the UK’s foreign minister, ruled himself out. Italy put forward Massimo D’Alema, who was a prime minister of Italy and then foreign minister, but Poland and Germany objected to his communist past and support for Palestine. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain, had sown confusion on Tuesday by publicly announcing the candidacy of Miguel Ángel Moratinos, his foreign minister, for high representative – a choice that had little chance of being supported by other member states, whether because of Spain’s non-recognition of Kosovo, where the EU has one of its biggest missions, or the country’s support for normalising ties with Cuba.

Fact File

Winners and Losers

– José Manuel Barroso was a big winner. An inter-institutional battle is under way between the Council of Ministers and the European Commission over the creation of the EU’s diplomatic service, which will work to the foreign policy chief. Nominally, the foreign policy chief belongs to both institutions. But the choice of Catherine Ashton, a European commissioner since October 2008, puts a Commission person in charge of shaping the European External Action Service.
– Barroso will be equally comfortable with the appointment of Herman Van Rompuy, who is from the same political family, the EPP. Since neither Ashton nor Van Rompuy is a natural hogger of the limelight, Barroso need not fear being cast in the shade.
– Tony Blair’s best chance of the presidency had lain in the big member states bouncing the others into the decision. If Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi had said that Blair was who they wanted, the pressure would have been hard to withstand. But the long, drawn-out ratification of the Lisbon treaty and the postponement of the decisions on appointments meant there was no element of surprise. An agreement emerged from the European Council meeting of 29 October – and the conclaves that preceded it – that the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) should put forward a candidate for Council president while the Party of European Socialists should put forward a candidate for the high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. The decision by the EPP to covet the presidency post was a body-blow to the Blairite cause. (Note that the Benelux countries, which opposed Blair, are all led by prime ministers from the EPP family.)
– The big loser might prove to be Belgium. Herman Van Rompuy became prime minister less than a year ago, after Yves Leterme stood down to fight (successfully) allegations that he had interfered improperly in the merger between Fortis-BNP Paribas, a Belgian and a French bank. Van Rompuy portrayed himself as a reluctant prime minister. He had seemed to miss out on the premiership back in 1994 when he was well placed to take over if Jean-Luc Dehaene had become European Commission president, a move that was blocked by the UK. As Leterme returns to the premiership, Belgians are left to ponder whether the reflected glory that they enjoy from Van Rompuy’s elevation is worth the loss of his leadership.

The choice was still not decided when the EU’s Socialist prime ministers met in Austria’s permanent representation to the EU on avenue Cortenbergh on Thursday afternoon (19 November). The PES had last month asked Werner Faymann, the chancellor of Austria, Zapatero and Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, the PES president and a former prime minister of Denmark, to screen candidates for the foreign policy post.

In effect, the Socialists let Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, come up with an acceptable candidate and Ashton won wide support. The resulting Van Rompuy-Ashton ticket was balanced in three respects: centre-right v centre-left; small country v big country; male v female. The latter point mattered in particular to the European Parliament, which had criticised the shortage of women in the line-up for the next college of European commissioners. The nomination of a woman to one of the two top jobs would help defuse that criticism.

Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt put the balanced ticket to the European Council and it received unanimous approval.

‘Leadership team of Europe’

Click Here: Golf special

“This is the new leadership team of Europe,” said Reinfeldt, presenting Van Rompuy and Ashton to the waiting television cameras. Van Rompuy then read a four-and-a-half page speech in three languages. The delivery was far short of Barack Obama standards, but the content was crafted to reassure those who fear an overbearing president of Europe. “Every country should emerge victorious from negotiations,” he said. “A negotiation that ends with a defeated country is never a good negotiation.”

“We are living in a period of anguish and anxiety and lack of confidence,” he said, after highlighting the economic, environmental and security problems. He said that now that the Lisbon treaty was ratified, the subject of EU institutional reform was “closed for a long time”. But he stressed that the presidents of the EU’s three main institutions – the Council, the Parliament and the Commission – must work together, respectfully.

Van Rompuy said that he looked forward to the enlargement of the EU in the next two-and-a-half years, to include “countries that of course meet conditions”. Asked his views on the admission of Turkey to the EU, he said that he would not be representing his own views but those of the 27 member states. “My personal opinion is totally subordinate to the views of the Council,” he said.

Unprepared Ashton

Ashton had no speech prepared and admitted that this was an indication of her surprise at her appointment. She pointed to her record as trade commissioner and said she was happy to be judged by whether she delivered results. Barroso, who sat smiling broadly next to her, extolled her qualities. His plaudits will not have reassured those in the member states and the Council of Ministers who fear that the Commission is attempting to take control of foreign policy.