Contrary to wary expectations, the European Council elected their new leadership Thursday night, including the first full-time president, Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy, and British Baroness Catherine Ashton, former EU Trade Commissioner, as high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. Swedish Prime Minister John Fredrik Reinfeldt, the current President of the European Council, told a press conference that it was a unanimous decision.
Van Rompuy addressed a press conference in Brussels in three languages: English, French, and Flemish. He called for unity and promised to take into account the stand of each of the 27 EU member countries.
Van Rompuy also promised that all these countries will benefit from his decisions, stressing that he saw as his main task creating new jobs in Europe and taking environmental measures. The new EU president will formally take office on Jan. 1, 2010. According to the Spanish El Pais, he will face considerable challenges in the post-Soviet countries, including the possibility of another gas war between Ukraine and Russia: “No one in Kyiv is prepared to predict whether Europeans will be able to sleep tight in January 2010, without fearing that Gazprom will cut off gas supplies for a couple of weeks like it did last January.”
World political leaders welcomed the election of Van Rompuy as the first EU president. Barack Obama stressed in his message that the United States does not have a stronger partner than Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote that the EU Council made the correct decision and that it made it possible to avoid the minority’s stand that would block it. Nicolas Sarkozy also thinks that it was a wise decision to elect as president a politician from an EU founding member country that is quite important but not one of the largest, because no one should feel being left out of the process.
Nevertheless, quite a few are dissatisfied with Van Rompuy’s election. Journalists asked Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, one of the main EU presidential contestants, whether he was disappointed, and he replied, “In politics we have no right to place our dreams above everything else.”
Catherine Ashton’s appointment as High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy took many by surprise. This post was generally expected to be occupied by the current British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. Ashton herself admitted that this appointment came as a big surprise to her.
Analysts point out that Ashton has practically no experience in the diplomatic field, although she showed good performance as EU Commissioner of Trade, succeeding Peter Mandelson last year. She is not widely known in Great Britain since she has never occupied a key Cabinet post. Catherine Ashton is 53. From 1983 to 1989 she was Director of Business in the Community working with business to tackle inequality, and established the Employers’ Forum on Disability, Opportunity Now, and the Windsor Fellowship. Before joining the European Commission she was a member of the House of Lords.
Diplomats believe that the decisive factors in her appointment were her social democratic affiliation, support from EC President Jose Manuel Barroso, and her gender.
Analysts believe that the elections in Brussels were proof of the fact that, despite the two years of distrust, Sarkozy and Merkel succeeded in finding a way to repair the Franco-German axis. These leaders are building a dialog, very much like their predecessors. However, the Chirac-Schroeder alliance led to the severance of Atlantic relationships with the Bush administration, whereas Sarkozy and Merkel intend to maintain a direct communications link with Washington.
