The sun is shining in Brussels and the sky has an unseasonably blue, cloudless, late-November-in-Rome quality as European Union leaders make their way here for the summit of summits - the event where they will choose the EU’s first full-time president and new foreign policy chief.  I wonder if the weather will be so fine when the leaders finally drag themselves away from the negotiating table after what is shaping up to be a night of relentless hard bargaining.

By general consent, the frontrunner is Herman Van Rompuy, the amiable, haiku-writing Belgian prime minister.  Even a speech he gave in 2004 that reveals him to be an implacable opponent of Turkey’s entry into the EU (Turkey has been an official candidate for the past four years) doesn’t seem to be doing Van Rompuy any harm.  Well, why should it?  It fits in perfectly with the views of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

It has been clear for the past week that Merkel and Sarkozy would be perfectly happy to put Van Rompuy in the presidency.  Yes, he is almost unknown outside Belgium.  Yes, it is hard to see President Barack Obama or President Hu Jintao taking him entirely seriously.  Yes, he is no Tony Blair.  But he will be good at building consensus among EU governments.  He will be good at organising the work of the European Council.  And that is what France, Germany and many small EU states want.

The question is whether the UK, seething with fury at Sarkozy’s betrayal of Blair and impatient with Germany and the rest for insisting on a president from a small country, will block Van Rompuy.  If the UK does, a third candidate will get the job - and, frankly, it is anyone’s guess who it will be (except that I cannot imagine it will be Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, because the UK and France share a distaste for him).

What many countries, including Germany, hope is that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will chill, accept Blair has no chance, and then accept the job of foreign policy high representative for the UK.  It is there for the British if they want it - that seems to be the message from most of Europe.  The obvious choice is Foreign Secretary David Miliband, but lately he’s been ruling himself out. 

I’ll tell you what, though.  Miliband and other potential British candidates are all strong advocates of Turkish entry into the EU.  So we could end up with a EU president (Van Rompuy) and a EU foreign policy chief (a Brit) who disagree on a fundamental aspect of the EU’s foreign relations.

What an excellent recipe for a united Europe.

My colleague Philippe Ricard wrote a fine piece in Monday’s Le Monde about the scarcity of women candidates for top positions in the European Union - not just the first full-time president and the new foreign policy high representative, but the next 27-member European Commission.

He made the point that if only a few women are nominated to the new Commission, the European Parliament is likely to cause real trouble when the nominees appear for their confirmation hearings, expected to start in December.  The legislature does not have the legal authority to reject individual nominees, but in 2004 it demonstrated that it had the political strength to force their withdrawal when it torpedoed the appointment of Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian conservative, as justice commissioner.  Moreover, the parliament does have the legal power to reject the Commission in its entirety - the so-called “nuclear option”.

Many MEPs show every sign of itching for a repeat performance of the Buttiglione affair, which is fondly recalled in the assembly as a defining moment in the parliament’s evolution.  A scarcity of women would provide the perfect cover because it would be widely seen across Europe as inherently indefensible.

Could these tensions be eased by the appointment of a woman as the full-time president or the foreign policy supremo?  In principle, yes.  But officials from several countries have told me in recent days that the need for “gender balance” in the appointments is not regarded as of the same weight as the need for political balance (one person of the left, one of the right) - or the need to pick the best qualified candidates.

That last point sticks in the throat a bit, but there we are.

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UK needs different ‘top job’ in Brussels (William Hague, FT)

EU pressed to appoint more women to top jobs (Stanley Pignal, FT)

EU top job search is too narrow (FT editorial)

Investigating Iceland’s financiers (Stanley Pignal, FT magazine)

Single market bargaining (Charlemagne, The Economist)

I confess to a certain surprise at the way that Massimo D’Alema is climbing up the list of candidates for the post of European Union foreign policy chief.  At first sight the former Italian prime minister and foreign minister ticks far too few boxes to get the job.  But there are, in truth, some straightforward reasons for his ascent - none of which reflects well on the EU.

First, the unticked boxes.  1) His communist past.  This is usually condensed into: “He’s a former communist and therefore unacceptable to Poland and other EU countries, which suffered under Soviet domination while the Italian communist party was gorging itself on covert funds from Moscow.”  In fairness, D’Alema abandoned communism 20 years ago.  I spent five years in Rome covering Italian politics, and he never struck me as an extremist or a hardliner.  Quite the opposite: he was highly pragmatic, in a shifty kind of way.

2) His opinions of the US.  D’Alema isn’t foolishly anti-American, but he has more than a few traces in him of that quintessential European personality, the austere leftwing intellectual who drips with cultural disdain for the US.  This could be a real risk for the EU.  If as EU foreign policy supremo he were to make critical remarks about the US in public, European influence in Washington would be killed stone dead - and there would be bitter recriminations in the 27-nation EU, making a mockery of the entire idea of a common foreign policy.

3) His linguistic skills.  These days it would be crazy for the EU to have a foreign policy chief who doesn’t speak fluent English.  D’Alema has picked up some over the years, but not enough.  “He has Italian waiter’s French and not much English,” says one EU minister who has known him during his various spells in the Italian government.

4) The domestic Italian political factor.  You have to ask yourself, why is Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi so eager to promote the candidacy of D’Alema, his political adversary?  A little history is needed here.  Back in 1996-2001 Berlusconi completely outmanoeuvred D’Alema in a lengthy set of negotiations over Italian constitutional reform that ended up going nowhere - to Berlusconi’s benefit.  It must have crossed Berlusconi’s mind that D’Alema is quite capable of self-destructing in the EU foreign policy job, something that would damage his career and strengthen Berlusconi’s grip on the Italian political scene.

So why is D’Alema’s star on the rise?  One reason is that France and Germany have never shown much interest in getting the foreign policy job (they prefer powerful economic posts on the incoming European Commission).  Meanwhile, the UK persists in its stubborn support for Tony Blair as the EU’s first full-time president, thereby reducing the chances that David Miliband could become the foreign policy supremo.  The behaviour of France, Germany and the UK has left a vacuum that has been filled by Italy, the EU’s fourth-ranking power.

The other reason is that D’Alema has the backing of Europe’s socialist parties.  The key player in this game is Martin Schulz, the German who chairs the centre-left group in the European Parliament.  Schulz is exploiting D’Alema’s candidacy for his wider purposes, which include maximising the legislature’s power relative to the EU governments and the Commission, increasing the left’s voice in Europe and consolidating his personal authority over the European centre-left.

It’s all pretty unedifying.  Whatever happened to the idea that Europe’s top jobs should go to the best qualified candidates?

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