March 19, 2007
Michel, the Belge
Would the last commissioner to leave please turn out the lights? That’s a gross exaggeration of course, but nevertheless, news of two commissioners’ getting more involved in “the countries they know best”, as the euro-euphemism goes, gave a certain fin de regime feel on Monday halfway through the Commission’s five-year term.
Louis Michel, the development commissioner, is taking a month’s unpaid leave in May and June to stand for election in Belgium. Well, not quite: he is campaigning, running last on the list of his French-speaking Liberal party for the Senate, doubtless requiring a 50 per cent swing or something to be elected.
Margot Wallstrom, the communications commissioner, has agreed to run a strategy group for Sweden’s opposition party on Europe. It emerged yesterday that she had forgotten to tell her boss, Jose Manuel Barroso.
Both have long been at the centre of rumours they could return to national politics. Wallstrom remains one of the most popular politicians in the Social Democrat party, now that leader Goran Persson lost the election.
But she would have to enter parliament to become leader, and despite making little headway in her avowed aim of connecting the EU with its citizens is unlikely to give up just yet.
Michel, who got his boss’s blessing, has an outside chance of being prime minister, since he is that rare beast, a Francophone Belgian who speaks good Flemish and is reasonably well known. For more than 30 years Belgium has had a Flemish prime minister but with the country’s two main linguistic communities divided as never before it could be time for a change.
Presumably if he is called others could drop off the list to give him a Senate seat. Michel’s spokesman said yesterday that he intended to return to the Commission but the result might change things.
What it means for the EU’s relations with Africa is anyone’s guess. Of course the civil servants will still beaver away between May 12 and June 10, led by enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn, who will be covering. Rehn’s aides were playing up his interest in Africa yesterday. The Finn joined the anti-apartheid movement in the early 1980s and served on the board of the Centre for Development and Co-operation.
Perhaps the mild-mannered Rehn, in between sorting out Kosovo and Cyprus, will usher in a wind of change in development policy. After all, relations with (at least Anglophone) African countries could not be much worse. A senior Nigerian trade official almost walked out of a meeting this month in protest at Michel’s finger-wagging style. His minister, Aliyu Modibbo Umar, backed him up. “Louis Michel is trying to bully everyone”, he told me. “We take exception to being patronised. We are not beggars…but partners in development.”
