February 1, 2008
Tony Blair for president?
Could Tony Blair’s shadow candidacy as the first full-time president of the European Union go the same way as Rudy Giuliani’s US presidential bid? Like Rudy, Tony has the name recognition factor and track record in government to be a frontrunner. He is also a figure bigger than his party, appealing across the divide. Blair himself is more popular in some EU countries than his own.
However, they share a chequered past. Giuliani was dogged by allegations from US firefighters that he cut and run on September 11 as mayor of New York. Blair is charged with invading Iraq on false pretences.
And neither has done much campaigning. Giuliani was undone by refusing to press the flesh in small, early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. He waited a month until the first big contest Florida, but found voters had forgotten about him in the meantime.
Blair has certainly not been positioning himself. While he is heading mediation efforts in the Middle East and spoke at a conference of France’s ruling UMP party he is also making speeches in China and working for JP Morgan, the investment bank, to pay the mortgage.
At least Giuliani said he wanted the job. It is not clear Blair does, though he has not ruled himself out.
The big question is what Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, was doing when he backed his buddy.
By floating his name so soon – more than a year before the Lisbon treaty that would create the job is ratified – is he merely a stalking horse for Sarko’s real candidate?
Or was the French president drawing out opposition to any Brit? If Blair is not acceptable, no Brit would be. Hans-Gert Poettering, speaker of the European parliament, on Thursday said it would be difficult to give the job to someone from a country that is not part of the Schengen borderless zone, the single currency and has not adopted the charter of fundamental rights.
“If there is a proposal from a country that has opt-outs it would certainly help that country to get the job if this country decides to opt in,” he said. It is unlikely Gordon Brown would sacrifice what he sees as fundamental British interests just to get his old rival Blair a job.
Poettering’s views are to be taken seriously. He is a senior figure in the pan-European People’s party, the centre-right bloc of which Sarkozy and Angela Merkel of Germany are members. Parliament will also have some say over who gets to occupy the holy trinity of European policymaking created by the Lisbon treaty.
Once (if?) the treaty is ratified by the 27 member states there will be a full-time president of the council, representing them, and a double-hatted foreign “minister” who will serve the council and the Commission, as well as the president of the executive Commission itself.
MEPs will have to approve the foreign minister - called a high representative - as they do all commissioners. Governments have made clear they want that person in place before the June 2009 European elections. If MEPs do not take to them, they will not continue beyond that, says Poettering. “If it is someone we do not like and they are proposed again…we will have a problem,” he said.
There will also have to be political balance. If the centre-right win the elections Jose Manuel Barroso, Commission president, would probably be offered a second term. The council president should then come from the Socialists.
Yet the elections could upset all those calculations. It is too early to speculate, Poettering, said, as there is no job description yet. However, countries looking, like Henry Kissinger, for one number to call in Europe could be disappointed.
“The president of the council should not be the boss of the EU,” he said.
With some Europeans hankering after a voice in who gets elected US president, it would be more important to give EU citizens an open campaign for the European Council presidency (and the High Representative).
Posted by: Ralf Grahn | February 2nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm | Report this commentIt seemed for a while that Tony Blair, in converting to Catholicism and in taking on a difficult job in the Middle East wanted to make amends for his Iraq adventurism. Without going into all of that, his integrity is yet to be re-affirmed for me at least. The EU finds itself at one of its crucial stages of its development: post-enlargement and pre-further expansion. The latter involves constructing a sound relationship with Russia, which, because of its energy wealth, is able to claim back its place among the leading European nations. By extrapolation, relationships with Ukraine, divided between east and west internally, provides another set of dilemmas for the EU top brass. Inside the union, there is now in even sharper relief, the issue of how much of the European social model to abandon? Most citizens want to keep as much as possible, but Mr Blair is a neo-liberal in practice, if not in occasional rhetoric. He does not much like European mainstream social democracy or Christian democracy as it is practised. He is really a 19th century laissez-faire liberal. This rules him out as a consensual leader of the EU. Furthermore, he has a penchant for war as the immediate solution to difficult political problems, whereas the EU is, fundamentally a peace organisation, created to persue the peace of Europe and to support peace in the world. No thank you, Tony. Not this job.
Posted by: Dave Feickert | February 2nd, 2008 at 1:18 pm | Report this commentBlair has already given us an idea of what he would be as Council president when he occupied the rotating EU presidency: lots of rhetoric (a rousing speech at the EU parliament among other things) and no action whatsoever…. It’s no surprise that his acronym is “Phony Bliar”
Posted by: pampero | February 2nd, 2008 at 2:25 pm | Report this commentCongratulations Dave Feickert you express my views perfectly.As a former MEP who was expelled by Blair for opposing his neo liberal policies I am totally opposed to him becoming the president of the EU.I suspect Gordon Brown is too he has seen enough of Blair and certainly doesnt want to greet him as “President Blair”
Posted by: Hugh Kerr | February 2nd, 2008 at 8:13 pm | Report this commentThe ET has launched a petition against Fony Bliar’s being nominated for the position PS ET stands for European Tribune
Posted by: pampero | February 4th, 2008 at 10:04 am | Report this commentLet’s hope the new European Generations start to get into politics, we need new ideas, new faces with new intentions, new energies and new solutions…Ideally Europe must find a young men or woman ,45+, with “real world” working experience, with hands-on experience from the ground up, with multiple languages and engineering-science background, a doer, a maker,a starter, a risk taker with a brain,who is not afraid to change the “status-quo” and go against the Brussels Lobby’s when necessary, per example: let’s look at Airbus, a vital EU Company, just starting to test synthetic kerosene-jet fuels based on “coal to gas to liquid” with the Fisher-Tropsch method,this is great news,altough it should have been going on for 10 years, and it’s not too late !so the new Leader will push Airbus to the limit with new fuel options until an alternative to kerosene from petroleum is founded, NON STOP !!!, we need a new EU leader that will push energy alternatives to the max( whereas Blair is totally under the Oil Lobby-Neocon Lobby control,shame !), we need an EU leader that will keep Airbus factories not only inside the EU but energized,making workers into stockholders,launching the A-400M project into overdrive with all kinds of turboprops choices made in the EU, with new composites, with new Vertical Take Off and Vertical Landing motors a reality, an EU leader that can energize the farming sector to new organic crops, new markets and new selling choices,an EU leader that will retrain carpenters,plumbers,electricians, masons,welders,architects , engineers and programmers to build the new solar homes , with concentrators,thermal tubes, turbines and batteries,new insulation and sealing solutions, new HYDROGEN FUEL-CELLS, a new leader in International Commerce, with Russia and Asia, a peace maker with the Rule of Law on a Typhoon wing,and a builder,we need a new EU leader that will demand genetic,chemical and cloning labels on all foods, and fight to keep JUNK FOODS out of schools, a fighter for the kids, and we need the EU to start inviting the kids into the Political process and some of them,make them Presidents.
Posted by: blogger | February 4th, 2008 at 5:41 pm | Report this commentIt would be incredible that this man who vetoed two Belgian prime ministers for the EU Commission presidency (Jean-Luc Dehaene and Guy Verhofstadt) because they were, he said, for “a federal Europe” should now pose as the saviour of the continent. He never supported Europe in the UK Parliament, spurned the Euro and the Schengen treaty and hoped that hasty enlargement, including Turkey, would make a united Europe unworkable. Let’s hope he finally collect his Congressional Medal in Washington and leave us, Europeans, in peace,
Posted by: J.M. van Gindertael | February 5th, 2008 at 12:52 pm | Report this commentPerhaps Brown should get a bit better at identifying “fundamental British interests.” How it is in our interests to be kept out of Schengen, so we can’t have the same freedom of travel as the rest of Europe is a mystery. The same goes for why our leaders seem to think it would be awful for our government to give us the same guarantees on human rights as others take for granted. It also goes for the continued insistence of those in charge in Britain on keeping the rickety old pound, a currency which throughout my lifetime (and I’m well into middle age) has never been anything but a hindrance to the UK economy. I’m not grateful for having to pay a higher rate of interest than everyone else, just to keep a dysfunctional currency going. So let’s change all those things and then Blair can apply to be president if he wants. More to the point, the British people would have a much better life, economically and politically
Posted by: Chris | February 5th, 2008 at 4:39 pm | Report this comment“TOO MANY UK INTERNATIONAL MILITARY & RE-CONSTRUCTION OBJECTIVES ARE RESULTING IN NONE BEING FACILITATED COMPETENTLY/WELL ENOUGH FOR SUCCESS!”
It may seem a bit trite, but the saying that emphasizes “he who tries to succeed at all things, rather than only one- succeeds at none…” arguably could be applied to former UK prime minister- Mr Tony Blair- and his apparent ‘competing interests’ of facilitating an end to the Israeli/Palestine conflict as the UN’s (the USA’s defacto) special emissary and quitting this position in order to be appointed to the newly created office of a ‘permanent’ (2 and 1/2 year) EU Council of Ministers’ president.
The same could be said for United Kingdom efforts in supporting the USA in its “war on terror” from 2003-2008.
Re the first issue: Mr Blair ought to at the least give middle-east peace his best shot before he moves on with his considerable skills to another job…
How??
Getting Egypt to ‘gift’ to Gaza (from the Sinai peninsula) a comparatively large piece of land- perhaps 50 miles by 50 miles or even 100 miles by 100 miles in size or so- while obtaining commitments from G8 nations/Saudi Arabia/similar wealthy Arab states to build/pay for building on this ‘expanded Gaza’ a “new” Gaza/city or at least the roads/rail/power/water/banking/financial-exchange/customs/sea-port and similar infrastructure necessary for it to function independently of Israel->>> and free of this country’s real and potential interference (in these & similar areas) might be a way toward these objectives.
Re the UK’s support of the USA in the misnamed ‘war on terror’:
UK military/other resources being spread far too thinly is plainly one of the central causes of its lackluster- if not scandalously inadequate- performance as occupiers & good-governance instillers/infrastructure re-builders in southern Iraq.
The laudable substantial UK military and other resources deployed in Afghanistan from 2003-2008 instead could have constructively been applied to the very worthy- and indescribably urgent- objectives inherent to the USA-led coalition’s ‘Iraq mission’ objectives.
Not doing so, in effect, has robbed UK Iraq efforts of sufficient focus and the necessary ‘critical mass’ needed to stop the genesis and deep establishment (over the last 4-years or so) in southern Iraq of what has become an internecine, sectarian-war type disaster.
The future?
The UK Parliament ought to be enabled to debate and then vote on ‘where’ UK military & related resources can be of most use: Iraq or Afghanistan, and after this- whether the UK ought to continue prosecuting military/reconstruction endeavors in both of these needy countries, rather than in one or the other.
A substantially beefed-up UK presence in southern Iraq, perhaps as part of a UK led, coordinated British Commonwealth countries’ “Iraq-government-assistance and southern Iraq reconstruction force” would be significantly more likely to ’succeed’ in addressing that part of Iraq’s grievous, festering problems, than the embarrassingly miniscule, obviously inadequate-for-their-tasks UK contingent in Iraq from 2003 until today.
Supporting the USA in its reasonable goals is something that the UK ought to not shy away from.
But surely, common sense would demand that ‘the UK attempts to pick supporting roles it can/is likely to be able to succeed at’, and declines to participate in roles supporting the USA that- if simultaneously carried out with current or expected UK commitments- will damagingly detract from the UK’s abilities to succeed at these current or expected commitments.
Finishing job one before moving on to another- or at least giving job one ‘your best shot’ before attempting another- is a principle that both Mr Blair and leaders of/politicians in the United Kingdom would do well to bare in mind…
Roderick V. Louis,
Posted by: Roderick V. Louis | February 9th, 2008 at 1:36 am | Report this commentVancouver, BC, Canada,
ceo@patientempowermentsociety.com
Even if the Zionists want Tony Blair as President of the European Council for his role in the Iraq War, it is evident there is no chance from a European perspective as the UK is neither part of the Eurozone, nor part of Schengen and broadly xenophobic against Europeans.
Posted by: Enrique | February 11th, 2008 at 12:05 am | Report this comment