As European Union leaders gather for their two-day summit in Brussels, the word is that the British government’s effort to have Tony Blair selected as the EU’s first full-time president is running into trouble.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just finished a round of afternoon discussions with other European socialist leaders, trying to persuade them that Blair deserves the job. The talks did not go well.
Martin Schulz, chairman of the European Parliament’s socialist group, made it plain that he and many other Continental socialists didn’t want the EU presidency to go to a Briton. The reason? The UK is semi-detached from Europe, not in the euro area, not in the Schengen zone permitting border-free travel around the EU, etc, etc.
Moreover, the socialists think they have a better chance of getting in one of their own people as the EU’s next foreign policy high representative than as the first full-time president. With 20 or so of the EU’s 27 governments controlled by the centre-right, they reason, national leaders are bound to pick someone from their own political family for the EU presidency.
Of course, you could argue that some centre-right leaders – Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi comes to mind – are perfectly happy to see Blair in the job.
But maybe not in France and Germany. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angel Merkel met for dinner in Paris on Wednesday night, and word is reaching reporters in Brussels that the two leaders were lukewarm about Blair’s candidacy. If true, that would come close to polishing him off – or, rather, it would enable him to say he had never been a candidate in the first place.
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on