Brussels blog

There is something fishy about the race to fill two of the biggest jobs going in Europe – the first long-term presidency of the European Union, and the post of EU foreign policy chief.  The closer the EU gets to decision time, the more various unofficial candidates are ruling themselves out or running into difficulties.  As far as concerns the presidency, the latest person to say she doesn’t want to be considered for the job is Mary Robinson, the former Irish head of state.

In some ways, it’s a shame.  The politically independent Robinson commands much respect across Europe and beyond – more than certain candidates I could mention from Belgium and Luxembourg.  It would also be a clever move on the part of the EU’s 27 leaders to put a woman in the presidency and so boost the EU’s profile in the eyes of its citizens.

Still, Robinson has done the right thing.  In truth, she didn’t really have much choice.  The point about the future EU president is that he or she must be someone whom the other leaders around the table recognise as one of their own kind.  In other words, he or she must be by instinct a full-blooded politician and by career profile a sitting or a former head of government.  Outsiders such as Robinson would find it much harder to control a meeting of 27 national leaders or to broker the necessary deals among the big players.

So who will it be?  All I would say at this stage is: “Beware of anyone who claims to have inside knowledge.”  Of course, there have already been some fairly spirited exchanges – one of the most extraordinary being the warning by William Hague, the UK Conservative party’s shadow foreign secretary, to other EU countries that the appointment of Tony Blair, the Labour ex-premier, would be regarded by a future Tory government as an unfriendly act.

But all the contacts among governments have so far remained informal.  While Germany was conducting its coalition negotiations on forming a new government, everything was totally up in the air, because Chancellor Angela Merkel could not commit herself to a particular candidate.  This gave President Nicolas Sarkozy of France some wiggle room to imply that his support for Blair might not quite be of the 100 per cent variety.

Now that the German coalition talks have reached a successful conclusion, we will probably see more momentum in the discussions over the two new jobs.  But one vital point is still undecided – does the EU want a dynamic, high-profile president or a less visible but bureaucratically efficient figure?  At the moment, the balance of opinion among the 27 countries appears to favour the second type.  But an awful lot will depend on which way Merkel and Sarkozy go.