Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council and chair of all EU summits

For anyone reading the tea leaves ahead of a major EU summit, early drafts of the final communiqué are always essential reading – not necessarily for what’s in them, but for what’s not.

The latest version obtained by the Brussels Blog – the second iteration ahead of next week’s increasingly high-stakes gathering in Brussels (which we’ve posted here) – has quite a few items listed as “p.m.”, an abbreviation for pour mémoire, which loosely translated means “to be added later”. It’s those items where the real debate still rages, and where all eyes will be focused.

The most important p.m. is in the very first section of the 11-page draft: the so-called “report on EMU”, which is the highly-anticipated treatise being drafted by Herman Van Rompuy, the summit chair, with input from José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission; Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank; and Jean-Claude Juncker, chair of the eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers. Read more