What’s the connection between martial arts and European financial market regulation?  Answers in Bulgarian, please.  Because the most colourful member of the newly elected European Parliament’s powerful economic and monetary affairs committee is surely Slavi Binev, a Bulgarian MEP. 

Binev is a Taekwondo champion whose parliamentary website describes him, with little exaggeration, as “the most recognisable figure in the history of martial arts in Bulgaria”.  Perhaps I should add that he is also a wealthy man who belongs to Bulgaria’s ultra-nationalist Ataka party and who runs a company specialising in nightclubs, construction and finance.  He knows, shall we say, how to look after himself.

The committee on which Binev sits is extremely important.  Along with national governments and the European Commission, it will shape all the financial services legislation that the European Union intends to adopt in the wake of the global financial crisis.  People in the City of London are nervous that the EU will damage their business by clumsy or aggressive over-regulation.  But the truth is that, if they want to stop that happening, they must roll up their sleeves and get to work with Binev and his fellow committee members (who include Rachida Dati, France’s former justice minister, and Eva Joly, the Norwegian-born French anti-corruption magistrate).

A close look at the committee’s make-up reveals some interesting details.  It has 48 full members and 46 substitute members.  Among the full members, a key role will be played by MEPs from Germany, the UK, France and Spain, who account for exactly half their number (eight Germans, six Brits, six French and four Spaniards).  Sixteen other countries are represented on the committee.

But these days MEPs tend to vote more along party lines than nationality, so it is also useful to note that this committee contains 17 moderate centre-right members, 13 socialists, five centrist liberals and a sprinkling of Greens, far leftists, Eurosceptics and other oddballs - including Binev.  As in previous legislatures, the three mainstream political groups will dominate proceedings.

Crucially, the committee chairmanship will be held by Sharon Bowles, a British liberal.  It is possibly the most important committee post in the entire European Parliament.  With the right input from governments, the Commission and the financial services industry itself, her influence may go a long way to ensuring that the EU does nothing foolish, or too foolish, in the field of financial market regulation.

Like much public life in the European Union, José Manuel Barroso’s battle to win reappointment as European Commission president is a battle of low politics dressed up in high ideals.  Barroso will be denied a second five-year term unless he secures the approval of the European Parliament, where a vote on his future should have taken place in July but was postponed until mid-September.  Now the moment of truth is close.  What can Barroso say and do to win over his socialist, Green and liberal critics?

One clue came in a speech, almost entirely ignored by the media, that Barroso delivered last week at a Barcelona business school.  Here he all but set out his policy programme for the next five years.  The speech’s most important passage read as follows: “The recent recovery spots are fragile and do not allow for any complacency.  In any case, it is clear that global growth will not return to pre-crisis levels for some time - if at all.  Those growth rates - and the economic model behind them - were simply not sustainable.”

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  Barroso’s opponents will not be alone in asking whether the Commission president did not in fact spend much of his first term promoting the very same growth model, based on financial market innovation, deregulation and cheap capital, that he now says was unsustainable.  Still, as he points out, “the failure to predict and head off the crisis was a collective failure”, with economists, bankers, regulators, supervisors and politicians all sharing responsibility.

What model should the EU embrace in the future?  Barroso lists seven “new sources of growth”: a) open global markets and investment regimes; b) maximising the potential of the EU’s single market; c) building networks such as high-speed broadband and energy interconnections; d) innovation policies, including a new emphasis on government procurement and intellectual property strategy; e) improving employees’ skills so that they can switch from declining industries to new sectors; f) developing a low-carbon economy; and g) improving the quality of public expenditure.

It all sounds sensible enough.  A Commission president is not an economic policy tsar for Europe.  But he or she can offer a vision, speaking up for the EU’s collective interest when national leaders find it inconvenient to do so.  Barroso, in his speech, was consciously selecting policy areas where he knows he could make a difference by stating the case for common European action.

Whether it will be enough to appease his parliamentary critics is another matter.

Is the “Stop Barroso” campaign finally running out of steam?  Leaders of the main political groups in the European Parliament have pencilled in September 16 as the day when they will hold a vote on whether to confirm José Manuel Barroso for a second five-year term as European Commission president.

If this arrangement holds, then it will mark a defeat for the anti-Barroso forces who wanted to delay the vote until after Ireland held its October 2 referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.  They were striving to create a situation in which (assuming the Irish voted Yes) the EU would simultaneously choose its first full-time president, the bloc’s new foreign policy high representative and the Commission president.  In such circumstances, they hoped, Barroso would no longer be a shoo-in to run the Commission.  Other candidates would emerge.  Haggling would ensue.  It would (they dreamed) be adeus, José Manuel.

This scenario now looks rather less likely.  It reflects two factors.  First, all 27 EU governments support Barroso.  There neither is nor has been any other publicly named candidate for the Commission presidency.  Secondly, it has been crystal-clear throughout this unedifying saga that certain MEPs have been undermining Barroso purely for the purpose of securing influence over his future Commission and its policies as well as jobs and political power for themselves.

It is, of course, a fundamental human right of every MEP to make himself or herself look foolish in the public eye.  But perhaps it’s time now to get back to the real business of stabilising Europe’s financial sector and hauling the economy out of recession?

If it were not funny, it would be tragic.  The UK Conservative party’s decision to quit the European People’s Party (EPP), the main centre-right political group in the European Parliament, is backfiring on the Tories in spectacular fashion.  The decision was always daft - a bit like the right wing of the US Republican Party splitting off and forming a minority group in Congress - but it now looks more short-sighted than ever.

On Tuesday the Tories relinquished the leadership of their new “anti-federalist” faction, the so-called European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, to Michal Tomasz Kaminski, a Polish politician.  They felt obliged to do so after Edward McMillan-Scott, a Tory MEP, refused to respect a deal in which Kaminski had been promised one of the parliament’s prestigious vice-presidency posts.

McMillan-Scott, who instead secured the vice-presidency for himself, has now effectively been kicked out of the ECR, and the Tories are being led by a Pole.  This, to put it mildly, was not in David Cameron’s script when he led his party out of the mainstream EPP group.

There are, in any case, serious doubts over how effective the ECR will be over the legislature’s five-year term.  To meet the requirement that an officially recognised faction should have at least 25 MEPs from seven countries, the ECR has been cobbled together out of 26 Tories, 15 Poles, nine Czechs and a solitary politician each from Belgium, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands (a Finn was also supposed to be in, but dropped out a couple of weeks ago).  The Tories are bound to spend half their time nursing the egos of the last five individuals, any two of whom could destroy the group by leaving it.

This, however, is far from the whole story.  Perhaps the most important development this week has been the decision of the EPP, the centre-left and the centrist liberals - the assembly’s three largest groups - to form a broad ”pro-European bloc”.  This will reinforce the marginalisation of the Tories, who will find themselves on the fringes of the legislature in the company of French communists, assorted Greens, anti-Islamic populists and extreme rightists such as the British National Party.

And what have the Tories got in exchange?  Well, Malcolm Harbour, a Tory MEP, will chair the parliament’s internal market committee.  Otherwise, it’s a grand old mess, unworthy of one of the world’s great political parties.

The composition of the newly elected European Parliament, which holds its first session next week, will make many Britons hang their heads in shame.  For British politicians are either poorly represented, or not represented at all, in the 736-seat assembly’s three biggest political groups: the centre-right, centre and centre-left.  By contrast, Brits dominate the Eurosceptic and far-right fringes.

The loss of British influence in the parliament, which has a say in most European Union laws, will be substantial.  The likely damage to Britain’s reputation in Europe can only be guessed at.

We’re already getting a taste of what may happen in practice.  In a BBC interview, Nick Griffin, leader of the extreme-right British National Party and newly elected MEP for north-western England, discusses how the EU should handle the problem of illegal migrants travelling across the Mediterranean from north Africa to Italy.  “I say boats should be sunk, they can throw them a life raft, and they can go back to Libya,” he tells his interviewer.  He is not advocating that “anyone should be murdered at sea”, he adds.

The BNP has been unable to form a political group in the European Parliament, with all the perks and influence that go with it, because for that you need at least 25 MEPs from seven countries.  The BNP tried to entice Italy’s Northern League, whose rabble-rousing leader, Umberto Bossi, refers to immigrants as “bingo bongos”.  But the League preferred the company of the UK Independence Party.

For its part, the UK Independence Party sees itself as part of a seamless anti-EU political trend that starts on the nationalist right, extending to and embracing Britain’s Conservatives - and as everyone in Europe knows, the Tories are likely to win the UK general election due next year.

A few data about the new European Parliament may drive the point home.  The mainstream centre-right European People’s Party is by far the legislature’s largest group, controlling 265 seats.  Not one of them is British.  The centre-left Progessive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, the second largest group, has 184 seats, of which 13 are British.

The centrist liberals are the third largest and have 84 seats, 11 of them British.  German, Italian and French legislators dominate these three groups as well as the Greens, in whose group the British hold two out of 55 seats.

The core of the 72-strong British representation in the new parliament will be the Tories and the UK Independence Party.  The first is highly critical of the EU, and the second wants to pull the UK out.  They hold 25 and 13 seats respectively, or 53 per cent of the British total.

All in all, Britain appears to be sleepwalking into a serious crisis in its relationship with the rest of the EU.  Does anyone in London know - or care?

There are two ways of looking at the imminent appointment of Jerzy Buzek, a former Polish prime minister, as the next president of the European Parliament.  The first way is to applaud Europe’s politicians for doing the right thing and giving one of the European Union’s top jobs to a man from one of the 10 former communist countries in central and eastern Europe that joined the EU in 2004-2007.  This is the highest honour yet accorded to a public figure from one of the EU’s new member-states.  Poles are justifiably proud.

The second way, however, is to be honest and recognise that the job of parliament president is about the lowest-ranking position someone could be given without its looking like an insult.  Buzek, who belongs to the legislature’s main centre-right group, won’t even hold the job for the assembly’s full five-year term: under a deal with the socialists, he will step down after two and a half years and hand over the reins to a socialist.  The fact is that, by giving this post to Buzek, older and bigger member-states in western Europe are making sure that they will get all the really big jobs when they come up for grabs later this year.

These are the European Commission presidency (already earmarked for Portugal’s José Manuel Barroso, though his reappointment to a second term is running into a few embarrassing difficulties); other top Commission portfolios, such as those covering competition, the internal market and trade; the job of EU foreign policy high representative (shortly to be vacated by Spain’s Javier Solana); and the full-time presidency of the European Council, which represents national governments.  The latter job will be created only if the EU’s Lisbon treaty is ratified by all member-states.  But assuming that it comes into existence, I will eat mon chapeau if it doesn’t go to a western European.

There is an interesting side story to all this.  Buzek’s appointment became a certainty after Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, withdrew his candidate, Mario Mauro.  Naturally, Italy wants compensation.  Berlusconi would probably be interested in one of the big Commission jobs for Italy, but Franco Frattini, his foreign minister, has other ideas.  He would like to replace Solana as EU foreign policy chief.

The reaction in certain other EU member-states to Frattini’s ambitions is, to put it mildly, one of incredulity.  No one has forgotten Frattini’s most recent diplomatic coup - a planned visit to Iran in May that went spectacularly wrong.  Frattini had to cancel his trip at the last minute when President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad insisted on meeting him in a city where the Iranians had just announced the successful launch of a medium-range missile capable of hitting Israel.  The visit would in any case have broken the EU’s policy of avoiding high-level contacts with Iran because of its nuclear programme.

So, it’s yes to Buzek - but no, grazie to Frattini.

Is José Manuel Barroso’s reappointment as European Commission president in trouble?  Probably not.  But the jury is still out on whether he will secure formal approval from the European Parliament as early as mid-July.  If he does not, it will be difficult to dispel the clouds of doubt that will linger over his future for two months or more.

Such uncertainty is hardly what the European Union needs at a moment when its banking system faces hundreds of billions of euros in losses this year and next, and when Germany and France, the eurozone’s two biggest economies, appear utterly at odds over when and how to rebalance their public finances.

The EU’s 27 national leaders decided unanimously at a Brussels summit last week to support Barroso’s reappointment.  It was not a legally binding decision.  They could, in theory, change it if there were massive resistance in the European Parliament.

But that’s certainly not Plan A.  Leaders such as Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, which is about to assume the EU’s rotating presidency, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel want the European Parliament to hold a vote next month to confirm Barroso for a second five-year term.

Barroso’s centre-right allies, known as the EPP, are the legislature’s largest political group.  They are happy enough to hold an early vote.  But they control only 264 of the assembly’s 736 seats.  Three other groups - the socialists, centrist liberals and Greens - say they would prefer to delay the Barroso vote until September or October.

Barroso correctly sees that he must win an absolute majority - 369 votes or more - if he is not to suffer serious political injury.  If we assume that he will pick up every single EPP vote, where is he going to get the other 105 votes from?  He knows it would be fatal to turn for backing to the far-right, nationalist and anti-EU fringe elements in the legislature.

Barroso can probably count on three sources of support.  First, there is the new conservative, “anti-federalist” group led by the UK Tories.  It has 55 members (or even, as of Tuesday, 56 - a politician from Lithuania’s Polish minority appears interested in joining).  Secondly, up to half of the 80-strong liberal group in the European Parliament can surely be coaxed into supporting Barroso.  Finally, there are even some socialists - especially in Barroso’s native Portugal as well as Spain and the UK - who are inclined to back him.  All told, that should see Barroso over the 369-vote mark.

But this is not the whole story, because even some of these parliamentarians may object to holding the vote in mid-July.  In the end, this whole saga is less about Barroso’s leadership qualities than it is about the European Parliament’s desire to assert itself as one of the EU’s most powerful institutions.

“Brussels 2009″ doesn’t have quite the ring of 1641 in the English House of Commons, or 1789 in Versailles.  But the situation contains some interesting dramatic potential, that’s for sure.

Back in 1970 or so, there was a children’s Saturday morning TV show called “The Banana Splits”, in which some ludicrous character or other would frantically splutter “Hold the bus!” - always too late, for the bus would proceed on its way regardless.  It is an irresistible temptation to compare the four Banana Splits of 40 years ago - Bingo, Fleegle, Drooper and Snorky - with certain members of today’s European Parliament.

For while the legislators are busy spluttering “Stop Barroso!”, they are saying it much too late.  José Manuel Barroso is proceeding on his way to reappointment as European Commission president.  In fact, the entire episode threatens to show the European Union in the worst possible light, after EU-wide elections to the European Parliament that, with their record low turnout, were themselves not exactly a ringing endorsement of the way the EU conducts its business.

Barroso is the only declared candidate for the Commission presidency, and he has the support of national political leaders across the political spectrum - centre-right, centre and centre-left.  True, he is not seen as the most inspiring or visionary of Commission presidents.  But that is, in a sense, exactly the quality that many national leaders are looking for - and the job is in their gift, subject to the parliament’s approval.

If socialist, liberal or Green politicians in the European Parliament wanted to prevent Barroso from getting a second term, they should have fought this battle before the elections to the assembly.  Each should have rallied behind a candidate of their choice.  But they did not.  The socialists were too divided even to come up with a candidate of their own.  The opportunity was lost.  It was their own fault.

Now the socialists and Greens have the nerve to suggest that the EU’s national leaders would in some way be guilty of treating the parliament with disdain, if they were to nominate Barroso at the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday and then pass on his name to the parliament for approval.  But in truth, this is precisely the procedure set out under EU rules.

All that the average European citizen cares about is having a Commission president in office who gets on with his job.  Squabbling and muscle-flexing among European Parliament politicians who, like the Banana Splits, have missed the bus is not of the slightest interest to anyone - except perhaps the EU’s critics, who will gleefully point out that the newly elected legislators appear to have learnt no lessons whatsoever from the recent election campaign.