European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso emerges as a clear winner from all this.
He had been nervous about being elbowed off the EU stage by a strong European Council president and undermined in his own Commission by an authoritative foreign policy chief.
Now he has to fear neither incidence. Belgian leader Herman Van Rompuy is discreet and modest. Just what member states, wary of being outshone, wanted. He will take these qualities to the presidency job as well as “subordinating” his own opinions to those of the council. So the internal fixer and not the traffic stopper.
Catherine Ashton, who has done well as a trade commissioner, has no foreign policy experience and has never held elected office. Her candidacy emerged largely as a result of a deal to have a socialist take the foreign policy post and preferably a woman and a Briton. The huge new job, as well as her relative inexperience, will mean she will need a lengthy adjustment period to find her feet. This plays into Barroso’s hands – although his aides stress that the commission president “has always said this is an extremely capable lady.”
Incidentally, they also say that Barroso will be happy to leave consensus-making among member states to Van Rompuy as this will “liberate” him to do other, as yet unspecified, “tasks.”
Van Rompuy will start on 1 January in order to have a longer handover time in Belgium where he has held together the fractious Walloons and Flemings since last year.
Ashton is to take up her duties as high representative and become vice president of the commission on 1 December. A legal tangle could ensue if the parliament, which holds hearings on all commission members, were to actually try and move against her. “On that there is no precise legal answer because the High Representative side is not in the gift of the parliament,” noted an official.
Thursday’s agreement throws open a few other questions – such as what to do with Benita Ferrero-Waldner, currently the external relations commissioner. She will be “given another substantial assignment” said the official. A solution also has to be found for the trade portfolio, which Ashton will soon vacate.
Meanwhile, Barroso is expected to have assigned the commissioner portfolios by the beginning of December. Only four countries have not yet named their next commissioners – the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece and Malta.
The commission president’s most immediate hurdle is to see that his commissioners are thoroughly prepared for MEPs, who as far as I can make out, are desperate to shed some political blood.
http://blogs.euobserver.com/mahony/
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