LUXEMBOURG Prime Minister Jean- Claude Juncker and Britain’s opposition Conservatives stepped up efforts to derail Tony Blair’s candidacy for the European Union’s top job as the region’s leaders intensified efforts to pick their first president.
Juncker, 54, said yesterday that he’d be willing to serve, saying Blair’s bid would deepen divisions in the 27-nation bloc. The UK Conservatives’ leader, David Cameron, said selecting the former Labour prime minister would damage EU-British relations if they take power in elections next year.
With EU presidents and prime ministers gathering tomorrow for a summit in Brussels, discussions may already be turning to alternatives, such as Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, said Marco Incerti, an analyst at the Centre for European Policy Studies.
Balkenende is “a bit of a compromise candidate,” said Incerti, who is based in Brussels. “He comes from a smaller country and is more inclined to try and have consensus. At the same time, his country is not as small as, for example, Luxembourg. And the Dutch are also always very pragmatic.”
The agenda for the two-day summit beginning later today will focus on persuading Czech President Vaclav Klaus to drop his opposition to the so-called Lisbon Treaty. He’s the last holdout to the agreement, which requires unanimous consent, intended to streamline EU decision-making, establish the job of president and strengthen the role of its foreign policy chief.
EU officials are confident that the Czech constitutional court will reject a complaint against the treaty, after holding a hearing yesterday. A decision may be announced next week.
“You have people who think that these two new posts, the president of the European Council and foreign minister, should be strong individuals with a lot of personal charisma and clout so they can actually be very assertive,” said Incerti. “On the other hand you have another camp which is more supporting a view in which these two new posts would be just deal-brokers, just trying to garner consensus and get all the EU leaders to agree.”
Juncker, the longest-serving leader in the EU, has styled himself as the anti-Blair candidate who would strive for consensus and speak forcefully to foreign leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
“I’m not a candidate, but if others are appealing to me to be a candidate and if the general conditions are fulfilled, I have no a priori reason to say no,” Juncker, in office since 1995, told journalists yesterday in Luxembourg.
Even though Luxembourg is the EU’s second-smallest state after Malta, “I am not a dwarf,” Juncker told Le Monde, a French daily, in an interview published yesterday.
Juncker and Blair are old rivals. After chairing an EU summit in 2005, the Luxembourger denounced as “shameful” Blair’s bid to cut EU subsidies for eastern Europe. A budget was approved six months later at a summit chaired by Blair.
“Europe has to be run in a coherent, inclusive and global way,” Juncker, who also serves as treasury minister, told Le Monde. “The president has to be able to meld the plans, ideas and dreams of both large and small countries.”
While Blair, now a United Nations envoy to the Middle East, has stayed mum on his career plans, the UK government has begun a lobbying campaign on his behalf. Prime Minister Gordon Brown today endorsed his predecessor’s candidacy, saying he’d be “very happy” to support him.
Blair’s role in backing the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is one of the strikes against him. UK’s opposition Conservatives have also warned that the selection of Blair would damage EU relations if they take power next year.
A Blair presidency isn’t “the right step forward for Europe, and I don’t think it’s the right step forward for Britain,” Cameron said. “We would prefer it was more a chairman-ic role, coordinating the council of ministers.”
Blair picked up the backing this week of French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, though it was unclear whether that is France’s official position. French President Nicolas Sarkozy dealt Blair a blow on October 15 by calling it a “problem” that Britain has stayed out of the 16-nation euro, symbol of the EU’s economic integration.
Concerns over Blair’s support for the Iraq war is also spurring consideration of other candidates, Alex Poniatowski, chairman of the French parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, said in an interview today.
“Mr. Balkenende is starting to have a certain number of backers,” he said. “He would be an acceptable candidate” for France.
Juncker may not have helped his chances today when he was quoted in Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper as criticizing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new government. She’s failing to focus on reducing an “exorbitant amount of debt that the next generation will hardly be able to bear,” he said.
“How should the heads of government in Luxembourg, Belgium or Austria tell their citizens to stick to a strict saving regime when Germany and France aren’t holding to one?”
Sarkozy and Merkel, who head the EU’s two biggest countries, meet tonight in Paris before traveling to Brussels.