With any luck Europeans will wake up tomorrow morning to the news that finally they have a permanent president of the European Council and a foreign minister. No that many of them will have been worrying too much about it. After all the average citizen is not voting to choose them. It is mostly done by the leaders of the 27 countries who form the EU: 26 men and one woman. It is understood that the two positions are politically linked so that one must go to the left and one to the right. The most difficult selection will be the one for president as they are more than 20 candidates. Of course some of them are better known than others and some have more chances of getting the position. At the beginning of this process, long before the Treaty of Lisbon was approved and thus the selection could be made, the name of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was the most heard but his having endorsed the Iraq war under the Bush administration made him loose the vote of several countries though the British seem to still be pulling for him. Spain would like for former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez to win. France and Germany are in favor of Belgium’s Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy while the Poles would rather have Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. And in the background the name of Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean Claude Juncker is beginning to be mentioned more and more. Amid such confusion of names and countries, female politicians are demanding that one of the top jobs goes to a woman. The most promising female candidate is the former Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga.
For the post of foreign minister the selection should be much easier as it seems there are only two leading candidates: Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s former prime minister and former foreign minister, and David Miliband, Britain’s current foreign secretary.
So, when this evening at the leaders of the 27 EU member states meet in Brussels at 6 p.m., they could be in for a long night.
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