WASHINGTON, June 29 (UPI) -- Marriage on the rebound is not necessarily destined for failure: it can also blossom into a successful union. This is an encouraging thought for Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso as the EU summit meets Tuesday to consider his nomination as the new president of the EU Commission.
Barroso emerged as the compromise candidate in the wrangle over who would head of the EU's Brussels-based bureaucracy when Romano Prodi, the current president, steps down in October. The Portuguese is not the first or second suitor for the job, and probably not even the third or fourth, but most observers agree that politically it's a clever choice.
For hardly anyone remembers Barroso was the fourth man along with Bush, Tony Blair and then-Spanish Premier Jose Maria Aznar at the March 2003 meeting in the Azores days before the attack on Iraq. As a member of the U.S.-led coalition of the willing, Barroso is considered acceptable to the Washington's supporters in the EU, including Britain, Italy, and Poland. At the same time, Portugal's low-profile support for the war is said to make him acceptable to the antiwar group led by France.
Barroro's nomination, Prodi said Tuesday, "sends a signal of returned unity" in the European Union. Barroso is also a more acceptable interlocutor in Washington than the outspoken, strongly antiwar Prodi -- which is certainly value added to Baroso's nomination.
EU sources say Tuesday's summit could be the shortest in the organization's history because Barroso's nomination has broad acceptance, and confirmation could take barely an hour.
The appointment, which should have no problems gaining EU parliamentary approval either, ends yet another of those internal battles that are the EU's standard way of arriving at major decisions. In the constantly shifting pattern of political alliances and secret agreements among its 25-member countries, the European Union has earned a reputation as the new Byzantium.
The in-fighting had already been going on behind the scenes for months when France and Germany advanced the candidacy of Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt a couple of months ago. A well informed European source said Monday, "The French and the Germans made the mistake of overplaying their hand, acting as though Verhofstadt had no opposition and his confirmation was a foregone conclusion."
The parliamentary group of the European People's Party (PPE) --the conservative Christian Democrat bloc in the European Parliament -- then proposed Chris Patten, the EU commissioner for foreign relations. Given time and a different set of circumstances, Patten, who is liked and respected in Brussels, had the potential to garner the necessary support. But once British Prime Minister Tony Blair openly supported him, it was clear that the French and Germans would stick to their guns and Patten and Verhofstadt would cancel each other out.
This is what happened at the EU leaders' summit of June 17-18, which ended in deadlock. The tantalizing question for observers is whether Tony Blair was aware that his strong backing was more likely to hinder Patten than to help him. Conspiracy theorists argue that the British prime minister had little to gain from having another British politician in charge in Brussels -- and especially not from a former Conservative Party minister in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet.
Verhofstadt, though also widely respected, had an arcane drawback in the eyes of the Catholic countries, especially Italy and Poland. The Belgian prime minister is known to be anti-clerical -- an old European tradition among Liberal politicians that goes back to the 19th century.
According to European sources in Washington, Verhofstadt sought to eliminate this drawback by promising the Poles he would help them to revive their attempts to include a reference to Europe's Christian roots in the preamble of the European Constitution.
At the urging of Pope John Paul II, a group of Catholic countries had tried to insert a "Christianity clause" in the constitution text, but the proposal failed to gain approval. Though most member governments regard the matter as closed, there are signs that the Vatican and some Catholic states, notably Poland, want to revive it.
With Verhofstadt and Patten out of the running, other names surfaced, including Spain's Javier Solana, the EU's high official in charge of foreign affairs, former Belgian prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, and the recently appointed French foreign minister, Michel Barnier.
But on Sunday Bertie Ahern, the persuasive Irish prime minister, in his capacity as the current president of the EU's council of heads of government, issued a statement saying that after numerous consultations with his colleagues he felt that Barroso had the necessary support to get the job.
Barroso, a 48-year-old social democrat who heads Lisbon's right-of-center coalition, will inherit the complex task of putting into effect the reforms outlined in the new constitution. He has said he wants to lead an EU that is "more cohesive, and more active on the international scene."
The bickering over the choice of a new commission president has drawn scathing criticism from commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. "This method is not worthy of what Europe's ambitions should be and the importance of its role," snapped the French newspaper Le Monde in an editorial.
But the democratic process can be messy, particularly when searching for a consensus among 25 different governments. After all, across the pond the world's leading modern democracy elected a president after weeks of bitter argument over bits of paper with holes in them.
