New EU Leadership

While Romanians seem tremendously preoccupied with the upcoming presidential elections, news are in from Brussels:

Belgian prime-minister, Herman Van Rompuy, became the first president of the European Union (namely, the president of European Council). The present structure of the Belgian federal government depended greatly on Van Rompuy’s compromising abilities, which one might rightfully expect to see in response to the notoriously divided EU politics.

His political background can provide us with several clues on what Europeans might expect in the next few years: further expansion of the Eurozone against the special status Denmark, Sweden and the UK have enjoyed since Maastricht will be most probably one of the priorities of his mandate.

Likewise, following Gordon Brown’s abandonment of Tony Blair for the position of High Representative for Foreign Affairs, UK’s Catherine Ashton has been confirmed as the new foreign-policy chief of the EU. Baroness Catherine Ashton is said to have never run for office in her political career. Her most preeminent project was the advancement of the Lisbon Treaty during her heading of the House of Lords last spring. Catherine Ashton’s job as a Commissioner for Trade might have been more than decent, but the fact that she is barely known outside Europe poses great difficulties to the role EU is supposed to assume on the international political scene.