European Union leaders have picked Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy as the first president of the 27-nation bloc and Britain’s Catherine Ashton as chief diplomat, appointing a team unlikely to overshadow national governments.
President Dmitry Medvedev sent congratulatory notes to Van Rompuy and Ashton on Friday, saying he hoped that the appointments would help further the cooperative talks between Moscow and Brussels, most recently in Stockholm last week.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov praised Ashton, the EU trade commissioner, for her fairness in dealing with Moscow. Ashton has been a key figure in Russia’s World Trade Organization accession talks over the past year.
With former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s bid for the top post derailed by opposition, Van Rompuy, 62, was tapped as a conciliator who helped prevent Belgium from breaking up. Ashton, 53, emerged as a last-minute compromise.
The selection late Thursday of two politicians with two years’ combined experience at their current posts prompted criticism that the region is falling short of its goal of boosting its clout.
“They are both going to be behind-the-scenes people who won’t take the initiative and won’t be reckoned with on the global stage,” said Fredrik Erixon, director of the Brussels-based European Center for International Political Economy.
The horse-trading at a summit in Brussels also set the stage for the award of top jobs at the European Commission, which regulates the EU’s $15 trillion economy. It may influence who is named to oversee financial markets and anti-monopoly rules and to succeed Jean-Claude Trichet as president of the European Central Bank in 2011.
(Bloomberg, MT)
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