Austrian German Friendship Is Still Alive
It has been a long time since the Brussels scene was so abuzz, for nothing livens up the city more that a good session of gossip, intrigue, plotting and scheming, for this is what the EU does best. The long running soap opera of choosing the President is made even better by adding a High Representative into the mix. Oh how we all love going through the matrix, looking for patterns along the lines of, ‘If the President is from the North and large, the HR must be from small and South. Or possibly East’ and so on.
The race has been made even more impenetrable by the virtual candidacy of Tony Blair, whose spokesmen are still claiming not to be campaigning as the job doesn’t exist. Meanwhile British diplomats are having more discrete lunches than their livers can stand and articles in the press are appearing, all from Blair’s buddies. Junker announced his candidacy, not directly, but by proclaiming that the EU needed a President who had the very qualities he found in himself. Remarkable coincidence.
But some names are ruling themselves out, sometimes with some considerable wiggle room. Mary Robinson withdrew from a popular internet based campaign and David Milliband was doing all the right things until he suddenly withdrew – via Twitter, how very modern. One can only wonder what sweetener was given to the boy David to drop his bid, done so that he didn’t get in the way of Blair. Could it be the Labour leadership, this winter? Blair is the man to beat and the discussion rages on choosing a global figure or a more modest chairman. On paper, it looks like the HR has the potential to be the more powerful figure, but, being the EU, they still haven’t sorted out what the job description is yet.
But if they want someone who “will stop the traffic in Beijing”, then Blair might be a bit small, a touch tarnished by his past. There is another towering European from a mid-sized country, who has experience in government and would stop the traffic all over the world and he has good relations with the US and a reputation for looking for consensus between party lines. Who should Europe select to represent them? Step forward Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California.
