Since Donald Tusk’s predecessor Herman Van Rompuy left office, the European Union has gone through a series of crises testing countries’ willingness to work together for the common good.

As president of the European Council from 2009 to 2014, Van Rompuy orchestrated the response to the eurozone crisis, one of the EU’s darkest hours since its creation. The fragile stability he left behind him was soon shaken by the resurgent Greek debt crisis, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees and a series of deadly Islamist attacks.

Europe’s diplomats remember Van Rompuy as the paragon of a consensus politician. But the current political climate has caught up with his style of politics: compromise is now more often the result of a series of heavily publicized clashes.

It is a Europe that Van Rompuy believes is facing a “leadership deficit” rather than a democratic deficit.

* * *

In the year since he left power, Van Rompuy has divided his time between university lectures — including at Sciences Po in Paris and the College of Europe in Bruges — and leadership posts such as the presidency of the European Policy Centre, a think-tank close to the EU institutions. He spends most days at the Brussels headquarters of the conservative European People’s Party.

On a drizzly Monday afternoon, he had just wrapped up a brainstorming session in the town of  Vilvoorde with business leaders on the future of retail. An “intellectual exercise,” Van Rompuy called it when POLITICO caught up with him for an interview.

The current EU leadership has little interest in being lectured by a former president and Van Rompuy has been sparing in his media appearances over the past year.

“People think of politicians as typically power-hungry, wedded to power and incapable of giving it up. In that case, I am completely atypical,” he said.

Van Rompuy’s election to the new role of president of the European Council in November 2009 was mostly thanks to things he wasn’t: not from a big EU country, not flamboyant or attention-seeking, not provocative.

“We don’t play a game of winning and losing, no zero-sum game … I will take into consideration the interests and sensitivities of every member state,” he phrased it in his confirmation speech.

Nicknamed “the Belgian submarine,” his approach was appreciated by national leaders always eager to raise their own profiles.

“The fact that I worked discretely had a lot to do with the fact that I was trusted from the start. You build up a relationship of trust in this way, and that’s perhaps essential to perform this role,” he said. “We are not there to make a good impression in the press. We are there to make the EU institutions work.”

It marks a stark difference between the Belgian and his successor, former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk.

“Tusk sees his role as going beyond that of only being a broker of compromises,” said an official at the European Council in an evaluation of the Pole’s first year in office.

Van Rompuy, however, refrained from passing judgement on his successor. “These people have to work in daily circumstances that I am not familiar with,” he said. “I don’t intervene in politics, not even in Belgium. Unless it’s an encoded message, and they’ll have to decode it before it hits home.”

* * *

With the EU facing existential crisis once more, Van Rompuy said he wouldn’t want to change places with Tusk.

“I believe that the migration crisis is a more difficult one than the eurozone crisis. I wouldn’t want to be in Donald Tusk’s shoes,” he said, adding that the human tragedy of the refugees made this a very different challenge.

The Belgian politician expressed gratitude to German Chancellor Angela Merkel for speaking about the refugees “in a humane way. I have missed this a lot at European level — as if it was merely a threat, as if it didn’t concern people in despair.”

 

Too often, he said, the response from leaders in Central and Eastern Europe but also in the west — who are “dominated by fear” — has been to imitate populists and demagogues who have tried to take advantage of the refugee crisis.

“A lot of leaders are confronted with extreme-right movements. They too tend to move to the right, thinking this will block the rise of the far-right,” he said.

Like the huge public debts and deficits that threatened the existence of Europe’s single currency, said Van Rompuy, the refugee crisis has highlighted the lack of instruments to deal with extraordinary circumstances.

“There is a parallel between the eurozone and Schengen [Europe’s passport-free travel zone]. Both are political projects … But both were designed with measures that would cope with normal circumstances — not times of crisis,” he said.

“Leaders have had to come to the conclusion that there was nothing in the toolbox in terms of crisis management nor to prevent such crises to happen in the future. Schengen, too, was destined for normal periods, not for one million people from outside of Europe’s borders.”

Van Rompuy expressed a sense of responsibility and regret for not having taken measures that could have made a difference today: the EU’s failure to craft a coordinated response to civil war in Syria; the drop in funding for refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan that have contributed to a “lost generation” of school-age Syrian kids; inaction after Italy ceased its Mare Nostrum operation to search for and rescue refugees in the Mediterranean.

“It doesn’t sit well that I didn’t do everything in my power to provide an alternative European capacity back then,” he said, airing the idea of a common EU asylum policy while acknowledging that the political climate is not right for such a debate.

* * *

Van Rompuy perfected the art of consensus and compromise in the notoriously complex world of Belgian politics, making his way up through Flemish Christian-Democrat ranks to become a cabinet minister in the mid-nineties and prime minister in 2008, at a time of domestic political deadlock.

It was a career characterized by negotiating tables rather than TV debates and campaign speeches, driven by what he calls his “very high sense of relativism.”

Naturally, he finds it hard to understand why David Cameron put Britain’s future in the EU at stake if his demands for new terms of membership are not met — Van Rompuy called it a “disproportionate” response.

“Cameron does not like the sound of the word ‘compromise’,” he said. “They are not used to that in the U.K., but in the European Union you take compromises on a daily basis.”

The U.K.’s non-membership of the euro, Schengen, EU asylum and migration policy and some social policies means it “already does not belong to the core of Europe,” said Van Rompuy. While many EU leaders can live with Cameron’s demands on the single market, competitiveness and guarantees against being forced to join an “ever closer union,” Van Rompuy believes his wish to limit welfare benefits for EU citizens is possibly “discriminatory.”

Even so, the Belgian master of consensus can see a way ahead for Britain to remain in the EU, if the will is there.

“There is a solution thinkable in which the non-discriminatory principle is respected and at the same time one responds to the misuse of social services,” he said. “But you have to be willing to find that compromise.”