Member states bid for best jobs in Barroso II

José Manuel Barroso faces intense talks as he starts work on assigning jobs in the next Commission.

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso is to hold an intense round of negotiations with the leaders of national governments in the coming week about the formation of his next administration.

Those negotiations will depend on a decision from the leaders tonight (19 November) as to who is to be the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy, because that office carries with it a vice-presidency of the European Commission. Once that name and nationality is known, Barroso will be in a position to assign the other 25 portfolios among those nominated for the post of commissioner. The Commission president is facing competing bids from member states that want to secure for their nominees one of the economics posts in the next Commission.

Barroso is expected to take at least until the end of November to match the proposed commissioners with portfolios. MEPs want a month to prepare the hearings for the 26 commissioners-designate, which are now scheduled to take place in the week starting 11 January.

As European Voice went to press, 22 out of 26 countries had nominated or indicated their candidates to join the administration that will be headed for a second term by Barroso, a former prime minister of Portugal.

Denmark’s government has not decided its candidate, although Connie Hedegaard, currently climate and energy minister, is considered the front-runner. The UK has not yet re-nominated Catherine Ashton, but is expected to do so if Barroso offers her a significant portfolio. Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, said this week that Neelie Kroes, currently the European commissioner for competition, was on a shortlist of candidates. The Greek government has yet to name its candidate.

This week Ireland proposed Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, a member of the European Court of Auditors, and Sweden put forward Cecilia Malmström, the country’s EU affairs minister, bringing the number of female candidates to five. If Ashton and Kroes were to be re-nominated and if Denmark does nominate Hedegaard, there would be a total of eight female candidates.

Campaigners hope that Greece too will nominate a woman. Senior female MEPs have warned that the European Parliament could reject Barroso’s line-up if it does not contain at least as many female commissioners as in the current Commission, ie, eight.

So far there is only one female candidate for the position of president of the European Council, one of the three top EU jobs to be decided at this evening’s summit: Vaira Vik?e-Freiberga, a former president of Latvia. Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian prime minister, remains the leading candidate for the post. The UK government is still pushing the candidacy of Tony Blair while Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a Social Democrat, is also standing.

But the post is expected to go to someone from the centre-right European People’s Party, while the centre-left Party of European Socialists (PES) is expected to take the high representative post.

The PES’s leading candidate for high representative is Massimo d’Alema, a former prime minister and foreign minister of Italy. But he is facing opposition from central and east European countries because of his communist past.