European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said Friday he has the support of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to stay in his post and took a swipe at France's left-wing opposition.
The 53-year-old Portuguese conservative's mandate expires in October, but he is expected to seek a second five-year term despite the European Union's struggle to reform and criticism of his response to the financial crisis.
Barroso is backed by E.U. heavyweights Germany and the U.K., but France's Sarkozy has called for a decision on the presidency to be delayed until after Ireland's second referendum on the Lisbon treaty, due later this year.
The E.U. has been in political limbo since French and Dutch voters rejected its first draft constitution in 2005. Last year, the blueprint's slimmed-down successor, the Lisbon Treaty, was rejected by voters in Ireland.
If Irish voters back Lisbon, the work of the commission's E.U. bureaucracy will be streamlined to deal with decision-making in the now 27-member bloc. But if they again reject the treaty, further turmoil beckons.
France's reluctance to rush into a decision on the president's post had been interpreted in some quarters as lukewarm support for Barroso, but the incumbent told Europe 1 radio that he had no reason to doubt Sarkozy.
"President Sarkozy has said it several times publicly and privately. I have no doubts about it," he said, when asked if France backed him, adding that the attacks on him in France have come from opposition figures.
"There are French politicians, for domestic reasons, who have decided to be in opposition, and they've attacked me personally, which is truly unpleasant," he complained.
Campaigning ahead of June elections for the European Parliament, French Socialists have accused the Portuguese right-winger of being too wedded to free-market ideas to respond to the financial crisis.
But Barroso demanded to know why, in that case, other European left-wing leaders such as Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown still supported him.