European Union leaders picked the low-key prime minister of Belgium and a British trade representative who has never held elective office as the bloc's first president and foreign minister.
Following weeks of complex back-and-forth discussions, the heads of the 27 EU nations settled quickly on Herman Van Rompuy and Catherine Ashton over dinner in Brussels Thursday after former British prime minister Tony Blair--hoping for a political resurrection--lost the backing of his government.
Blair's withdrawal "made it easy" for the others to settle on Van Rompuy and Baroness Ashton, said Van Rompuy's spokesman.
The choices of two politicians largely unknown outside their home countries suggest the long-held ambitions of some to give the bloc a larger presence on the world stage had been scaled back.
But creating the two top jobs indicated that the EU was badly seeking coherence as it wrestled with thorny domestic and foreign-policy questions--its relationship with Russia, for instance--that often divided its members.
"We live in an exceptionally difficult time," Van Rompuy said, citing the strains of the financial crisis and the challenge of climate change. "A period of anxiety and uncertainty."
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The posts of president and foreign minister were introduced with the EU's Lisbon Treaty, a set of reforms to the bloc's internal functions that had been sought by proponents of a strong, centralized Europe for years and which was ratified after a lengthy struggle just a few weeks ago.
Britain and some other countries initially favored a candidate for president who would generate high wattage in international circles--a description that conveniently matched Blair's description. But his candidacy faced several problems--among them, his support of the Iraq war and lukewarm backing from others on the political left.
Fatefully, he failed to get the backing of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. That raised the chances of lower-profile compromise candidates, such as Van Rompuy and the prime ministers of the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Blair's challenge ended when, sensing that there wasn't enough support for him, Prime Minister Gordon Brown dropped his championing of the man he served as treasury chief for a decade, and put all of Britain's efforts into pushing Baroness Ashton--the EU's trade commissioner. Blair also lost interest when he realized the job was more for a chairman than a higher-profile global figure.
Van Rompuy is, in fact, an accidental holder of his current office. He became prime minister after a tenuous coalition between the country's French and Dutch speakers fell apart. The king of the Belgians turned to Van Rompuy as a conciliator, and he became prime minister.
A haiku-writing intellectual from Belgian's Dutch-speaking north, Van Rompuy is a quiet figure but viewed as a forceful negotiator and a keen seeker of compromise. That is an essential skill in permanently feuding Belgian, which has separate parliaments for its Dutch- and French-speaking regions, and for bilingual Brussels.
"I did not seek this high office," Van Rompuy said Thursday night at a press conference he entered carrying a bouquet of yellow flowers. "But from this evening, I will assume it with conviction and with enthusiasm."
Before becoming prime minister in late 2008, his last turn in the spotlight came as budget minister in the 1990s, when he had the task of ushering the Belgian franc out and the euro in.
The choice of Van Rompuy, who ended up in the prime minister's office only after months of wrangling, is likely to return Belgian politics to a state of turmoil. He was one of the few Belgians able to gather support from the fractious French and Dutch language groups in the country.
Baroness Ashton, made a peer in 1999 by the Labour government, went on to hold a number of junior ministerial roles in education and the ministry of justice before being made the leader of the House of Lords for the Labour Party in 2007. When Peter Mandelson quit his role as EU Trade Commissioner to return to U.K. government, Brown replaced him with Baroness Ashton in Brussels.
Margaret McDonagh, who as Labour peer worked with Baroness Ashton, said she believes her former colleague would be a good choice for the role.
"She is somebody that can develop relationships very quickly. A no-nonsense person," she said.
Baroness Ashton is almost unknown in the U.K., let alone internationally.
Earlier this month, Andrew McGuinness arranged for her to speak in front of senior British business people at a central London restaurant and found them "unfamiliar" with her. Having demonstrated her "grip of" her work, "they told me they were surprised that someone with that level of competence wasn't more familiar to them," said McGuinness, chief executive of advertising agency BMB.
Not everybody agrees with the choice. Dan Hannon, who is a Member of European Parliament for Britain's Conservative Party, said Baroness Ashton's appointment is wrong, given that she has never won an election and that this symbolizes the undemocratic nature of the EU.
As much as the job description has been watered down over the years it took for a president to be appointed, even making a choice is a victory for European federalists who have long held the vision of a union represented in the world by a single leader.
That desire became more acute earlier this decade as the EU prepared to add 10 new countries, mostly from Europe's ex-Communist east. Internal factions that mostly revolved and reshuffled around the views of a few big countries--France, the U.K., Germany--were set to become vastly more complicated.
To federalists, it was the ideal time to put one person in charge.
The notion of a full-time president--partially replacing and partially grafted on top of the EU's system of rotations, under which each country sits in the chair for six months--arose in the attempts to write an EU constitution.
The constitution failed, but the positions of president and the foreign minister survived in the Lisbon Treaty, a tortuously negotiated, watered-down constitution that was finally approved by governments in 2007.
Getting the Lisbon Treaty formally passed was no mean feat. Irish voters--the only ones to get a referendum--snubbed it in June 2008, and the EU had to wait more than a year before slinking back and asking the Irish to do it again. The second Irish vote approved the treaty, but then EU leaders had to deal with euroskeptic Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who refused for weeks to sign it before relenting earlier this month.
During the long wait for the Irish re-vote, and the exasperating respite beholden to Klaus's, EU leaders had little public debate over who should be the president.
But once the ink was dry on the Lisbon Treaty, the floodgate of names opened. Besides Van Rompuy and Blair, the Dutch and Luxemburg prime ministers figured in the discussions.
So did former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez. Tweaked that the east was left out of the ring, Latvia's Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Estonia's Toomas Hendrik Ilves raised their hands. From across the Atlantic, the EU's ambassador to Washington, John Bruton, also tossed in his hat.
Once the leaders met, the decision came rapidly. Both of the winners were backed unanimously.
The emergence of Baroness Ashton late in the day achieved a number of concurrent objectives. With the conservative European governments seeking one of their own as president, this meant the foreign minister would have come from the socialist bloc. A woman was sought also to achieve "gender balance."
UK Prime Minister Brown said he still believed Blair would have been a good president but that political parties "became more important than people expected." He emphasized the importance of the foreign minister's position because that person is also vice president of the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.
Indeed, European officials say the foreign minister's role could turn out to be more important than that of president. As well as having an important role in the commission and leading European foreign policy, there is a significant budget envisaged for the foreign minister's department.
One European official said the foreign minister's department would be responsible for a diplomatic corps and staff of close to 3,000 people, and would be likely to grow, and also was in charge of the European Union's military missions overseas. Her annual budget could come to EUR4 billion, this person said.