Moderate at helm in drastic times
THOSE of acertain age will recall a young Belgian of modest proportions by the name of Tintin.
The tousled-haired hero performed heroic acts, foiling exotic villains. Tintin was Belgian, as was his creator, Herge.
Another Belgian of modest stature — although without the quiff — is playing a part in a drama that threatens to engulf us all — the European sovereign debt crisis.
His name is Herman Van Rompuy and he is a former Belgian prime minister, thrust centrestage as president of the European Council in November 2009.
Van Rompuy has been hailed as a skilled negotiator and a quietly determined politician.
As Belgian budget minister through much of the 1990s, he helped drag the country’s economy back from the abyss. When he took on the job in 1993, Belgian debt stood at 135% of national output.
Four years after he left the job, in 1999, it had fallen below 100%
In 2008, he was called back by the country’s head of state, King Albert to serve as prime minister amid growing signs that the country was tearing itself apart.
As PM, he proved adept at balancing the warring Flemish and French-speaking Belgians before receiving the summons to become president of the European Council
He will need all these skills as he sets out to pull together an increasingly fractious and embattled eurozone at a time when financial markets are tumbling and the very future of the euro appears to be in the melting pot.
Van Rompuy has attracted controversy despite a personal preference for conflict avoidance. He has been painted in the media as a rival to European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso.
The media have made hay with the fact that the two men travelled to G20 conferences in separate jets.
The implication was that the two main spokesmen for Europe simply could not stand each other, though no concrete evidence of this has ever emerged.
The job the balding, bespectacled van Rompuy occupies came into being following the passage into law of the Lisbon Treaty. The Irish electorate held up the enactment of the Treaty in June of 2008.
We were feeling rather more self-confident then, but later mended our ways and approved the Treaty through following a rerun of the vote.
This enforced delay allowed Van Rompuy to enter the frame for the newly created post of Council President, a job which he secured against competition from former British prime minister, Tony Blair. Our former Taoiseach, John Bruton, also indicated a willingness to serve, but his candidacy was stymied by the sheer steepness of the descent in our nation’s reputation. The former prime minister of Spain, Felipe González, was also suggested.
Blair was vetoed by France and Germany, who did not want a big — and rather narcissistic — political beast to take up residence in the Brussels jungle.
The German and French leaders, Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, continue to view themselves as the great centres of Europe, heading up the great powerhouses which will decide the destiny of a continent. They favour the selection of individuals for top EU jobs who come from smaller countries, and are low-profile, inoffensive, not well-placed to threaten their own ascendancy.
Van Rompuy fitted that bill.
It was Barroso, along with EU Budget Minister Olli Rehn, who went out on a limb to support an easing the terms of the EU/IMF bailout deal in the face of opposition from the French, Germans and European Central Bank.
Van Rompuy has preferred to operate behind the scenes, and when he has spoken out, he has done so while sticking by and large to the script prepared in Berlin and Paris
He has repeatedly defended the austerity programmes pressed on to the heavily indebted Euro states, describing worries that economic growth would be choked by such programmes as “exaggerated”. His apparent biddability has found favour with the powers that be.
This week, Merkel and Sarkozy met to pronounce, yet again, on the future of Europe. They pressed for more co-ordination and proposed a new expanded role as coordinator of a nascent fiscal union for Herman Van Rompuy.
They ruled out a resort to the issue of eurobonds as a means of allowing struggling EU states such as Italy and Spain to borrow at much lower rates, stressing the need for the implementation of much tighter fiscal controls along with national constitutional bans on deficits.
For now, it will be left to the European Central Bank to prop up eurozone sovereigns under particular pressure from the markets.
The financial markets, awaiting a pronouncement on eurobonds, designed to prop up confidence, were less than impressed and share prices began to tank.
When Van Rompuy was name checked for the job as EC President, the reaction in the British press and among eurosceptic politicians was fairly scathing. The Times dismissed him as a “harmless nice guy” who writes haikus.
Much was made of his Roman Catholicism.
The paper quoted a piece of verse penned by Van Rompuy: “A fly zooms, buzzes : Spins and is lost in the room. He does no one harm.” The writer helpfully compared the Belgian to the insect.
He has attracted more than his share of insults from the eurosceptics, who prefer to ignore the fact that Van Rompuy is a politician of the old school who likes best to operate behind the scenes.
He has been a fixture in Belgian politics since the 1970s, when he headed up the youth wing of the Christian Democrat Party of Flanders. This province is now highly prosperous and hard-working. The Christian Democrats have had to face a growing threat from a strong secessionist movement, the Vlaams Blok, since the 1970s.
Van Rompuy is used to maintaining the centre ground against pressure from the extremes.
However, the pressure of events is pushing Europe as a whole to choose between the extremes of closer integration involving a fiscal union with all that entails in terms of tax harmonisation, and an uncontrolled disintegration of the eurozone.
The founding father of the single market, Jacques Delors, now 86, has warned of a collapse in the EU project as a whole if the eurozone disintegrates.
Van Rompuy would be no doubt uncomfortable with such declarations, yet the real sense remains that Europe has reached a crossroads.
At such points in history, what is required is not an astute backroom boy but rather leaders in the mould of Churchill or de Gaulle, or even Helmut Kohl or Francois Mitterand, people of huge stature who can drag their peoples forward by sheer force of personality.
Such leaders are lacking right now in Europe and it seems unlikely that a modest Belgian political fixer, however talented, can fill this yawning gap.
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