EU to discuss top jobs next week

Sweden calls extra summit on 19 November to select an EU president and foreign policy chief.

Fredrik Reinfeldt, the prime minister of Sweden, has called an extra summit of EU leaders on 19 November to agree who should occupy three top EU jobs, including the EU’s first personal presidency.

Sweden, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, said that “it is hoped” that the EU’s 27 national leaders will be able to agree over a working dinner who should be the president of the European Council, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, and the secretary-general of the secretariat of the Council of Ministers, the EU institution through which national ministers reach shared positions.

In a statement, Reinfeldt said that he had completed a first round of consultations with EU leaders on who they wanted to appoint to the three posts. It had been widely expected in Brussels that the extra summit would be called only when an agreement on the three posts was close.

EU leaders meeting in Brussels for a summit on 29-30 October agreed that the president of the European Council, the forum in which EU leaders meet, should come from a party that is a member of the European Parliament’s centre-right European People’s Party, while the high representative should come from the Parliament’s centre-left Party of European Socialists.

Both are new posts created by the Treaty of Lisbon, which was ratified by the last of the EU’s 27 member states – the Czech Republic – on 3 November.

The front-runners for the presidency are believed to be Herman van Rompuy, Belgium’s prime minister, and his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende.

David Miliband, the UK’s foreign minister, has been viewed as the leading candidate for the post of high representative, who will also be a vice-president of the European Commission. However, his candidature has been thrown into doubt by reports from close associates that he is not interested in the post.

The other leading socialist candidate for the position of high representative, Massimo d’Alema, a former prime minister and foreign minister of Italy, is facing strong opposition from Poland because of his communist past. Other governments believe he has been too pro- Palestinian.

Other socialist candidates include Adrian Severin, a former deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Romania, and Anna Diamantapoulou, a former European commissioner who is currently Greece’s education minister.