Portugal: Portuguese Prime Minister Mr José Manuel Durao Barroso, the frontrunner to be president of the European Commission, imposed a tough austerity cure on his country after it breached EU budget rules.
Unforgiving electors in Portugal punished his centre-right party in European Parliament elections this month, but that did not stop the multilingual trained lawyer from becoming a top contender for the Brussels job.
Mr Durao Barroso (48), who has been prime minister only two years, surfaced as a possible consensus candidate to succeed Mr Romano Prodi as European Commission president after more experienced leaders fell by the wayside or cancelled each other out.
"I'm a reformist, not a revolutionary; a centrist, not a free-market fundamentalist," he said this year.
His main drawback for critics in the EU is that he supported the US-led invasion of Iraq despite popular opposition at home.
On the eve of the war in March 2003, he hosted a summit of Mr Bush and his main European allies - Britain and Spain - on the Azores Islands.
Mr Durao Barroso is not seen as a European visionary, either of the federalist or the nationalist variety. Like the leaders of other smaller EU countries, he backs strong, equal rights for member-states - particularly small, cash-strapped ones like his own - and a well-funded European Commission to back the weak and poor.
With the expansion of the EU from 15 to 25 member-states last month, Portugal is worried about competition from the newcomers with their low-wage work forces, and about losing EU regional aid to poorer east European countries.
It also faces pressure from larger states; such as France and Germany, which are keen to move towards faster integration.
To protect Lisbon's influence, Mr Durao Barroso, a former foreign minister, pressed for references in the EU constitution agreed this month to the principle of equality between member-states.
"We have to avoid any fragmentation between founding states and newcomers, between the centre and the periphery or between the rich and the poor," he told the Financial Times in March.
Despite a recession, he put in place tough austerity measures after ousting the socialist government in 2002 to bring a ballooning deficit inside euro-zone limits.
His government, which relies on the support of a small right-wing Eurosceptical party, is also reforming the civil service and other sectors. In spite of his cost-cutting policies, Mr Durao Barroso opposes capping EU spending, of which Portugal is a big beneficiary.
In March, the father of three told France's Le Monde daily that he wanted a European Commission that was "strong and representative of all national sensitivities". The president should be chosen for "competence and experience in European matters", as opposed to political balance.
Ironically, he may become head of the EU executive precisely because of those political balance factors.