EC/PRESIDENCY: The Portuguese candidate is the least offensive option for Commission president, writes Denis Staunton
After almost two weeks of sniping, backbiting, bullying and horse-trading, Europe's leaders have united behind Portugal's prime minister, Mr José Manuel Durão Barroso, as the best candidate to succeed Mr Romano Prodi as President of the European Commission.
In Mr Durão, they have chosen an expert in international relations who speaks four languages well and has a distinguished record as a conciliator and negotiator. The Portuguese prime minister is also one of the least charismatic national leaders in Europe today and an unpopular figure in his own country, which he has led through two of the unhappiest years in its post-revolutionary history.
The secretive, bad-tempered and divisive process of selecting a new Commission president cannot have enhanced the EU's reputation among its citizens. It has left a number of excellent candidates humiliated and will not encourage senior politicians who value their personal dignity to make themselves available for top EU posts in the future.
Mr Durão came through the process as the least offensive option rather than the positive choice of most leaders, making the task of asserting his authority as Commission President more difficult.
Assuming the leadership of the Commission after Mr Prodi's uninspiring five years in office, Mr Durão faces a number of daunting challenges. He must seek to restore morale within the Commission following unpopular internal reform and attempt to restore the Commission President's political authority among EU leaders.
The first two years of Mr Durão's tenure will be dominated by a debate over the EU's next seven-year budget plan in which the union's net contributors are arguing for tighter spending limits. A month after Mr Durão takes office in November, EU leaders will address the controversial question of whether to begin accession negotiations with Turkey.
A former Maoist student leader who now leads a centre-right party and shares power with the far-right, Mr Durão has shown great flexibility throughout his political career. As a junior foreign minister, he helped to broker a peace deal that ended the civil war in Angola and he later played an important role in negotiations leading to the independence of East Timor.
A keen Atlanticist who supported the US-led war in Iraq and organised a pre-war summit with President George Bush and his allies on the Azores, Mr Durão avoided alienating anti-war European leaders and has maintained close contact throughout the conflict with the French President, Mr Jacques Chirac.
Not all of Portugal's recent misfortunes can be laid at Mr Durão's door and he is entirely blameless where two are concerned - the forest fires that laid waste five per cent of the country and a scandal surrounding the sexual exploitation of orphaned children. Mr Durão must, however, take full responsibility for the austerity measures he introduced to bring Portugal's budget deficit within the limit of 3 per cent of GDP imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact.
Mr Durão has described the budgetary situation he inherited from the Socialists in 2002 as "the most serious crisis in Portugal's history since the beginning of the new democracy in 1974".
Mr Durão's antidote - a mixture of spending cuts, tax increases, privatisation programmes and civil service reform - succeeded in reducing the deficit but almost doubled unemployment. The opposition Socialists won a resounding victory in this month's European election. Despite his tough economic policies, Mr Durão claims to be a moderate, rejecting charges that he is a neo-liberal ideologue.
"I'm a reformist, not a revolutionary, a centrist, not a free-market fundamentalist," he said this year.
Mr Durão is expected to take a less confrontational approach than Mr Prodi in dealing with the EU's biggest member states and he has avoided criticising France and Germany for their flouting of the Stability Pact's rules.
His low key approach could prove useful in the Commission's dealings with national governments but as European governments seek to persuade citizens to approve the new constitutional treaty, some may wish for a more charismatic leader in Brussels.