Nicole Fontaine, Pat Cox's predecessor as president of the European Parliament, describes her job to Lara Marlowe
Nicole Fontaine knows Pat Cox well. Her book, My Battles at the Presidency of the European Parliament, to be published on January 17th, calls him "open and consensus-seeking" and before his election yesterday, she was confident that he would win. "It would be astonishing if he didn't," she says.
She boasted that her election in July 1999 marked the first democratic presidential poll in the Strasbourg assembly for at least a decade. Until then, the conservative European People's Party (EPP) grouping, to which she belongs, had a cosy arrangement with the socialists to pass the top office back and forth between them.
But in 1999, the liberals - whom Mr Cox leads - agreed to vote for Ms Fontaine if the EPP would returned the favour yesterday.
Despite the wheeling and dealing, Ms Fontaine's election was a surprise. French socialist MEPs said they were "socialists before they were French" and preferred the former Portuguese president, Mario Soares. "Mr Soares was stunned when Mrs Fontaine beat him, 306 to 200, and had the bad grace to tell Portuguese radio that her inaugural address was a discurso de dona da casa - "a housewife's speech".
Ms Fontaine, a grandmother who turns 60 today, spent the first 12 years of her career defending the interests of Catholic schools in France and could hardly be called a rabid feminist. Yet she is proud to have been only the second female president of the parliament - 20 years after another French woman, Simone Weil, was elected.
Ms Fontaine probably owed her success to the 30 per cent of MEPs who are women, and dedicated her victory to them. Defending women's rights may not be Mr Cox's top priority, but Ms Fontaine believes he will follow the four main goals she outlined in the speech which Mr Soares criticised so insultingly.
They include imposing wider recognition of the parliament's powers; achieving internal reforms which will render it more transparent and more efficient; bringing European citizens closer to their institutions and "making the parliament the strong voice of the citizens of Europe on the international stage".
As we speak, Ms Fontaine adds a fifth goal - keeping the upper hand in the unending battle with EU bureaucracy. "I'd tell my successor to preserve the ground I've gained so that the technocrats don't take root again."
She wants Mr Cox to defend what she calls "a huge victory" - the inclusion of the president of the European parliament on the "family photo" at EU summits. The Finnish and Portuguese presidencies resisted her overtures. It took the French presidency in the second semester of 2000 - and the intervention of her mentor President Jacques Chirac - to attain a slot in the photo opportunity. Is this, one wonders, what Europe is about?
HER "greatest disappointment", Ms Fontaine says, was "the misunderstanding with the German delegation of my own political grouping the EPP, which I never managed to dissipate".
The bad blood started when she made one of her frequent and impassioned political declarations, denouncing the election victory of Jorg Haider's far right-wing Freedom Party in Austria. It worsened when she attempted to achieve a "members' statute" which would unify pay and benefits for all MEPs; at present each of the 15 has a different national pay scale.
Paris asked Ms Fontaine to make a special effort under the French presidency. Based on a proposal from the German socialist Willi Rothley, she drew up a plan that would have adopted an average amount.
"The reaction of my German colleagues was terrible," she recalls. "I received a letter from the head of the German delegation accusing me of plotting with the French minister [for European affairs\] and of attacking the dignity of European parliamentarians. When I travelled to Germany a few months later, I learned in the Bundestag that German and Italian MEPs earn more than any others, and they had the most to lose."
As a neutral Irishman, Mr Cox's relations with the single largest contingent of MEPs will not be fraught with the historical complexities of Franco-German relations. Yet for all her difficulties with the Germans, Ms Fontaine praises their skill in using the assembly to further national interests.
The French "do not carry the weight they ought to," she says. Ninety-five per cent of Germany's 99 MEPs belong to one of the two main parliamentary groupings; 33 of France's 87 MEPs are independents. Not only are the French incapable of working together, Ms Fontaine complains, they use the European Parliament as an "elephants' cemetery" for political has-beens or as a nursery for promising novice politicians.
She recalls praise from an old-timer in her own party, the centre-right UDF: "Nicole, you've worked so hard in the European Parliament that now you deserve a term in the National Assembly."
She says she'll wait a long time for the day when a Paris deputy is told he has earned a seat in Strasbourg.
Ms Fontaine took her foreign policy role very seriously, travelling to eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The high point of her office, she says, was receiving the Afghan leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, in Strasbourg in April 2001.
"I encouraged him in his fight against the Taliban," she says, adding that her gesture forced the French foreign minister to receive Massoud as well.
When he was assassinated five months later, presumably by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation, the Northern Alliance sent a special emissary to tell Ms Fontaine he was dead, six days before the official announcement.
She led brave campaigns against the death penalty in the US and against the American use of cluster bombs in Afghanistan. King Juan Carlos wept when he thanked her for her stand against assassinations by the Basque group ETA.
However, when the late Palestinian statesman Faisal Husseini wanted her to meet him at Orient House in East Jerusalem, her courage failed. She claims she spent a sleepless night and decided that it was not up to the president of the European Parliament "to make a symbolic act where other [European] institutions didn't dare".
Lara Marlowe is Paris Correspondent of The Irish Times