What difference will Europe’s new leadership team make?

Opinion by Denis MacShane          

As elsewhere in today’s EU affairs, the new leadership team has Made-in-Berlin firmly stamped on the package.  Donald Tusk, the president of the Council, is Angela Merkel’s favourite among her EPP cohort of prime ministers.    

He speaks Polish and Kaszubian, the dialect of the small region of Kaszubia behind Gdansk where peasant farmers drive hard bargains and the local Uklad (cabal) of local dignatories in town halls, judiciary, police and media control planning permissions and keep power firmly in their own hands.

Tusk’s Civic Platform Poland has been reasonably successful.  He nationalized the pension system and business-political corruption remains a real problem. The last decade’s mass emigration of two million Poles has held down unemployment figures. Remittances from richer welfare states in West Europe have helped the Polish state budget.  In 2010, I shared a platform with Tusk at the high-powered Krynica conference held each September at the Carpathian resort and which is now the Davos of East Europe. The Polish prime minister said then Poland would soon join the Euro. His finance minister, the Brit-Pole Jacek Rostowski, however hung on to the zloty whose low value has allowed Poland to both export and to keep up the flow of German industrial investment.

Tusk speaks European if not a second European language. He agrees with Angela Merkel on the need to defend brown coal,  highly polluting lignite,  which Poland depends on for energy. In fact, no-one can recall any major difference between Tusk and Merkel. Tusk has told President Hollande he will spend his first months learning French and English. Anyone who has tried to achieve working fluency in a foreign language from scratch will know it is easier to promise this in language school adverts than to achieve.

Having an EU president who cannot yet speak a second major EU language will leave ever more power in the hands of national EU leaders, which suits most of them.

Even David Cameron backed Tusk. This was not a sudden switch to Europeanism on the part of the UK prime minister. With Tusk in Brussels, Cameron’s main European friend, the head of the Eurosceptic PiS (Law and Justice) party in Poland, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, now looks more than ever certain to win power in 2015.

If Cameron keeps power next year the two ends of Europe will be in the hands of Eurosceptic prime ministers. With an EPP president of the Commission in the form of Merkel’s nominee Jean-Claude Juncker, another EPPer , Donald Tusk, now President of the Council and with Merkel backing Spain’s Luiz de Guindos, the ruling Partido Popular finance minister  as head of the Eurozone group, the EPP has placed three of its own in key EU leadership positions.

The Liberals have been squeezed, the Greens marginalized and the populist xenophobic parties like Britain’s UKIP, France’s Marine le Pen and other anti-EU parties excluded.

The left in the Party of European Socialists have a modest compensation prize in the arrival of Frederica Mogherini from Italy as successor to the PES’s Catherine Ashton. There were fears that Signorina Mogherini would be too soft on Putin as Rome, whether under Silvio Berlusconi or Matteo Renzi, never challenges the Kremlin. But with the Polish Tusk in place with his clearer understanding of what Putinismo means, she is likely to divert her attention of other world problems that concern the EU.

Her master’s thesis was about relgion and politics in modern societies. With the rise and rise of Islamist ideology now taking an extreme turn in Iraq, she may devote her five years in office in working out how to tackle the growth of Salifist and Islamist ideology which is as much about the internal politics of Muslim communities in Europe as it is about actual armed conflict in the Middle East.

When the Lisbon Treaty, drawing from the abandoned EU constitutional treaty, brought into being the new posts in Europe of president or foreign policy chief it was hoped this would help create a more political Europe alongside single market economic Europe.

These hopes have come to naught. Europe is now centrifugal with national leaders displacing the Commission and while being polite to Herman Van Rompuy and Catherine Ashton not really interested in their existence.

Can Tusk and Mogherini change that? To paraphase Gramsci, pessimism of the intelligence seems more realistic than optimism of the will.

Denis MacShane is the UK’s former minister for Europe.

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