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The extraordinary EU summit on 30 August, which was expected to put together “the full puzzle” of the EU top jobs for the next five years, will only decide on the successors of Council President Herman Van Rompuy, and EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, sources told EurActiv today (26 August). Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission President-elect, is reported to be convinced that it is not possible to decide on the composition of the future Commission before leaders decide who will succeed Van Rompuy and Ashton. If the summit decides on the two top jobs, it is expected that Juncker would...

Having public candidates for the Commission presidency during the next EU elections is not the panacea for Europe’s credibility woes, says European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. While European parties look for figureheads for their EU election campaigns, the president of the European Council feels this will not resolve Europe’s democratic deficit. “You don’t have to look for solutions to things that aren’t a problem. To go and look for ‘faces’ to guide the EU: that’s not a solution,” Van Rompuy said at a debate last Thursday (10 October). … Giving his predictions for the upcoming May 2014 elections at...

Herman Van Rompuy, European Council President, issued his strongest warning yet to Britain, saying in a speech in London yesterday (28 February) that the EU’s door was open to those in the club who want to leave. … … Van Rompuy laced his speech in London’s financial district with a clear warning to Cameron: Europe will not countenance any attempt by Britain to win an ‘a-la-carte’ membership, picking and choosing which of the European Union’s rules it will follow and which to reject. He cautioned Prime Minister David Cameron that the bloc’s other leaders do not want to renegotiate Europe’s...

A new ideas paper on progress towards further EU integration highlights the shifting power sands for national parliaments, as the European Parliament is set to become the principal democratic guardian of a future EU. The paper—put together by EU council president Herman Van Rompuy and published Thursday (6 December)—lays out a loose time framework for achieving “genuine economic and monetary union.” In a section entitled democratic legitimacy and accountability—the section itself is an acknowledgement of the how the issue has moved up the political agenda—the paper notes that the one of “guiding principles” is that democratic control should happen at...

Directly electing the European Commission President at the 2014 EU elections would “organize the disappointment in advance”, said European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. Directly electing his own successor would be “even more absurd”, he added in comments that are likely to irritate proponents of increased democracy in the European institutions. Van Rompuy’s statement, made at a public conference in Brussels on Wednesday (28 November), runs in direct opposition with the EU’s major political families, who in their majority, would like to “give faces” to the next European elections in May 2014. But Van Rompuy warned that the “huge legitimacy”...

EU leaders yesterday offered Egypt more than €1 billion ($1.31 billion) in aid and the prospect of better terms of trade during the first visit to Brussels by an Egyptian president. Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, emphasized the importance of consolidating Egypt's transition to democracy, saying: “Success in Egypt would have positive repercussions on the region as a whole.” After his meeting with Egypt's Mohammad Morsi, Van Rompuy described Egypt “as a friend, a neighbor, a partner” that could count on EU support during its democratic transition. …

In Europe things are getting uglier and uglier. The economy is in a free fall and the EU will try to use the crisis for yet another power grab, reducing our national democracies to nought. In the toy parliament, the democratic fig leaf of the European Union, only one man is speaking for the peoples: Nigel Farage.

The European Union's Lisbon Treaty has come into force with the aim of streamlining EU decision-making. The first EU president also took office along with the bloc's new foreign policy chief. The European Union welcomed the Lisbon Treaty with a ceremony in Lisbon, Portugal where the text was first signed. Getting all 27 EU states to ratify it however, was a long and arduous process that was only completed last month. The new treaty lays out a series of fundamental changes within the European Union, including creating the bloc's first permanent president. That job has gone to former Belgian prime...

A new-look leadership structure designed to streamline the European Union begins in earnest on Friday when Spain assumes the rotating presidency alongside the bloc's first president, Herman Van Rompuy. But as Spain's prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Van Rompuy and the head of the EU commission José Manuel Barroso jostle for position at the bloc's top table, critics say that the situation is risks becoming more hydra than hybrid. .... Van Rompuy's position was created under the terms of the EU's Lisbon Treaty, which also creates the role of a foreign policy and security supremo, a post that the...

It wasn’t so long ago that Barack Obama’s speeches were being hailed as “extraordinary” “rhetorical magic” (Joe Klein in Time) that should be “required reading in classrooms” (Bob Herbert in the New York Times). Pity the poor grade-schoolers who have to be on the bus at 5 a.m. for a daylong slog through the 4,000-word sludge of the president’s Nobel thank you. Rich Lowry, my boss at National Review, writes that Obama has become a “crashingly banal” bore. The good news is that he “is not nearly as dull as, say, Herman van Rompuy.” Who? Oh, come on. Herman van...

The saying goes… “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t after me!” And indeed those who have tried to warn us of a coming one world rule have been roundly criticized, patronized and ostracized to the point of exclusion from any intelligent debate regarding the subject. Fact is the subject of one world government is treated as if it is some science fiction notion. Which begs the question, how does anyone who pooh-poohs the idea of one world government explain the comments coming from the newly installed president of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy who as a...