Delors scathing about plans for Union president

Date: 09/10/2003

By Dana Spinant

JACQUES Delors, the former head of the European Commission, has launched a strongly worded attack on plans to create an EU president, one of the centrepiece proposals of the draft constitution produced by the Convention on Europe's future.

"This new European Council president: to do what?", the Frenchman asked rhetorically during an address to young Socialist party members at the European Parliament on Tuesday (7 October).

"What will he do all day? Are we to believe that George Bush will call him?"

Delors believes the US president would still call London, Berlin and Paris to discuss international affairs, and not the proposed new chief.

A former finance minister under François Mitterrand in the 1980s, he describes the creation of an EU president as a "very French idea: they announce a word and think they have sorted out the problem. Diplomats adore this nominalism".

Delors expressed dismay that "the Community method and the European Commission are not treated in the draft constitution as they should be treated to make the EU work".

One of the original contenders for the chairmanship of the Convention - the post went instead to his compatriot Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Delors admitted he was disappointed by the Convention's draft constitution on several counts.

Its meagre proposals concerning the coordination of economic and monetary policy at EU level was an extraordinary oversight in his view. "The [EU's] economic policy cannot be limited to mere surveillance of monetary policy," he argued.

In an earlier interview with a German financial weekly, Delors warned that a failure of the intergovernmental conference to agree on a final constitution draft could trigger the collapse of the EU.