Going out on a high note

Date: 26/06/1997

FOR Foreign Minister Jacques Poos, Luxembourg's presidency of the EU during the second half of this year represents perhaps his last opportunity to occupy the centre of the European stage. He is likely to relish every minute of it.

This will be Poos' third spell as president of the Council of Ministers and one which will have to tackle some crucial EU issues: whether, and if so how, monetary union goes ahead; the questions left unsettled by the Amsterdam summit; and preparing for the launch of enlargement negotiations with applicants from central and eastern Europe.

For sheer drama, though, the next six months are unlikely to match Poos' last turn in the chair.

That was between January and June 1991, when confrontation in the Gulf turned into a war to liberate Kuwait, followed by the start of the disintegration of Bosnia. In these events he played a prominent - if not always successful - role.

Poos' long career in government (he first became a minister in 1976, and has been deputy prime minister since 1984) is expected to come to an end at the latest at the June 1999 general election, when he will have just turned 64.

However, it is widely believed that he would welcome the opportunity to take up a job with an international profile when he leaves government. Alternatively, he could follow a long tradition and step into a top post in Luxembourg's business sector, which is always ready to accommodate the great and the good when they quit politics.

Jacques François Poos (he insists on the American-style use of his middle initial) is a somewhat unlikely figure to have dominated Socialist politics in Luxembourg for the past couple of decades, with his patrician manner - punctuated, it is true, by occasional outbursts of hot temper - and a curriculum vitae which includes a spell as a banker during a pause in his government career.

At least, though, he does boast of some experience in the real world, unlike many of his colleagues including Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker. Out of 12 Luxembourg ministers, only four have actually worked in the private sector.

It is appropriate that Poos will help oversee the final push toward a single currency, because economics, finance and Europe have been intertwined throughout his career, starting with a thesis on Luxembourg in the Common Market which earned him a doctorate in economics from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in 1961.

He began his career as a civil servant in the ministry of economic affairs, including a spell in research for the Luxembourg government's statistical service, before being selected at the age of 29 to head the trade union-owned Imprimerie Coopérative printworks and the daily newspaper of Luxembourg's left, Tageblatt.

Observers of today's smooth diplomatic figure may find it hard to imagine that under Poos, the Tageblatt was a stridently partisan propaganda weapon.

This was especially true after 1968 when a grand coalition between the conservative Christian Social Party (CSV) and the Socialist Workers' Party (LSAP), which was supported by the newspaper, broke up in acrimony and the Socialists were consigned to a spell in opposition.

One of the most celebrated incidents of that period led to the downfall of Luxembourg's first-ever woman minister, the CSV's Madeleine Frieden-Kinnen, after the Tageblatt published a photograph of her sunbathing with a naked priest.

Poos was widely blamed for dragging political debate into the gutter, but that did not stop him being elected as a member of parliament in 1974 and being called into government two years later to become finance minister under Premier Gaston Thorn, filling the shoes of Raymond Vouel, who left politics to become a member of the European Commission.

Poos held the post until 1979, when the Socialists lost heavily in the general election and were again pushed into opposition.

During the five years his party was out of power, Poos became a director first of Banque Continentale du Luxembourg and then of Banque Paribas Luxembourg.

His involvement carries a slight whiff of controversy today following recent accusations by a Belgian diplomat that Banque Continentale was used as a conduit for money laundering by the Iraqi-owned General Mediterranean Holding group, which has long-standing links with the Paribas group. The allegation has been vigorously denied.

Poos' spell with the French-owned bank also coincided with efforts to free the foreign Paribas subsidiaries from the control of the Paris-based parent, which had been nationalised by French President François Mitterrand's new Socialist government in 1991.

The Socialists replaced the liberal Democratic Party as the CSV's coalition partner in 1984 and Poos, who had headed his party's candidate list and polled more personal votes than any other politician in the country, became deputy prime minister under Jacques Santer, taking on responsibility for the foreign affairs, treasury, economic affairs and small business portfolios.

In the years that followed, Poos enjoyed a good relationship with the easy-going Santer (they were inevitably dubbed the Frères Jacques) as their respective parties renewed their coalition for an unprecedented two further terms.

As leader of the LSAP, he also saw off rumblings of discontent in the party's rank and file about the lack of any discernible Socialist flavour to government policies, as well as the eviction from office in 1989 of the popular Transport Minister Marcel Schlechter.

Since Santer's departure to head the Commission in January 1995, however, Poos has been visibly less comfortable alongside new Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker - who is an altogether more forceful character than his predecessor and less inclined than Santer to offer a fig-leaf to hide his coalition partner's subordinate role in the formulation of policy.

Poos is conscious of being the last survivor of his generation from either party left in government, and the fact that his succession is being prepared, with 38-year-old Alex Bodry - currently minister for planning, defence, youth and sports - being groomed to lead the party.

One sign of this is the way Poos has gradually, over the years, unloaded much of the bundle of portfolios held by all members of the Luxembourg government (a total of 29 distinct dossiers, some of them admittedly trivial, are shared between 11 full ministers) so that he now heads only the foreign ministry. Deputy prime minister is a purely titular post.

That is why Luxembourg's EU presidency may well be Poos' last opportunity to make a mark on history. In 1991, he left little more than a footnote, despite throwing himself into an ultimately futile round of shuttle diplomacy in a bid to persuade Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait without bloodshed.

“Well-meaning but lightweight,” was the verdict on Poos' efforts at the time.

One of the motivations behind the emergence of the troika system - under which the current president of the EU Council of Ministers is accompanied on important missions abroad by the foreign ministers of the preceding and subsequent holders of the presidency - was to provide Poos with colleagues possessing a diplomatic clout he was perceived to lack.

But the challenge of completing EMU is one he clearly relishes, describing it recently as “the last great European ambition of this century”.

And he says that if currency speculation threatens to derail preparations for the euro over the next six months, EU finance ministers must step in - if necessary by fixing EMU membership and exchange rates ahead of the July 1998 deadline.

The first challenge of the next century, Poos believes, will be the Union's enlargement to the east.

It will be the job of his country's EU presidency to launch the process so that December's European summit in the Grand Duchy can decide the rules of admission, the identity of the candidates who will start entry negotiations, and whether these should involve all the applicants for EU membership or just the expected first wave.

Meeting these challenges would be an eminently satisfying culmination to the political career of this proud man.