Market Socialist

Date: 06/03/1997

THE most offensive thing about Karel van Miert is his taste in ties.

Even the worst political enemies of the Commissioner responsible for enforcing the EU's competition policy find it hard to attack him personally.

When Marijke van Hemeldonck, a former colleague of Van Miert's in the Flemish Socialist Party, criticised him in print for his leadership style and alleged penchant for yes-men, people were surprised.

Dieter Wolf, president of the German cartel office, has been fighting a long battle to wrest Van Miert's powers from him and place them into the hands of an independent competition office.

Yet even he stresses: “I am not criticising anybody; I am criticising decision-making structures in Brussels.”

But while it is almost impossible to find anyone who dislikes the 55-year-old Belgian Commissioner, he certainly stirs political passions. When he was handed the competition portfolio four years ago, the blue-eyed boy of the then European Commission President Jacques Delors was meant to cut a less 'liberal' figure than his predecessor, Sir Leon Brittan.

After all, he had two advantages: he was a Socialist and he was not 'Anglo-Saxon' - that worst of all French swear words. Brittan's obsession with free markets and the interests of the consumer had become too much for Delors and the French government to stomach.

Van Miert was meant to introduce a breath of pragmatic air. Of course, he would enforce the EU's tough rules against unfair subsidies and the creation of private monopolies, but he would also - they hoped - take employment, international competitiveness and the interests of producers into account.

As it turns out, Van Miert has been a great disappointment to them. He has pursued the payment of illegal state aids with a vengeance, and has no truck with the idea that European companies should be allowed to gain dominance in their own markets so long as this permits them to take on the American corporate colossi.

Many French officials within the Commission believe he has been taken prisoner by staff in the Directorate-General for competition (DGIV). It is certainly true that he is not, like some of his colleagues, a prisoner of his private office, or cabinet.

The dispute went right to the top last year when, under the influence of his personal staff, Commission President Jacques Santer criticised the approach of DGIV in breaking up European companies when they needed to be strong to compete on the world market.

In order to clear the air, Santer summoned Van Miert to his office to explain his position. Van Miert listened, and got the message that the 'European champions' lobby had won the president's ear.

To him, they had got the argument the wrong way round. It is true that the cutting edge of the new industries of information technology and biotechnology began in the US. However, they did not begin in the laboratories at IBM or DuPont, but in hundreds of hungry small companies.

“He feels that if he allows big incumbent players to carve up these markets now, then small and innovative players will not be able to get into them,” says an aide.

He has had to make compromises on the payment of big government subsidies - just watch him say 'no, no, no, yes' when Crédit Lyonnais comes begging for yet another 4 billion ecu later this month - but he does not like it.

Moreover, he has been prepared to take a lot of stick for not liking it, most recently in the case of Walloon steel-maker Forges de Clabecq. The political pressure on Van Miert, as a former Socialist Party leader, to bend the rules was considerable, but he withstood it and Clabecq closed.

The Commissioner surprised many people last year by just how personally he seemed to take the illegal diversion of state aid by German shipbuilder Bremer Vulkan and the deliberate flouting of subsidy rules by the Saxon government.

His reaction demonstrated a reverence for the rules of the game and a fear of the anarchy which might ensue if companies saw their counterparts or even governments getting away with lawbreaking.

“His instincts come from his modest background,” says a former colleague. “He is opposed to privilege, rather than left-wing.”

Raised on a farm ten kilometres from the Dutch border, Van Miert was the eldest of nine children and the only one to attend university.

His early life, say some of his colleagues, accounts for his personal antagonism towards industrial cartels and governments which can afford to lavish favoured firms with subsidies at the expense of others in the Union.

Some believe he has swung from full-blooded Socialism to arch-capitalism. But the truth is more prosaic.

“He has always been the same,” says a journalist who has followed Van Miert since his Socialist Party days. “There have even been suggestions that, in his youth, he thought about being a young Liberal, but the Socialists offered a better chance of a career.”

His rise was meteoric. Having qualified in diplomatic sciences at Ghent University, Van Miert studied briefly in Nancy and Oxford and spent a year as a European Commission stagiaire in 1967-68.

By the age of 31, he was a member of Belgian Commissioner Henri Simonet's cabinet, before moving back into Belgian politics to become chief of staff to Willy Claes, the then minister for economic affairs.

At the ripe old age of 34, Van Miert became president of the Socialist Party, beginning a ten-year campaign to spread the party's appeal away from its traditional working class base.

“He was always flexible and rarely took a political position without mapping out the consequences,” says a former political colleague. He will be remembered for campaigning in the Eighties to keep US cruise missiles off Belgian soil, then keeping quiet once they arrived and his party was in government.

Van Miert's political past returned to haunt him two years ago when police searched his home and office for evidence of his involvement in the Agusta bribes-for-contracts affair.

In 1988, Belgium bought 46 attack helicopters for 200 million ecu and, to sweeten the deal, Agusta paid 1.2 million ecu into party coffers.

Van Miert, together with his long-time companion and party luminary Carla Galle, looked set to join the rack of heads severed by Belgium's seemingly endless anti-corruption investigations. It was not to be. The two seem to have been cleared.

His final three years in the Commission should be peaceful, at least in that respect. The young man who entered the Commission eight years ago under the wing of Delors has now assumed that most elusive of political qualities - gravitas.

The trick with gravitas is not to take it home. Van Miert intends to leave the Commission when his mandate expires at the end of the century and he approaches his 58th birthday, and he has no interest in returning to Belgian politics.

Since 1978, he has taught a fortnightly course on European institutions at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. “His classes were always very interesting, which is not so common,” says one former student.

Instead of heading back to the cauldron of his native country's politics, Van Miert's friends expect him to turn this fortnightly hobby into a more permanent arrangement and to spend time on his first love - gardening.

Competition policy 'groupies' will soon start taking bets on who will replace him in one of the Commission's hottest seats. But if the experience of the last decade is anything to go by, whoever gets the job will soon become a believer in the DGIV cause.