Prodi plans an early meeting with his team

Date: 24/06/1999

By Tim Jones

ROMANO Prodi will summon his chosen team of European Commissioners to an informal 'conclave' a week before he presents the 19-member team to MEPs in mid-July.

By the time they arrive, the prospective Commissioners will already have been assigned portfolios, unlike the last such meeting at a château outside Luxembourg five years ago. Then, Jacques Santer's team were told on arrival what job he wanted them to take and they then haggled over the spoils.

"This will be the first meeting of a team which must work together for five years and it is sensible, since some of these people will not have met before, to do it informally," said a Prodi aide. "It will not be an occasion for allotting jobs."

In the past week, Prodi has narrowed down his choice of Commissioners to propose to the European Parliament on 21 July. The first open declaration came from The Hague, where the left-right coalition nominated former Liberal leader Frits Bolkestein as its candidate for the trade, competition or transport portfolios.

Given Prodi's insistence that he - and not governments - will choose both names and portfolios, this raised a few eyebrows in Brussels.

However, Prodi's staff were relaxed about the style of the nomination. "We read this announcement as the government putting forward the government's choice," said an aide. "The majority of other countries have done this privately and let names come out through the press. The Dutch are being more formal about it."

Within a few days, Athens had followed suit, declaring that it was nominating Under-Secretary for Development Anna Diamadopoulou as its Commissioner and claiming that Prodi had accepted her candidacy.

In Germany, the nominations plot thickened this week with the German press claiming Prodi had rejected European Affairs Minister Günter Verheugen because he was only skilled in foreign and defence policy. This was vehemently denied by the new Commission president, but Verheugen himself then stepped into the fray by questioning the way Prodi was choosing his team.

Verheugen said it appeared that Prodi wanted to appoint highly qualified people and yet also wanted them to be able to do any job on the executive.

The European People's Party (EPP), the victor in this month's Euro-elections, is insisting that German Christian Democrat and Prodi ally Elmar Brok be Bonn's second candidate for a Commission post. "If there is not a CDU Commissioner, the life of this Commission could be quite short," said Spanish Christian Democrat Alejandro Agag, secretary-general of the EPP.