The European Commission Presidency. A Lisbon agenda

José Manuel Duro Barroso, the next European Commission boss, will have to fight hard for a liberal economic agenda in Brussels

UNTIL last week, few people outside Portugal had heard of the country's prime minister, José Manuel Duro Barroso. But the man chosen to be the next European Commission president has been immersed since his teens in politics. In the 1970s he was a Maoist activist, daubing caricatures of capitalists on walls and preaching the dictatorship of the proletariat. As he explained in Brussels this week, at Lisbon University during the Portuguese revolution there were only two political parties: pro-Soviet Communists and pro-Chinese Communists. The Maoists were the more forward-looking.

Today Mr Barroso is the very model of a modern prime minister. As a centre-right leader he has been unpopular with the proletariat for his budget cuts and privatisations. He is well-placed to thrive in Brussels. He speaks English, French and Spanish fluently. He is only 48, yet has a wealth of international experience, including negotiating a peace deal in Angola.

Mr Barroso sees his new role as that of honest broker and “point of equilibrium” between conflicting groups. He does not want to build up the prestige of the commission against national governments. That is a change from some ambitious predecessors, who saw the commission as a European government in embryo. Yet, as Mr Barroso notes, the role of honest broker will be trickier in an enlarged European Union. “The risks of polarisation will be much greater with 25 member states,” he says. “We have to avoid any fragmentation between founding states and newcomers, between the centre and the periphery or between the rich and the poor. The key issue is fairness.”

It is inevitable, he adds, that different countries will move towards further integration at different speeds. But this should not lead to some being treated as second-class members. “There can be no directorate of countries saying these are the member states that can move forward, while the others are left in the waiting-room,” he declares. Such words will be a relief to the smaller countries which fear that France, Germany and Britain have precisely such a directorate in mind.

Mr Barroso faces an early test of his ability to stand up to France and Germany. In return for backing him, the French and Germans have made clear that they expect big economic portfolios in the next commission. The Germans want the job of a new “super-commissioner” for the economy; the French have their eye on the competition post. Big EU countries, which have just lost their second commissioners, naturally want top jobs in Brussels. This week France won the reappointment of Pierre de Boissieu as boss of the Council secretariat, and Spain the renomination of Javier Solana as foreign-policy supremo.

But the worry in the commission is that the French and Germans want these jobs to promote illiberal economic ideas. Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, has talked of the need to protect manufacturing industry. The French see Mario Monti, the current competition commissioner, as an ultra-liberal: he has crossed swords with Paris several times. Liberals are alarmed. Frits Bolkestein, the single-market commissioner (a post that Britain covets), has said that Franco-German calls for a return of industrial policy made him feel he was living in a 1970s time-warp.

Mr Barroso's sympathies are with the liberals, as his record shows. But there are suspicions that he may already have given undertakings to France and Germany to secure their support. In a press conference this week, Mr Barroso insisted that no decisions had been taken and emphasised his right to deploy his team as he sees fit. But no new commission president will relish starting in a showdown with France and Germany. Managing this tension will be Mr Barroso's first and most crucial task.

The potential for tension between Mr Barroso and the Franco-German pair is heightened by his support for the Iraq war. It was as foreign minister in the 1990s that Mr Barroso staked out his position as an Atlanticist, arguing that Portugal was bound by geography and history to maintain strong links with Britain and the United States. He hosted a pre-war summit with America's George Bush, Britain's Tony Blair and Spain's José María Aznar in the Azores. Indeed some thought the Azores summit would make him unacceptable to France and Germany.

The French were swayed by his fluency in their language. And Portugal has sent only 120 policemen to serve in Iraq. Even so, the British are surprised that France did not veto Mr Barroso. One senior British politician unwisely proclaimed the decline of French influence in the EU - ensuring that the new president will be keen to show his independence not just of France and Germany, but of Britain too.

Article discusses the choice of José Manuel Barroso of Member State governments to be the next European Commission President, 29 June 2004. It says that he will have to fight hard for a liberal economic agenda in Brussels.

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