Socialists united in choice of Ashton

Brown wanted all EU leaders to ‘identify’ with the choice of foreign policy chief.

The decision to name Catherine Ashton as the European Union’s first high representative for foreign affairs and security policy took shape on Wednesday afternoon, when the EU’s Socialist prime ministers met in the Austrian permanent representation to the EU in Brussels.

The decisive moment was, according to a UK spokesman, when Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, switched his support from backing Tony Blair for the post of president of the Council to backing Ashton for high representative.

Brown backed Ashton “because he wanted that all 27 [leaders of EU member states] should be able to identify with the choice”, according to Werner Faymann, the chancellor of Austria. Faymann was a member of a selection panel set up by the Party of European Socialists (PES) to screen candidates for the post of high representative. The Socialist leaders agreed on Ashton unanimously, Faymann said.

At their last summit in Brussels on 29-30 October, Europe’s centre-left and the centre-right had agreed that the latter should name the president of the European Council and the former the foreign policy chief. The other members of the panel were José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, prime minister of Spain, and Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, the leader of the PES.

Italy put forward Massimo D’Alema, who was a prime minister of Italy and then foreign minister, who was considered the front-runner, though some governments and MEPs from central and eastern Europe objected to his communist past.

Zapatero had sown confusion on Tuesday by publicly announcing the candidacy of Miguel Ángel Moratinos, his foreign minister, for high representative – a choice that had little chance of being supported by other member states, for a variety of reasons from Spain’s non-recognition of Kosovo, where the EU has one of its biggest
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missions, to Spanish support of a normalisation of ties with Cuba.

Faymann himself had prevented the candidacy of Alfred Gusenbauer, his predecessor as Austrian chancellor and leader of the country’s Social Democrats, by agreeing to the nomination by his centre-right junior coalition partner of Johannes Hahn as Austria’s member in the European Commission. No country can hold two seats on the Commission and the high representative is a vice-president of the Commission.

Faymann told reporters after tonight’s dinner that there had been no discussion of Commission portfolios as part of the decision-making. “There is nobody who has had a promise of a portfolio,” he said. “The question of portfolios played no role.”

Experienced minister

Brown said Ashton was “a highly experienced minister and a highly experienced commissioner”.

He said the appointment “gives Britain a powerful voice and will ensure that Britain’s voice is loud and clear and it will ensure Britain will remain as I want it, at the heart of Europe”.

“She behaved brilliantly as a commissioner and people know her popularity extended beyond any particular grouping of the EU.”

Brown added: “She is a woman holding a job which has too often been held by men.”