Charlemagne

摘要

Attacks on Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the Euro-pean Commission, have intensified before the European election held between June 4th and 7th, and ahead of a European Union summit when national leaders will discuss his reappoint-ment to a second five-year term. On the left, the Party of European Socialists (pes) calls Mr Barroso a conservative who "puts markets before people". Should the pes emerge as the largest group in the European Parliament, it will try to block him.rnBut prominent federalists are also unimpressed. Guy Verhof-stadt, a former Belgian prime minister, speaks for many in Brussels when he denounces Mr Barroso for a lack of ambition for Europe. Mr Verhofstadt invokes the memory of Jacques Delors, the pugnacious Frenchman who ran the commission from 1985 to 1995. Mr Delors proposed many ambitious plans, he says, and got 30% of them: that 30% then became the European internal market. Mr Verhofstadt thinks that last autumn Mr Barroso should have proposed such things as a single eu financial regulator, a single European bad bank, or a multi-trillion issue of "Eurobonds". That would have triggered a "big fight" with national governments, he concedes. But "maybe the outcome would have been 10%, 20% or 30% of his plan."