British Government Pushes Blair as EU President as Lisbon Treaty Crumbles

British Government Pushes Blair as EU President as Lisbon Treaty Crumbles

http://larouchepac.com/node/11053


July 17, 2009—The British minister for European Affairs, Glenys Kinnock, announced on Tuesday, that the British government candidates Tony Blair to the office of Permanent EU President, a position introduced by the Lisbon Treaty. The announcement has surprised many, not because Blair was unexpected (everybody knows that Blair wants the job), but because it comes at a moment when hopes to resuscitate the Lisbon Treaty are sinking. Not only the Irish have not decided yet, but a re-thinking process is going on in Germany. For this reason, some speculate that the British announcement is a dirty trick by Brown against Blair.

As a matter of fact, shadow Foreign Minister William Hague said that Blair should be let "nowhere near the job." He said: "The creation of a new EU President could be enormously damaging for Europe. Any holder is likely to try to centralize power for themselves in Brussels and dominate national foreign policies. In the hands of an operator as ambitious as Tony Blair, that is a near certainty."

Helga Zepp LaRouche commented that Blair's candidacy should be a motivation to throw the Lisbon Treaty out of the window, at a moment in which the German Parliament is busy working out guidelines issued by the Constitutional Court on July 30. The Court ruled that the German Parliament has to enact a new law which strengthens the rights of the national Parliament versus EU supranational institutions. The Christian Social Union (CSU) party, whose MP Peter Gauweiler was the main challenger of the Lisbon Treaty at the Constitutional Court, has now drafted a 15-point paper, with proposals on how to formalize the Court guidelines into a bill. According to informed sources, the paper "incorporates all requests from the Constitutional Court and makes additional provisions to strengthen the rights of both houses of Parliament. It also calls for a 'Competence Procedure' for a constitutional control." This special procedure can be activated by just one third of the Bundestag (lower house). According to the FAZ, Chancellor Angela Merkel has reviewed the paper with the CSU leadership and "gets the picture that the CSU position stands on solid bases of constitutional law and policy."

However, other members of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, like Hessen Minister President Roland Koch, have accused the CSU of being "hostile to Europe." Another CDU local leader, North Rhine-Westphalia Minister President Jürgen Rüttgers, a friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger, has gone so far as to attack the Constitutional Court, which, Rüttgers says, "brings water to the mills of those who still support the 19th-century idea of the nation-state."