[A-List] EU integration struggles: Berlusconi alone

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Berlusconi's right plight
Financial Times: September 12 2002

Silvio Berlusconi's summit of fellow right-minded European leaders at
his Sardinian villa this week was apparently not the intimate,
purposeful gathering it could have been.

The Italian premier was keen to thrash out Europe's future with France's
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Spain's José María Aznar and the Netherlands'
(Harry Potter lookalike) Jan Peter Balkenende. But strangely none of the
others appeared at the press conference late on Monday.

Berlusconi admits something of a split between the more federalist
Netherlands and Luxembourg; and Spain, France and Italy, which would
like more power for European Union governments.

And reports from the island suggest Aznar spent much time fulminating
about why the European parliament should not choose a possibly powerful
new EU president. (Surely nothing to do with his eyeing the job
himself?)

It was not a great moment for an outbreak of disunity on Europe's
hitherto ascendant right, what with possible centre-left election
victories in Sweden on Sunday, Germany a week later and Austria in
November ("Luxembourg [2004] is going to be the real turning-point,"
predicts one senior socialist in Brussels).

But as Luxembourg's Jean-Claude Juncker argued wearily, there isn't
really a European right - just different politicians defending national
interests. Maybe a European Union would be a good idea.