Old rivalries take shine off EU charter victory

Triumph over the EU's adoption of a landmark constitution fizzled out yesterday after leaders of the 25-nation bloc returned home fuming with each other and deadlocked over who to select as European Commission chief.

The row over the successor to Italian Romano Prodi as Commission president laid bare old rivalries, with France and Germany once more at odds with Britain and others which dislike their federalist vision of European Union integration.

Uncertainty over who will land the job dragged into the weekend as several top candidates withdrew their names. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who had until now been given an outside chance, said it would be hard for him to say "no" if the bloc's leaders agreed to ask him.

Nevertheless, the accord on new rules for a union of 450 million citizens now straddling the former Iron Curtain was a welcome relief for leaders who suffered a wave of public apathy and euroscepticism in last week's European Parliament elections.

"Today is great day for Europe," declared former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing - who chaired the convention that drew up the text of the constitution - after a deal was clinched at the end of a two-day Brussels summit late on Friday.

But after two years of tortuous negotiations on a charter whose aim is to make the bloc's institutions less complex, less remote and easier for citizens to understand, the leaders now face an even tougher task of selling it to their publics.

Rejection by any one of several member states due to hold referendums on the constitution could sink it for good.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed the treaty in Brussels as a good deal for Britain after he won a rearguard battle to preserve national vetoes on key policy areas. But he will have his work cut out back home to win a referendum - probably late next year - because, as the EU elections underlined, British euroscepticism is running high.

Resurrected under the skilful presidency of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, the constitution had died last December after a bust-up with Spain and Poland over voting rights.

The Vatican said it was also disappointed by the EU treaty's "disregard" for Europeans' Christian identity.

The summit exposed a battle for power between opponents and backers of the US-led Iraq war, broadly supporters of a more federal EU and those who want a Europe of nation states.

Blair and several other leaders blocked the Franco-German candidate for EU Commission president, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, at an ill-tempered summit dinner on Thursday. But Paris and Berlin resisted the alternative candidate put forward by EU conservative and Christian Democratic leaders - British EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten.

However by yesterday afternoon, both Patten and Verhofstadt had pulled out of the race to head the EU executive body.

French President Jacques Chirac had insisted that the successful contender should come from a country with long EU experience that was in all the main European policy initiatives, notably the euro single currency and Schengen open-border area.

That would rule out anyone from Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and the 10 mainly East European states which joined on May 1, reuniting Europe after its Cold War division.