Outside the European Commission’s hulking headquarters, a poster on a street lamp proclaims “Titanic: final weeks”.
It is advertising an exhibition in Brussels on the cruise liner sunk by an iceberg off Newfoundland a century ago. But as Jose Manuel Barroso spends his last few days at the helm of the EU’s often maligned executive arm, with his designated successor Jean-Claude Juncker speaking ominously of “Europe’s last chance”, it’s hard not to see the irony.
Barroso, a former Portuguese prime minister, is proud of having helped keep an enlarged 28-nation Europe afloat for 10 years through the most severe economic and financial storm in half a century.
I was confident we would prevail
“I was always confident that we would prevail, but I had to push the ship in the right direction, sometimes against very strong headwinds,” Barroso said yesterday.
His legacy is to have helped the eurozone survive a searing 2009-13 debt crisis by establishing a financial rescue fund, enacting stricter budget rules, tightening financial regulation and starting to build a European banking union.
But he leaves amid a howling Eurosceptic gale in Britain and chill winds of anti-EU populism in many other member states, whipped up by mass unemployment and economic stagnation.
His happiest moments were receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Union in 2012 and signing the Lisbon Treaty that revamped the bloc’s complex institutions after French and Dutch voters rejected a European constitution. He also helped make Europe a world leader in the fight against climate change and the drive for cleaner energy. But after years of crisis with sleepless nights spent trying hold the eurozone together, other memories are more sombre.
Barroso recalled hosting a private brainstorming session with the chief economists of the main European and US banks in July 2012 at the peak of the crisis.
“I asked them two questions. ‘How many of you think Greece will still be in the eurozone at the end of the year?’ All except one said ‘no’.
“The central scenario was the Greek exit. Then I asked: ‘How many of you believe we’ll be able to sustain the euro in its present form?’ It was 50/50.”
With financial markets in turmoil, he spent most of that month persuading Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras to embrace radical reforms and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the most powerful EU leader, to keep Athens in the currency area.
“There were many important personalities even in the German government saying the best thing is to put Greece and some others out so that we can save the rest,” he recalled. If Greece had been cut loose, Portugal, Spain and Italy would have come under immediate market pressure. The survival of the euro, launched in 1999 as Europe’s central economic project underpinning its single market, would have been in jeopardy.”