Blair’s Fading EU Chances Spur Race for Top Post

EU leaders voiced growing doubts about the former U.K. prime minister, shifting the speculation to figures with a lower global profile such as Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende or former Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen.

“The shortlist hasn’t been put together yet,” Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, a socialist allied with Blair’s Labour party, told reporters as EU leaders gathered for the second day of a summit in Brussels. Once the treaty is passed “we’ll have to act quickly and show we’re capable of acting.”

EU leaders yesterday surmounted the key remaining hurdle to creating the job by bowing to the Czech Republic’s demands for an exemption to treaty provisions that Czech leaders feared would grant property rights to ethnic Germans expelled after World War II. The concession was Czech President Vaclav Klaus’s price for abandoning his campaign to sabotage the Lisbon Treaty, which overhauls the a half-century-old governing apparatus.