Brussels, 05/12/2001 (Agence Europe) - Responding to questions about the President of the Convention that will be preparing for institutional reform of the EU in Brussels on Tuesday, the former president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, said that he had let the French government know that he was willing to be a candidate but had not yet received a reply. He said he would be willing to accept the post if he were asked. He was speaking after the last of the Laeken Group meetings - over the past few months, the Group has been advising the President of the EU Council of Ministers, Guy Verhofstadt, on preparing the Laeken Declaration to be adopted by the Brussels-Laeken Summit on 14/15 December. The other members of the group are Jean-Luc Dehaene, Giuliano Amato, Bronislaw Geremek and David Miliband. After the meeting, Jean-Luc Dehaene said that he felt the best President of the Convention was not yet "on the market". (See yesterday's EUROPE, p.4 on Jacques Chirac's comments on Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Italy will support Giuliano Amato's candidacy.)
In terms of the draft Laeken Declaration presented by the Belgian Presidency, Jacques Delors said that the diagnosis in the first part of the Declaration (see EUROPE of 1 December, p.6) was over-negative, exclaiming that the most Eurosceptic journalists in Europe had already latched on to it saying that even those drafting the declaration don't believe in Europe (referring to an article in The Times and elsewhere). Asked about the draft document's level of ambition, BELGA reports Jean-Luc Dehaene as saying that the important thing was to have an open debate and the Convention gives that option.