Brussels, 30/04/2003 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday, the European Commission worked on its response to the institutional proposals made by the Praesidium of the European Convention during a session that the spokesman's service said could be "very long". President Prodi in a speech diffused on Tuesday had already set the tone by saying that "the Commission and myself personally refuse the idea of a full time European Council president" mainly because this would break the balance between small and large Member States. "This would mark the end of the Community method. The Union would no longer be a community and would, in fact, become a free trade area managed by a political directorate", he said. Mr Prodi also recalled the attachment felt by most Member States to keep one Commissioner for every country, saying that "their insistence is justified if one wants the Commission to continue to play its traditional role of honest broker".
Convention Chairman Valéry Giscard d'Estaing replied, while on French radio France Info, that "we should remain cool-headed and look at the advantages and disadvantages of a rotating or stable presidency". VGE, who notes that the rotating presidency is "twenty presidents of the European Union over the next ten years and never the same twice", stresses that, in the Praesidium proposal, "we are not taking any power away from the Commission" by proposing to "strengthen the authority of the Commission president". In an interview published on 30 April by Die Presse, Commissioner for Agriculture, Franz Fischer, asserts that the Congress of Peoples proposed by VGE "is really quite useless" but that a full time President of the European Council "is much more dangerous". According to Fischer, this would be the guarantee that "no foreign policy integration would be reached" and the reduction of the Commission to a "simple executive body", especially if the President surrounds himself with a "bureau" (which could include 500 people) and which determines the strategic directions of the Union.