Several Dutch news reports on Wednesday say that Jan-Peter Balkenende, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, is named as a possible successor to Jose Manuel Barroso as President of the European Commission in Brussels.
“I hear everywhere that he is well-placed with everybody and that he also is interested,” an unidentified source is quoted as saying in the daily Trouw.
The Dutch prime minister, responding via a spokesman, has told the newspaper that the leadership of the commission is not an issue on his current agenda.
Dutch PM Balkenende press conference at Dec. EU summit
The new president of the European Commission will be hand-picked by the leaders of the 27 EU member states during their June summit in Brussels. Barroso has already stated he is keen to serve a second term and French Presidency Nicolas Sarkozy has publicly expressed his support for Barroso.
Balkenende and Sarkozy handshake
“He has few enemies,” a source says in De Telegraaf newspaper.
Former Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot last year said that Balkenende would not be likely to decline the opportunity to take charge of the Berlaymont and its nearly 30,000 eurocrats. “He would not say no,” Bot said, refererring to his prime minister.
Dutch commissioner Neelie Kroes is unlikely to return in the new European Commission that is expected to be in place from November. Kroes holds the high-profile competition portfolio, from where she, for example, initiates antitrust actions against corporate heavyweights like Microsoft.
Kroes is a liberal politician of the VVD party, which is in opposition to Balkenende’s centre-right-christian government.
Dutch candidates for the European Commission are former agriculture minister Cees Veerman and social affairs minister Piet Hein Donner of the christian-democrat CDA party, and European affairs secretary Frans Timmermans of the Dutch social-democrat PvdA party.
