Donald Tusk wasted no time. On Monday XNUMX December, just a few hours after the handover by outgoing European Council president Herman Van Rompuy and a meeting with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, the former Polish prime minister called Barack Obama to reaffirm the importance that the European Union attaches to maintaining the strong link with the United States. Yesterday he also spoke by telephone to Chinese President Xi Jinping with whom he hoped for a strengthening of strategic relations between Brussels and Beijing, "which will bring benefits to the EU, China and the whole world". And he received NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg for an initial exchange of ideas on the hotbeds of crisis just outside Europe's eastern (Ukraine) and southern (Syria and Libya) borders.
With limited international experience (in the last two months he has started studying English at a rapid pace to better master a language he knew little), Donald Tusk nonetheless has a respectable curriculum at a national level. Born in Gdansk as Lech Walesa, a man-symbol who led and successfully led the resistance to communist oppression in Poland, Tusk, 17 years his junior, has followed in the footsteps of the Nobel Peace Prize winner. It was 1980 when he gave birth, precisely within the context of Solidarnosc, an independent association of students. Initiative that the power of those years tolerated for a limited period of time. And at that point Tusk, to avoid arrest, went into hiding until the political police tracked him down and locked him up in prison.
Freed following an amnesty for political prisoners, a couple of years later he founded a party, the Liberal Democratic Congress. Elected to Parliament for the first time in 1990, thirteen years later Donald Tusk was among the promoters of a new center party, Civic Platform. And seven years ago he was entrusted with the leadership of the government which he held for 7 years (a record for post-communist Poland) and which he left when the EU member states unanimously elected him president of the European Council.
With this brilliant political career in Poland behind him, enriched by very important economic results (over the years in which the crisis has practically brought to their knees - some more, some less - all the other Member States of the European Union, Poland managed to grow its GDP by 20%), will Donald Tusk be able – they ask Brussels – to give a positive turn to European policies?
To answer this question, it may be useful to reflect on the role and powers of the permanent president of the Council, a figure introduced by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty with the aim of achieving a better level of efficiency in the complicated process of forming European laws, which must take into account also of the aspirations (and ambitions) of all the Member States of the Union.
Role and powers which in reality are not very marked since, together with the creation of the figure of the permanent president, the weight of the European Parliament has been strengthened by entrusting this body with the role of "co-legislator". In practice, in most cases, a European law must be approved by both the Parliament (which is elected by universal suffrage by the citizens) and the Council (where the representatives of the member countries sit).
Thus – states the Treaty of Lisbon – the permanent president must ensure the orderly progress of the work of the European Council. And "also ensure the external representation of the Union for matters relating to the common foreign and security policy, without prejudice to the powers of the high representative of the Union for foreign affairs and security policy".
A real regulatory mess that sooner or later will give rise to intricate political knots that are difficult to unravel. Hypothesis that could also materialize in a short time considering that the new president is openly pro-American and that it is not for nothing that he met the secretary general of NATO at a bang. Who, in a recent interview with Corriere della Sera, illustrated the reasons which lead him to prepare the countries of the Atlantic Alliance also for the possibility that the Ukrainian crisis could lead to an armed confrontation with Russia. This is a hypothesis that Federica Mogherini (ie the high representative for foreign affairs and security policy) seems committed to avoiding.
But, in the unfortunate event that one of the conflicts were to escalate and decisions had to be taken very quickly, who will have the task of speaking for Europe?
