BRUSSELS -- After nights and days of grueling negotiations, the European Union selected its top leaders on Tuesday, nominating Germany's defense minister to guide the bloc in a tumultuous new era for Europe, where right-leaning nationalists are trying to break the bloc from within and traditional parties are weakened.
On Tuesday, the bloc's leaders nominated Ursula von der Leyen, the multilingual German defense minister, for president of the European Commission.
For the crucial position of head of the European central bank, they named Christine Lagarde, the French director of the International Monetary Fund in Washington. Lagarde, 63, a lawyer and former government minister in France, has been running the fund since 2011. While not a trained economist, she is widely considered an excellent manager with extensive contacts around the world.
Lagarde and von der Leyen, both political conservatives, would be the first women to hold these key positions, probably the two most important jobs at stake.
Von der Leyen, 60, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right party, is well known and speaks fluent English and French, having spent some of her childhood in Brussels. As defense minister, she has advocated a more active role for Germany in contributing to NATO.
Von der Leyen will need to be confirmed by the European Parliament, but Lagarde will not.
The bloc's leaders also decided to name Charles Michel, 43, the young acting Belgian prime minister, a liberal, as president of the European Council of heads of state and government; and proposed Josep Borrell, 72, a Spanish former foreign minister, as the new foreign-policy chief. Like von der Leyen, Borrell will need to be confirmed by the European Parliament.
After European Parliament elections in May brought a fragmented and polarized mix of parties to power, EU leaders in Brussels had struggled to forge a package deal that balanced ideologies, gender and regions.
The nominations followed a grinding negotiating process among the 28 member states. Talks had failed to produce consensus once and nearly failed again Sunday night and Monday morning.
The struggle underlined the political fragmentation of Europe, as larger parties have lost ground to smaller, more ideological ones, making consensus more difficult to reach. And it reflects the broader problems facing the European Union in charting a clear path forward: The bloc has in recent years struggled to form a unified position on a series of crises, including migration, climate change and the rise of populists in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, which has increased inequality and exposed weaknesses of the common euro currency.
A Section on 07/03/2019