Poor old Herman van Rompuy, the first holder of the EU’s full-time presidential post. For his first six weeks in office, the former Belgian prime minister retained a Trappist vow of silence as he toured European capitals, preparing for a special one-day summit of EU leaders he had called. The strategy was to keep out of the limelight until he could use the meeting to exceed expectations and show himself to be the EU’s powerful new kid on the block.
The first half of this plan—staying low-key—certainly worked. Rarely in Brussels, Van Rompuy gave almost no interviews and met no journalists, making only a couple of speeches and giving just one press conference, in Madrid. So reclusive was he that some observers compared him to Yuri Andropov, president of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, who was almost never seen but would occasionally issue communiqués which were pored over for clues on policy.
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