Europe’s Top Jobs: Indecision Time

MATTEO RENZI summed it up best. The Italian prime minister suggested that “they just had to send an SMS and we could have saved the cost of the official flight. In any case, it was a nice opportunity to meet and wish Angela Merkel a happy birthday.” Indeed, European Union leaders in Brussels toasted the German chancellor’s 60th birthday this week. But they failed to settle the main business: a package of top EU jobs.A day after the European Parliament endorsed the much-contested nomination of Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission, leaders were meant to pick names for the other big posts: the high representative for foreign affairs, the president of the European Council and a new president of the Eurogroup of finance ministers. The stumbling block was Mr Renzi’s nomination of Federica Mogherini as the foreign-policy supremo. As Italy’s foreign minister of five months, she has barely more experience than Catherine Ashton did when she was named to the post in 2009. But she ran into objections from several eastern European countries, among them Poland and the Baltic states, who see Ms Mogherini as too pro-Russian. It did not help that she visited Moscow just before the summit and talked up the Kremlin-backed South Stream pipeline.The Mogherini row made it inevitable that the whole package would need to be agreed at the same time so that all could be…

The Economist: Europe