Belgian prime minister becomes first EU president

Herman van Rompuy, who has just been chosen as the EU's first President, was a virtual unknown outside of Belgium until a few weeks ago, when his name began to do the rounds in Brussels as a possible candidate for the newly created post of President of the European Council.

EU leaders have finally opted for Mr Van Rompuy for the job of president. The last factor standing in the way of Mr Van Rompuy was Britain’s objections to him as a candidate. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was backing his predecessor Tony Blair for the job. But the British dropped their objections when British EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton was named as EU foreign minister.

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende was also rumoured to be in with a strong chance for the job, but he always denied being a candidate.

Herman Van Rompuy's acceptance speech following his appointment as EU president (YouTube/Sky News):

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Discreet saviour
The Belgian prime minister is seen by many of his own countrymen as an unsung national hero who has quietly pulled his nation back from the brink of collapse. The 62-year-old Van Rompuy was drifting towards retirement when he was plucked from his parliamentary seat and put in the prime minister's office at the end of 2008, amid a spiralling crisis that threatened to split the country's Flemish and French-speaking communities.

He made no secret of his reluctance to take on the near-impossible job of keeping Belgium's brawling politicians from one another's throats over issues ranging from the national budget to immigration. Within just a few months, Van Rompuy worked his discreet magic to quell the political flames, switching effortlessly from his Flemish mother-tongue to French to heal the rift between the two language groups.

"This country was in a terrible state and he's managed to bring peace and stability", says Belgian newspaper editor Liesbeth van Impe. "Today, there are no more newspaper headlines predicting the collapse of our country. But now, everyone is worrying about what will happen when he's gone."

Poet president
The country's media pour accolades on their saviour, yet Mr Van Rompuy remains a remarkably discreet and private figure. He is a married father of three and an economist who graduated from the venerable University of Leuven. He cut his teeth at the Belgian central bank before embarking on a long parliamentary career.

Yet many Belgians like him best for his quirky passion for haiku, a 17-syllabled form of Japanese poetry, which he composes in Flemish. Despite many painstaking efforts by the media to extrapolate political messages from them, Mr Van Rompuy's three-lined compositions are most often mini-odes to nature. His words paint pictures of birds flitting across open skies and the setting of the sun on the Belgian countryside. "I breathe easy," was a recent last line.

Jesuit vision
Herman van Rompuy says he was imbued from his early years at a Jesuit college with a strong European identity.

"When I was a student, the memory of the war was still fresh in everyone's minds. So our teachers organised exchanges with students from other European Jesuit colleges in Europe. That left a deep impression on me because I realised that we were all deep down so very similar," he said in an interview last year.

Mr Van Rompuy had kept characteristically quiet on the question of whether he would like to have the job, knowing full well that a noisy candidacy would most likely spoil his chances. "The most important thing now is not to say the wrong thing," he had told Belgian reporters. One political colleague commented: "He knows what he's doing. That's why he's been opening his mouth only to breathe!"

It's a strategy that has worked wonders, and this master of understatement may yet hold some surprises.