Belgium’s Herman Van Rompuy will chair, on 11 February in Brussels, his very first summit of heads of state and government since officially taking office at the beginning of January. According to his wishes, this meeting will take place in a very informal setting, with an unusual organisation, thus allowing him to impose his style.

The European Council will not, therefore, be held at the Council’s headquarters in the Justus Lipsius building, but a few streets away in the Bibliothèque Solvay. While this historic place is worth a look, it is nevertheless not very well suited to welcoming several hundreds of journalists. Moreover, accredited summit delegates are invited to patiently wait at the Council. The formula for this meeting has been voluntarily chosen in order to create “an intimate working environment” for heads of state and government alone (without advisors or ministers), acknowledged Van Rompuy’s deputy spokesperson. The stable president is not just changing the setting - he is also amending the time, because he is not convening a dinner but rather a lunch.

Van Rompuy is immediately impressing with his style and changing the direction of debates between leaders. “This is a new way of working, which is being tested and inaugurated,” notes a high-ranking diplomatic source. “Van Rompuy is an unassuming figure. This will be the first time he chairs a European Council and he prefers to begin with an informal meeting in order to better prepare for the formal one” in March. But the president appears to want to repeat the exercise of informal summits, which will end up irritating ministers, in particular European and foreign affairs ones. In fact, some of them point out that these kinds of meetings are not prepared by the General Affairs Council but by Coreper and are likely to spell the end of the rotating Presidencies (see Europolitics 3904).