European leaders are to gather in Brussels today to negotiate the selection of the very first EU president and foreign affairs high representative.

Negotiations started yesterday. According to Swedish Prime Minister and chairman of negotiations, Fredrik Reinfeldt, a telephone session in Stockholm yesterday failed to produce an agreed selection for both top positions.

After Tony Blair was cast off the list of frontrunners because of his links to the war in Iraq, Belgium’s Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy has taken the position of the favoured candidate. Alongside Van Rompuy, Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker have also joined the running.

Rompuy is best known for preventing the split of Belgium during the 11 months he was in office. Former European Commission adviser Fraser Cameron has argued that Rompuy may be selected because of his consensus-building traits, which in the long run will not surpass or overshadow Europe’s more powerful member states such as France and Germany.

Another summit has been scheduled to take place today at 6p.m in Brussels to finally fill the new positions and ‘might take a few hours, or it might take all night,’ according to Reinfeldt. Moreover, Reinfeldt threatened to implement a rule that prevented any single country from exercising a veto.

The Lisbon Treaty, which takes effect from 1 December, is the means by which the presidency and other positions have been established. After eight years of internal wrangling, the EU president’s role has finally been established. The role will last for a two and a half year-term, which can only be renewed once. The purpose of introducing two top-level positions will help ‘facilitate cohesion and consensus’ within the EU.

Furthermore, the role of the president has been described as a role that will help pull the EU together by making it a more recognisable force in the global market. With emerging markets like China and India proving to be formidable forces, the EU’s goal is to use the president to exert more influence in the international field.

Predictions have been cast and tend to sway towards the presidential position to be filled by a centre-right candidate; a centre-left politician however may fill the foreign affairs position.