This is the first meeting of EU heads of state and government in which Malta is participating with full voting rights after it joined the Union on 1 May.
Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi and Foreign Affairs and Investment Promotion Minister John Dalli are leading the Maltese delegation at the Council.
The question of a successor for Mr Prodi has overshadowed the beginning of the meeting, with various names being mentioned around.
However, The Malta Independent has learnt that the European People’s Party (EPP) has proposed External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten as its candidate for the Presidency.
This newspaper has also learnt that Mr Patten, who is a British Conservative, also has the backing of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Although it has not been officially announced yet, the decision to back Mr Patten was taken during the meeting of EPP leaders at the castle of Meise, on the outskirts of Brussels, which ended yesterday morning.
Dr Gonzi attended this meeting together with PN international secretary Jason Azzopardi.
Asked by Maltese journalists late in the afternoon whether the EPP had indeed backed Mr Patten, Maltese Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi would not confirm that such a decision had indeed been taken.
“The EPP has a number of excellent candidates for the European Commission who could bring the EU forward,” was the Maltese Prime Minister’s sole comment on the matter.
Asked who Malta’s preferred
candidate for the Commission Presidency was, Dr Gonzi said he did not wish to indicate names since consultations were going to take place in the evening.
The EPP’s initial candidate had been Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg. However Mr Juncker has turned down the offer.
EPP president Hans-Gert Poettering has insisted that since the largest party in the EP was the EPP, and the outgoing Commission president was from the centre-left, then the new one should be from the centre-right.
A similar position was expressed by Dr Gonzi yesterday afternoon.
On its part, the Party of European Socialists (PES) said that the new Commission president should be “the right one, not necessarily one from the right,” in the words of party president Poul Nyrup Rasmussen.
The PES was not going to present any candidate for the Commission presidency but was reserving to take a position on the person chosen by the EU Council during the subsequent hearing at the European Parliament, Mr Rasmussen said.
He was speaking at the end of a meeting of PES party leaders at the President Hotel in Brussels earlier in the afternoon. Present for this meeting was Labour leader Alfred Sant, together with senior delegate to the EP George Vella and party international secretary Joe Mifsud.