Herman van rompuy biography

Economist, blogger, haiku writer and Belgium's PM for less than a year

The EU's first permanent president, Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy, is a camera-shy man who has been catapulted from relative obscurity.

After his selection at a Brussels summit, he stressed his credentials as a consensus politician and made it clear he would fulfil the role of a chairman rather than a globe-trotting statesman.

His tasks include liaising with EU leaders and arranging the bloc's annual summits. He says tackling climate change and lowering EU unemployment rates are among his priorities.

The centre-right leader has a reputation as a good negotiator with a self-deprecating sense of humour, which helped him to hold together a fractious coalition government at home.

Shortly after his presidential appointment was announced, the 62-year-old drily remarked on previous US complaints about the EU lacking a central go-to fi