Stardate 20040112.1453

(On Screen): The office of the EU President currently rotates among the various member states in a round-robin fashion, with each holding that position for six months. I'm not sure if the head of state of each nation automatically becomes the "EU President" for that period or whether the nation has the ability to choose someone else, but this does represent one of several ways in which the struggle between big members and small members plays out. Does this mean that Liechtenstein and Malta will eventually get their turn? (And will anyone actually care?)

Likely the taxpayers of those nations will care; being the EU President is expensive.

The six-month EU Presidency, which puts the particular member state under the glare of a political and media spotlight, also brings enormous costs.

Ireland, which holds the EU Presidency for the first half of this year, is no exception.

The Irish Independent reports that the Presidency will cost Irish taxpayers around 500,000 euro for every day it remains at the EU helm.

The total bill will be well above 90m euro.

While around 23m euro was spent on preparations last year and 60m euro has been allocated this year - this is not the final sum as some of the Irish government departments have yet to say how much they are set to spend.

And next in line is the Netherlands, who is apparently having a bit of a hard time coming up with the money.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands, which takes over the EU Presidency directly after Ireland for the remainder of the year, is having problems of its own.

According to De Volksrant, the Dutch government is having difficulty finding business sponsorship for their EU Presidency.

On Saturday, the newspaper quoted the foreign ministry as saying that "seemingly businesses would rather not advertise with the Dutch EU Presidency".

The government is hoping to save two to three million euro from the overall costs, which are predicted to be around 68 million euro, through business sponsorship.

Perhaps corporations don't think they get the bang-for-the-Euro from this that they would spending that money in other ways. The Dutch, always pragmatic anyway, might consider a more direct way to reward corporate sponsors, like those which are already used in the sports world.

The top contributor would get to have his name associated with the position during that six-month period in all news reporting, e.g. "The Mercedez-Benz/German presidency", "the "Guinness/British Presidency" etc. The executive would have a special jacket made which he would wear at all official appearances and especially at photo-ops which would display the corporate logos of the next five or ten contributing corporations, with placement and size being a function of the amount of money the offered.

Hey, if it works for race car drivers, why not for the EU president?

Update 20040113: Paul writes to point out that race car drivers also wear fireproof underwear, which might also be appropriate for the EU president.

Update 20040113: Brian Tiemann comments.