The European Union's new president set out today the stall for his inaugural summit, calling for a better EU economic policy and more top-level meetings between European leaders, dpa reported. Herman Van Rompuy was appointed President of the Council of EU member states to make the EU a more coherent and better-organized global player. The forthcoming summit, set for Thursday, is expected to provide a first indication of how he plans to achieve it. "All European economies are facing major challenges. Our structural growth rate is not high enough to create jobs and preserve our social model. We need to act together to address these challenges," he wrote in an open invitation letter to EU leaders. The EU's economy contracted sharply last year and is tipped to return to growth only slowly this year, with member states such as Greece and Latvia facing massive financing problems. A coordinated EU economic strategy is "even more important in the light of recent developments inside and outside the eurozone," Van Rompuy wrote in an apparent reference to those national woes. The letter also called on EU leaders to hold more summits on more issues, the better to coordinate their national policies. "I see our meeting as the beginning of a process of close and ongoing concertation among heads of state and government on all major issues facing the EU," Van Rompuy wrote. Future EU summits should "regularly come back to those themes and provide clear guidance," he wrote. The EU's top leaders normally meet four times per year to coordinate the bloc's strategy. However, the number of unscheduled summits has spiralled in recent years to handle issues such as Russia's invasion of Georgia and the economic crisis, leading fans of the EU to say that this should be a permanent innovation. Van Rompuy's first public move after he took office on January 1 was to call for Thursday's extra summit. The informal meeting on Thursday is billed as a private discussion between EU national leaders on the issues of long-term economic planning, climate change and the earthquake in Haiti.
