Nieuwe namen voor belangrijke Europese topfuncties (en)
Former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer should run the European Commission according to MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit. While British ex-commissioner Chris Patten i is eyeing an EU foreign minister role.
"A European mandate would not be the worst thing for Joschka," Mr Cohn-Bendit told the Frankfurt Journal magazine on Tuesday (4 August).
The two politicians know each other since the 1970s, when both helped staged street protests for the radical left and later joined the Green party.
Mr Fischer was foreign minister under chancellor Gerhard Schroeder from 1998 to 2005. He supported German military intervention in Kosovo but opposed the Iraq war.
He came back onto the EU political scene in June by agreeing to promote the Nabucco gas pipeline - a project to link the EU directly to suppliers in the Caspian Sea region, reducing dependency on Russia.
Britain's former commissioner for EU external relations, Chris Patten, has meanwhile told the FT that he would like to take up the new EU "foreign minister" role envisaged by the Lisbon treaty.
"I'm not campaigning for the job ...But if I was approached, which I think is unlikely, I would certainly be very positive about it," he said.
Mr Patten worked in Brussels from 1999 to 2004 earning a reputation as a critic of the then US president George Bush. He is currently the chancellor of Oxford University.
Mr Cohn-Bendit opposes the re-appointment of centre-right Portuguese politician Jose-Manuel Barroso as commission chief on grounds that he has tried to sideline the European Parliament. But no serious competitors have come forward for the post since the 27 EU states voiced backing for Mr Barroso in June.
Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, former Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen, Finnish EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn i and Dutch former Nato chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer i have been named as potential EU foreign relations chiefs.