"José Manuel Durão Barroso is a good candidate to preside over the European Commission in these times of change," wrote El País of Madrid in an editorial on Monday, 24 hours before Durao's succession to the post was finally endorsed at a special meeting of European leaders in Brussels.
"He belongs to the right-wing family of the European People's Party," the paper wrote, "the group with most deputies in the European Parliament, which must endorse his nomination. He is also one of the candidates of that external elector which is the US, since Washington wants a true friend at the head of this quasi-executive in Brussels, which is so influential in decisions which affect American interests."
"That the president of the Commission," wrote El País, "is Portuguese is positive both for Europe and for Spain. At a time when the big nations have strengthened their position in a Union in which the number of small countries has grown, this nomination will reassure the latter and inspire confidence in the institutions ... The future chief of the Commission is more an Atlanticist than a European, but this will matter less now since foreign, defence and security policy are striving for European autonomy and this will be driven not from the Commission but from the Council, under the baton of Javier Solana, who will also be ratified on Tuesday as future foreign minister of the EU, with support that has been unanimous since the beginning."
Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was forced to fly home early from the NATO summit on Monday in an attempt to keep his government together after stinging defeats in local elections at the weekend.
Emphasising the huge symbolic blow for Berlusconi and his party represented by the loss of Milan, Rome's La Repubblica wrote: "Forza Italia has been beaten at home. The enterprise party has lost in the enterprise city, where it all began, 10 years ago, with the Italian entrepreneur's entry into politics." Other regions followed Milan's lead in the elections, with 52 out of 63 falling to the left. In Florence, the centre-left Olive coalition, which is likely to be led into the next election by Romano Prodi, scored 65.9 per cent of the vote.
"The reluctance of European leaders and others to offer more than a veneer of support [to the transfer of authority in Iraq]," wrote Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter in the Financial Times, "is not surprising in light of the continued international unpopularity of the war and a desire to wait out the US elections". But November may be too late for the Iraqi people, they warn.
Acknowledging that Washington's new pragmatism and internationalism on Iraq had been "motivated by necessity and domestic political calculation" and also that many Europeans would be much happier dealing with a different US administration, the authors nevertheless insisted: "European leaders must change their calculus too. They should insist on partnership but should also recognise that, although they would be assuming the risk of collective failure in Iraq, they also have the possibility of claiming collective success - either with a new administration or a chastened version of the current one."
The Frankfurter Allgemeine was not so sure about the chances of success, but had some advice for the new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, whose only hope, it felt, of gaining credibility among that large part of the population which still did not accept him was to gain profile against the Americans. His earliest pronouncements, the paper noted, already smacked to some extent of the "strong man", a figure which had never been exactly underdeveloped in old Iraq, or Mesopotamia, where Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians and Caliphs had ruled. Perhaps in the Iraq of the future, the paper speculated, we might dare hope for a somewhat milder, more acceptable version of this historic figure.
Finally El País reported, under the headline "The first human word was 'no'" the thesis of a group of Spanish researchers that the key to human evolution lay in the capacity of homo sapiens to approve or censure the behaviour of its children.
This "fruit of biological evolution allowed our ancestors to begin to accumulate culture from one generation to another without needing to learn everything again in a painful process of trial and error". Thus "the essential invention was not speech, but the abstract concept of right and wrong and the will to transmit it to our children".