December 19, 2011
It's raining as the Royal Danish Air Force plane carrying Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt touches down at the Ciampino military air base in Rome recently. Three hours earlier, she was in Lisbon, where she met with her Portuguese counterpart, Pedro Passos Coelho; her next appointment is with Italy's newly appointed prime minister, Mario Monti.
The reason for Ms. Thorning-Schmidt's capital-hopping is that Denmark assumes the rotating European Union presidency on Jan. 1, at a time when the future of the euro, and perhaps of the European Union itself, is far from assured. Just to complicate matters, Denmark doesn't use the common currency, although, unlike the U.K. its currency, the krone, is pegged to the euro.
Ms. Thorning-Schmidt is certainly aware of the size of the task. "What we have in Europe is both an economic crisis and a crisis of confidence in our politicians," she says.
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