Trading places: as head of the WTO, Pascal Lamy is no stranger to
international consensus building. Photograph: WTO

European Union leaders are racking their brains to come up with candidates for the future presidency of the European Council. The job, to be created by the nearly ratified Lisbon Treaty, will replace a system whereby the EU is "led" by a different national leader every six months. Instead, the Union will have a full-time consensus builder who will also represent the EU to foreign heads of state, for a maximum five-year term. The man or woman who gets the job is banned from holding national office, but the assumption is that potential incumbents need to have served as a president or prime minister in a past life.

Strangely, suitable candidates are proving elusive, even though the post has the potential to be both prestigious and influential. Of those names that have been touted so far, some – like the former British prime minister, Tony Blair – are divisive figures that would inevitably bring much political baggage to the office. Others – like Jan Peter Balkenende, the current Dutch prime minister – are agreeable to most, but uninspiring. They lack the profile and international standing that is needed if the post is to be more than merely ceremonial.

One reason for the scarcity of candidates is that the job appears to require its holder to be a walking paradox, capable of herding the member states together with quiet charisma and persuasion, but with no executive powers, constituency, or policy levers. A successful first incumbent will need to be charismatic but modest, highly effective but non-intimidating, a consensus builder but also a decision-maker. Most ex-leaders of national governments would struggle to adjust to the limitations and requirements of such a position.

So EU leaders would find more suitable candidates if they widened their search beyond former heads of government to heads of international organisations, former European commissioners with a distinguished record and, perhaps, even prominent figures from the world of business with an international profile. Some potentials might be Dominique Strauss-Kahn, (although it is probably more important that he stay in his current position as head of the International Monetary Fund), or Chris Patten, a former EU commissioner for external relations.

In an ideal world, the most promising candidate from the non-leaders category would probably be Pascal Lamy, the current head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Judged against the above criteria, Lamy emerges as a front-runner for a number of reasons. First, as the current head of a complex but indispensible organisation that operates by consensus and moves at a slow pace, Lamy could argue that he has done this sort of work before. Second, he has no political baggage of the sort that would identify him as a tool of one particular camp of member states or another. A French socialist who supports free trade, Lamy would be a prime candidate to bring the Union together on many issues, especially on further steps to hasten economic recovery.

Also, as chief of staff for Jacques Delors, European Commission president from 1985 to 1994, Lamy was a highly effective consensus builder who managed to thrive amid often spectacular political infighting. That is a quality that would stand him in good stead in the power-sharing triumvirate established by the Lisbon Treaty, where the European Council president's responsibilities rub up against those of the president of the European Commission and a newly powerful high representative for foreign policy.

Opponents could argue that Lamy has no foreign policy experience on big-picture issues like the Middle East peace process or Iran's nuclear programme. But trade – along with enlargement – has long been the EU's most important foreign policy tool, and Lamy is a former EU trade commissioner. And rising powers like China or India would sit up and take notice if the head of the WTO were to depart suddenly to become president of the European Council.