Attacks on Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, have intensified before the European election held between June 4th and 7th, and ahead of a European Union summit when national leaders will discuss his reappointment to a second five- year term. On the left, the Party of European Socialists (PES) calls Mr. Barroso a conservative who 'puts markets before people'. Should the PES emerge as the largest group in the European Parliament, it will try to block him. But prominent federalists are also unimpressed. Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister, speaks for many in Brussels when he denounces Mr. Barroso for a lack of ambition for Europe. Mr. Verhofstadt invokes the memory of Jacques Delors, the pugnacious Frenchman who ran the commission from 1985 to 1995．Mr. Delors proposed many ambitious plans, he says, and got 30% of them: that 30% then became the European internal market. Mr. Verhofstadt thinks that last autumn Mr. Barroso should have proposed such things as a single EU financial regulator, a single European bad bank, or a multi-trillion issue of 'Eurobonds'. That would have triggered a ' big fight' with national governments, he concedes. But 'maybe the outcome would have been 10%, 20% or 30% of his plan. ' The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has endorsed a second tenn for Mr. Barroso, a former centre-right prime minister of Portugal. Yet he seems keen to make him sweat. French officials have briefed that the decision on Mr. Barroso's future taken at the June 18th-19th summit should be only political, leaving a legally binding nomination for later. Yet the attacks on Mr. Barroso are unlikely to block him. No opinion poll shows the PES overtaking the centre-right European People's Party in the European Parliament. The centre- right leaders who hold power in most of Europe have endorsed Mr. Barroso, as have the (nominally) centre-left leaders of Britain, Spain and Portugal. This helps to explain why the PES, for all its bluster, has not fielded a candidate against Mr. Barroso. It is equally wrong to pretend that Europe was ready for a federalist big bang last autumn. Officials say Mr. Barroso spent the first weeks of the economic crisis bridging differences between Britain and France on such issues as accounting standards and the regulation of rating agencies. Later, he kept the peace between Mr. Sarkozy and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, after the French president pushed for summits of EU leaders from euro-area countries (Ms Merkel thought that sounded like a two-speed Europe). In any case France has no veto over Mr. Barroso's reappointment: the decision is now taken by majority vote. Some diplomats suggest that France's stalling tactics are meant to extract such concessions as a plum portfolio for its commissioner. Those calling for 'European' action often talk as if they are describing an elegant mechanism, needed to make the union work properly. They argue that only a single financial regulator can police Europe's single market, or complain that 27 national bail-out plans lack 'coherence'. In fact, these apparently structural calls for 'more Europe' are pitches for specific ideological programmes. Thus, in a joint statement on May 30th Mr. Sarkozy and Ms Merkel announced that 'Liberalism without rules has failed. ' They called for a European economic model in which capital serves 'entrepreneurs and workers' rather than 'speculators', and hedge funds and bankers' pay are tightly regulated. They added that competition policies should be used to favour the 'emergence of world-class European companies', and gave warning against a 'bureaucratic Europe' that blindly applies 'pernickety rules'. If all this sounds like Europe as a giant Rhineland economy, that is no accident. Mr. Verhofstadt, a continental liberal, means