Leo Tindemans, the former Belgian prime minister and veteran centre-right politician, who has died aged 92, will be best remembered as one of the fathers of European integration. It was his report in 1976 that laid down the idea of a “people’s Europe”, foreshadowing ideals such as economic and monetary union and common foreign and security policies, which would later alarm theoretically natural allies such as the British Conservatives, but which at the time earned him the sobriquet Mr Europe. He was once heard musing that what he would really have liked to have been was foreign minister of a large European country.
Tindemans, tall, thin, naturally courteous and dignified, was a dominant force in Belgian politics for many years, prime minister from 1974 to 1978 and minister for foreign affairs for most of the 1980s. He was the architect of the constitutional settlement in which was rooted a Belgian federal state whose three language groups, the Wallonian French-speakers, the Flemish of the north and Germans in the eastern fringes, together with the capital, Brussels, had their own regional governments. This project has in recent years inadvertently caused significant difficulties in forming a stable, collaborative, national government, a stasis that grieved his generation.
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