PROFILE: 'Haiku Herman' - Belgium's Zen prime minister

Brussels - He is seen as the master of the back room deal: Herman Van Rompuy, Belgium's 62-year-old prime minister, politician, philosopher and prolific author of Dutch poems in the Japanese form called haiku.

Born in war-torn Brussels in 1947, he specialized in classical studies at school before taking his degree in economics at Belgium's top university in Leuven.

After leaving university, he became the deputy leader of the youth wing of the Dutch Christian Democrat party, where he built up a formidable reputation as a compromise broker. Rising quickly through the ranks, he negotiated on behalf of his party during the formation of no fewer than nine coalition governments between 1980 and 2008.

He also developed a love for the Japanese poetic style of haiku, a pithy verse of three lines with five, seven and five syllables.

"Splashes wait for warmth So they can evaporate. Water becomes cloud,"

ran one verse which he wrote for Dutch-language daily Het Laatste Nieuws earlier this month.

"Three waves are rolling Together in the harbor. The trio's at home,"

he wrote to celebrate the launch by Spain, Belgium and Hungary of the forthcoming "troika" of national EU presidencies, which will run lower-level EU ministerial meetings over the next 18 months.

Beside his political career, Van Rompuy made a name for himself as the author of religious and philosophical books such as Christendom: a Modern Thought (1990) and Searching for Wisdom (2007).

It is unclear whether his search for wisdom was successful, but at the end of 2008, he was appointed prime minister of Belgium in a bid to end 18 months of poisonous feuding between the country's Dutch- speaking majority and French-speaking minority.

Commentators from both sides of the linguistic divide say that he has been strikingly successful over the past 11 months in bringing the feuding factions back to the negotiating table.

His backers in the race to become the EU president argued that that experience made him the ideal candidate, since much of the job will consist of trying to find agreement between the bloc's notoriously fractious members.

But opponents pointed out that he has only headed his country for 11 months, with the worst diplomatic crisis he faced in that time a row with the Netherlands over the dredging of the estuary of the River Scheldt, which runs through Belgium's main port, Antwerp.

Indeed, of the EU's 27 national leaders, only six have less experience at the top of government.