Van Rompuy and Barroso leave EU stage with porcelain plates

Herman Van Rompuy and Jose Manuel Barroso said goodbye to EU leaders on Friday (24 October) after attending their final summit as presidents of the EU council and commission.

For the Belgian Van Rompuy it marks almost the end of an almost 5-year term in which he worked behind the scenes to keep the EU united as it went through its deepest-ever economic crisis and tried to find solutions from preventing it ever happening again.

He was the first ever permanent president of the Europ...