MADRID/BRUSSELS (EJP)---Spain took over the European Union rotating six-month presidency from Sweden on Friday, just a month after the Lisbon Treaty, which reformed the EU institutions,  took effect.

Under this treaty, EU summits will be chaired by Herman Van Rompuy, the former Belgian Prime Minister who was named last month full-time President of the European Council along with the new EU foreign policy chief, Britain's Catherine Ashton.

But Spain, whose Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero promised to work to end Europe’s economic crisis, will steer other top meetings on the economy, environment and energy, and host summits with non-EU countries, like Israel.

Zapatero said Spain's main goal as EU president is "to fight for economic recovery, for recovery from the crisis, and make Europe an economy that is more and more productive, more and more innovative and more and more sustainable."

The Prime Minister also stressed that under the new Treaty of Lisbon the EU must work to assert itself more on the global stage as it deals with countries like the United States and China.

"We have to make Europe an ever stronger factor in the international context.A Europe that defends and extends the values of peace, cooperation, and dialogue among all peoples and nations," he said.

One of the key goals of the Lisbon treaty is to streamline EU decision-making procedures so it can develop continuity in EU policy-making and reduce the disruption caused by the six-month rotation.

Observers noted that EU's efforts to resurrect the economy will now be led by the country that is perhaps the worst off of all of them.

Spain's unemployment rate has doubled in the past two years. The rate hit 19.3% in October, the worst figure in the 16-nation eurozone and the second highest rate in the EU behind Latvia. While countries including France and Germany have managed to climb out of technical recession, Spain acknowledges it is lagging behind and will not see net creation of jobs until late this year.

Spain had posted nearly a decade of solid and sometimes robust growth, largely on the strength of its construction sector, until the real estate bubble collapsed over the past two years.

A major EU goal in the next six months is to agree on a replacement for the Lisbon Strategy - a blueprint that was supposed to make the EU the world's most competitive economy by 2010.

EU President Herman Van Rompuy will chair a special EU economic summit meeting on 11 February. Then on 25 March EU leaders will try to agree on the economic strategy for the next decade.

Another major challenge is to restore the EU's role as leader in the battle against climate change. The Copenhagen summit in early December was widely seen as a debacle for the EU, which wanted a much more ambitious final deal.

A key test of the new EU diplomatic image and role will be the EU-US summit in Madrid on 25 May.

As the new High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Britain’s Catherine Ashton, who is also Vice-President of the European Commission, will chair the 27 EU Foreign Ministers' meetings. But first she must get the approval of the European Parliament at a hearing in January.

The 27 nominees for European Commission posts will each be questioned in turn by MEPs at the 11-19 January hearings, with a vote on the full Commission set for 26 January.

‘A Palestinian state in 2010’

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said last month that the new EU presidency will work to build in 2010 a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin  Netanyahu (L) greets Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos in Jerusalem.

My idea, and my dream, and my engagement, is to work for having in 2010, finally, a Palestinian state that could live in peace and security with Israel," Moratinos, a former EU Mideast envoy, said.

"We are all in the international community defending the two-state solution. Why should we wait for a Palestinian state? We have Israel as a state, we want its neighbour, the Palestinians, to have the same status," he said.

However Moratinos underlined that a Palestinian state could only come about through negotiations.

"It has to be done through negotiation, it has to be done by agreement, it has to be done through international community recognition," he said.

"It's not going to be easy, but I think it's needed. We need a Palestinian state, the sooner, the better, and that is going to be our objective," he added.