BRUSSELS (AFP) - More pensive poet than political pit-bull, Herman Van Rompuy, named the European Union's first president on Thursday, earned his stripes dealing with Belgium's bickering political class.

Flemish yet francophile, the 62-year-old Christian Democrat prime minister has for months navigated a minefield trying to stablise the European kingdom divided between its Dutch-speaking north and poorer French-speaking south.

In the end it was those qualities of a fixer, and perhaps his very modest amount of charisma, which appealed to European Union leaders most, as they searched for a technocrat to be the face of the new EU from next year.

A political moderate, open to compromise like the famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, Van Rompuy prefers a more austere style, using his "little grey cells" to overcome his country's problems.

Born on October 31, 1947 in the Brussels suburb of Etterbeek -- home to what is now the European quarter -- Van Rompuy was educated in the capital and studied philosophy and economics at university.

A grey, bespactacled man, he is a practicing Roman Catholic and has four children with his wife Geertrui, Europe's new first lady.

Van Rompuy has written several books and his sense of humour shows through in his penchant for poetry. He likes to keep a blog updated with his latest compositions in Haiku, the 17 syllable form of Japanese poetry.