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EU leaders on the defensive in economic crisis debate [fr] [de]
Challenged by members of the EU's national parliaments gathered in Brussels yesterday (17 February), the bloc's leaders resorted to defensive rhetoric when asked to explain the modest scope of the Union's anti-crisis measures.
Background
Parliamentarians from the 27 EU member states held a debate entitled 'A New Deal for European Economic Recovery?' The meeting was the first under the Czech EU Presidency to gather MPs from individual countries and the heads of the EU institutions.
The event was co-chaired by European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering, Czech Přemysl Sobotka, president of his country's Senate, and Miloslav Vlček, speaker of the Czech Chamber of Deputies.
Pöttering called on the Czech parliamentarians to "vote massively" to ratify the Lisbon Treaty in the lower chamber of the country's parliament later that day. The Czech Senate is to vote on a later date, which is not yet known.
Members of national parliaments charged the Union's leaders with not doing enough to counter the world economic crisis. As French National Assembly member Pierre Lequiller pointed out, the measures to tackle the crisis at EU level are "difficult to observe", while those taken at national level are not harmonised.
Lequiller also compared the bold recovery measures pushed through the US legislature by President Barack Obama after less than a month in office to what he called a "shy" EU response.
Commission President José Manuel Barroso did not challenge this statement. "Obviously, our recovery plan cannot be like America's," Barroso said.
He further elaborated that this is "because we are 27 countries: some are members of the euro zone, some are not". "We have countries with serious recession, we have countries with positive growth levels. We have countries receiving funds under emergency plans, from the EU as well. Politically, but also intellectually, it's not easy to come up with a common programme covering 27 different scenarios. But in spite of that, I believe the results we have been able to achieve are positive," he further stated, ending on a more cheerful note.
But the Commission president rebuffed criticism that the Union did not find greater means to respond to the crisis.
"Let's be honest – when the EU budget was decided, the countries from the '1% club' [which insisted that the Union's budget should not exceed 1% of the bloc's GDP] said 'no more than one per cent,'" Barroso recalled, advising MPs to turn to their national governments for clear answers.
Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, who currently holds the rotating EU presidency, again spoke out strongly against protectionism, but also attacked recently aired plans to introduce euro bonds to boost the ailing eurozone economy. Despite his country not being member of the euro zone, Topolánek recently said he wanted to be a "guardian" of the euro (EurActiv 10/02/09).
"I would warn against the [euro bonds] idea, against the issue of new bonds, because we are going to run into difficulty repaying government debt. That would upset the stability of the euro zone, or could weaken the euro zone, and we will be picking up the pieces for ten to fifteen years to come," Topolánek told the parliamentarians.
The Czech prime minister advised the MPs themselves not to make big promises reagrding the coming European elections in June.
"I don't want to point at you in this chamber, but I warn you, ahead of the [European] elections, to be careful what you promise to people. You can't tell people they'll be better off after the elections," said Topolánek.
Positions
Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek said:
"The question is: where does the money come from to finance anti-crisis measures? At the present time, small and large states are facing problems. Government bonds have been downgraded, their prices are coming down, nobody is interested in them. Governments find it difficult to obtain liquidity […] Any favouring of your own country's sectors is a betrayal of the community principle."
"Clearly, we cannot stop the global financial crisis, but what we can do, through a coordinated, resolute and circumspect approach, is that we can limit its effects and prevent it from continuing in years on end, like in the 1930s."
"To think that we can solve the crisis is a myth. That's nonsense. We are here to eliminate the effects of the crisis and stimulate growth in the future."
"I reject an un-economic approach to the crisis. I don't think that we, as politicians, can pretend to dictate to the crisis what to do. We'll simply be exacerbating it."
European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering said:
"There are basic principles which should underlie our action. And that's the social market economy, we are in favour of the market, but we also say that the market must be there to serve people. Therefore the market has a social function, and that's enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty, and that's what we need to find an answer for."
"Basically, we have achieved a single market, and to start coming now with protectionist measures within the EU, would be tantamount to destroying that market. And it would create the foundations for a disaster."
"Also the common currency. If we did not have a common currency in the EU, we would be in much greater trouble now. We must to everything to maintain the stability of the European currency. We must refrain from that mindset of borrowing more and more, and getting greater and greater deficits, that would undermine the strength of our common currency."