Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, who holds the rotating EU presidency, formally announced the two summits at a joint press briefing with the European Commission in Brussels.
The second extraordinary summit, to be held in Prague by the Czech EU Presidency in May, will be dedicated to unemployment, which is rising fast across Europe in the wake of the crisis. Unemployment is expected to hit 9.3% in the EU as a whole and soar to 10.2% for the euro area, according to the Commission's forecasts for 2010.
The two informal summits will come in addition to the two formal EU meetings already planned for mid-March and mid-June.
Topolánek also rebuffed criticism from Czech President Vaclav Klaus, famous for his eurosceptic comments, who had dismissed the summits as useless. "I have stopped paying attention to such remarks," he said.
European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, speaking together with Topolánek in Brussels, explained that the first meeting will be devoted to shaping a common position ahead of the G20 in April, aimed at reforming the functioning of global markets. The informal Council will take place a week after a mini-summit called by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin (EurActiv 03/02/09) that will bring together the four EU countries that are members of the G20 (Germany, France, Italy and the UK).
Barroso underlined the financial issues which leaders will address on 1 March, stressing the importance of finding common ground to help banks recover from the crisis. Among these is the necessity for banks to get rid of toxic assets which are directly linked to the US sub-prime housing market and resources that were damaged by the crisis (impaired assets). How to define them and where to allocate them will be key to finding a compromise, Barroso said.
For his part, Topolánek pointed to the economic and protectionist issues to be dealt with at the informal summit: "We need to assess our national recovery plans and we aim to fine-tune them to avoid protectionism and violation of state aid rules," he said.
Referring to a dispute he had with French President Nicolas Sarkozy over alleged plans by Paris to bring French carmakers' plants in the Czech Republic back to France, Topolánek said: "Clearly there are countries that believe in countering the crisis by not respecting common rules. Others do not. We are among the latter." (EurActiv 09/02/09).
To the delight of Topolánek, Barroso openly supported his line, calling for coordinated actions: "He who walks alone betrays Europe, and himself, because [such policies] triggers the same reactions from other countries," he said.
Asked by EurActiv about the consistency of his country's stance on protectionism considering that the Czech Republic is giving foreign workers airline tickets and 500 euro to leave the country (EurActiv 11/02/09), the Czech prime minister said he did not consider those actions as state aid or protectionism. Rather, he pointed out that the foreign workers in question had no visas and needed to leave the country anyway.
In the European Parliament, an anti-protectionist line emerged again yesterday with the approval by the economics committee of a report drawn up by the Socialists, calling for coordination of national recovery plans to avoid harming Europe's global competitiveness.
The leader of the Liberals in the European Parliament, Graham Watson MEP, likened the Czech car plant worker to the Polish plumber "in a rogues' gallery of supposed economic bogeymen". He called for a debate in the Parliament on the "dangerous slide to protectionism," referring to the "sinister spectre" raised by "the union of populism and protectionism".
