Climate of uncertainty and polemic. It is not an easy thing to talk about the eurozone summit this Friday, at a time when the agitation surrounding the single currency and uncertainties regarding the situation in Greece (as well as in a few other member states) are at an all-time high. Both ability and courage is required to distil the news and misinformation often produced at the end of the day by the financial community, because this information is often subject to speculation. It is often rectified or modified the following day but the damage has been done and the speculators have achieved their goal. On Wednesday evening, the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, declared: “I am witnessing totally irrational movements on the markets, triggered by groundless rumours, such as, for example, yesterday, with regard to Spain and Portugal”. The Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, described these rumours as “complete insanity” with regard to his country and said: “We can't spend all day paying attention to speculation”. The day before he made this announcement, the French minister for the economy, Christine Lagarde, declared: “When Standard & Poor's downgrades a country five minutes before the markets close, it is an incitement to commit crime. All those who hold shares are going to get rid of them without the time to think about it”. The frequency of this kind of behaviour is, in the financial world, impossible to measure and we can understand the efforts being made to define new rules.
Will the informal meeting of heads of state and government from the eurozone re-examine the current situation and provide it with new impetus? When arranging the meeting, Mr Van Rompuy explicitly indicated that it would focus on concluding the support plan to Greece and would also “draw the first conclusions about eurozone governance”. The president of the European Commission, Mr Barroso, confirmed proposals for next Wednesday (see following pages). For the time being, the summit will find it difficult to go beyond the stage of taking general positions because the future rules on financial supervision and other essential aspects are being examined by the European Parliament, and the taskforce in charge of examining “European economic governance” will not hold its first meeting until 21 May. The Parliament is insisting that it be represented in this meeting and Pervenche Berès proposed that the Parliament organise a broader-based reflection group (with legal experts, academics and social partners) in an effort to go beyond the intergovernmental approach advocated by member states.
How should the Stability Pact be revised? In this context, several fundamental orientations have been accepted, primarily, the determination to revise and strengthen the Stability Pact. In her address to the Bundestag, Angela Merkel expressed a commitment to ensuring that the pact not be breached, even if this proves to be “a lengthy and laborious” task. France and other countries are, in principle, going in the same direction, even though the legal aspect of this review has not yet been completely clarified. Should the Maastricht Treaty be revised, given that the pact is in fact annexed to this treaty? Or should the pact be amended by way of a decision made by the Community institutions? It is not just discipline that needs to be reinforced but also the demand to take economic competitiveness of states more into consideration. If we add all this to the dossier on the rating agencies, we can observe that certain political forces consider it necessary that one of these exist in the eurozone. The French minister for the economy insisted, above all, on the supervision of how the rating agencies function and on controlling conflict of interests.
Positions on all the new rules are so numerous and often so contradictory that any attempt to write about them would be absurd. Economists and certain political figures sometimes give the impression of giving more importance to their own political doctrine rather than to what is actually happening. Those who are scathing in their criticism of German discipline forget the fact that this discipline represents the condition that will enable finance to be found on the markets in favourable conditions, not only for Germany itself but also for the other eurozone countries. Those who advocate that Greece leave the eurozone and return to its significantly devalued national currency, forget that Greek debt is counted in euros and that the amount needed to pay back the debt would also be in euros. Examples of this nature are numerous. Too many solutions are presented without taking into account their repercussions and are offered in scathing, critical, indeed insulting tones with regard to those who would be responsible for making these decisions.
While we await the results of Friday's meeting, let's not forget that the participants are elected on a regular basis and that the parliaments (national and European) are having their word too.
(F.R./transl.fl)