Brussels, 09/12/2011 (Agence Europe) - MEPs' knee-jerk reactions to the agreement, reached on Friday 9 December by the EU heads of state and/or government on the new fiscal compact and strengthened tools to combat the debt crisis, are divided. They all regretted the United Kingdom's decision to go it alone.
The leader of the EPP Group at the European Parliament, Joseph Daul, said: “I welcome the political will demonstrated last night by the majority of member states and I deplore the fact that the United Kingdom in particular prevented an agreement within the Community framework”. He nonetheless went on to give assurance that the European institutions “fully play their role as guarantors of European interests. The European Parliament in particular should see its role of ensuring the democratic legitimacy of the new treaty guaranteed”.
Guy Verhofstadt (ALDE, Belgium) said that the leaders of the EU have gone further towards strengthening budgetary discipline. “However, we doubt this alone will be sufficient to tackle the crisis we face today. There is no mention of a banking licence for enhanced ECB intervention, or of a eurobond market or a collective redemption fund to bring down excessive debt”, he said. The new treaty, he warned, “to be elaborated by March, is only acceptable if the community method and democratic control are fully respected. (…) I do not exclude that we may have recourse to the Court of Justice if these guarantees are not explicitly foreseen in the new intergovernmental treaty”.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Greens/EFA, France) said that there are answers to the crisis (European Monetary Fund, eurobonds and investment funds) and that these can be adopted immediately without changing the treaty. In his view, the “intergovernmental treaty raises as many new questions as it answers. In terms of responding to the immediate sovereign debt and credit crisis, the summit is a fiasco”. The Greens at the EP will ensure that the prerogatives of the EU are respected.
Tomasz Poreba, of the ECR Group, took the view that the United Kingdom had a perfect right to defend its national interests by opposing changes to the treaty. He maintained that, “by agreeing to join the internal fiscal pact, Poland sanctioned a 'two-speed Europe'”. He finds, on the part of Poland, that “it is especially peculiar to have agreed to make payments and fund the rescue of the euro area”.
The leader of the GUE/NGL, Lothar Bisky, today denounced “the outcome of negotiations between EU leaders as a dangerous attempt to enforce extreme austerity by all means and defy democratic procedure”. “Enshrining austerity as default economic policy is simply inviting further disaster as it is now so blatantly clear that the neoliberal approach does not work”, he said. (LC/transl.jl)