Brussels, 27/02/2012 (Agence Europe) - Meeting for an extraordinary session starting on Monday 27 February, the European Parliament and the national parliaments stressed the need to get the assemblies elected by universal suffrage involved in all decisions to reinforce economic governance. This was the watchword reiterated by the vice president of the EP, Gianni Pitella (S&D, Italy), in his opening speech. It is certainly true that the member states need to put their public finances in order. But the economic adjustment programmes focus too much on austerity, which “depresses” fragile economies more than anticipated, and they do not give enough room to measures to boost growth. He went on to plead in favour of creating “fresh resources” such as eurobonds or the financial transaction tax.
In response to the criticism, the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, said that the European leaders had not abandoned the Community method as part of their response to the sovereign debt crisis. The European Commission benefits from new prerogatives in terms of budgetary and macroeconomic monitoring, the Court of Justice of the EU will assess the introduction of the golden rule limiting indebtedness into the national legislations, and the EP played a key role in the adoption of the revised Stability and Growth Pact. The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, welcomed the results obtained in terms of economic governance in the framework of the European semester. Germany is one of the countries with the best performance, thanks to reforms undertaken a decade ago, he said, in response to a comment by Belgian MP Ms Gerkens, who expressed surprise that the Commission had recently spared Berlin, despite a current account surplus of nearly 6%. (MB/transl.fl)