Brussels, 06/05/2013 (Agence Europe) - Germany refuses to budge, saying that any financial solidarity with another country will require amendment of the EU treaty.
In an interview published on Monday 6 May in French business newspaper Les Echos, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble says that ideally banking union would require a uniform bank recovery mechanism and the EU treaty would have to change to make this possible. He said the Germany was prepared for this, but other countries fear that would take too long. Meanwhile, he said, member states were going to create a network of national bank restructuring authorities in order to endorse banking union within the set deadline. Germany says harmonisation of the rules governing national bank restructuring funds, currently under discussion at the EU Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, must not include any binding financial solidarity measures from one member state to another (see EUROPE 10833 and 10840).
In the same spirit, last month, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, rejected the idea of any unified EU savings guarantee system for up to €100,000 (see EUROPE 10835).
Schäuble said that the introduction of a redemption fund, as mooted by German economists to temporarily manage excess eurozone nations' debt, was absolutely impossible without changing the EU treaty. He said that, in order to build Europe properly over the long term, there was no way round the need to reform institutions to make them more democratic, which will necessarily require the giving up of a degree of national sovereignty. (MB/transl.fl)