Brussels, 21/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - At an interparliamentary conference on Tuesday 21 January on European economic governance, Economic and Monetary Commissioner Olli Rehn was not able to win national parliamentarians over on all points, despite taking a cautiously optimistic line on the EU's economy. He came in for severe criticism from MPs in countries in receipt of financial aid.
Rehn said: “Ireland, Latvia, Spain and Portugal are showing strong ownership of the programmes, trust in Greece it can increase”. Latvia is in receipt of balance of payment aid. The troika will soon return to Greece, he said, “once national authorities' groundwork on both fiscal and structural efforts” is done. In response to a question from a representative of the Greek parliament, Dimitrios Papadimoulis, unhappy about the state of the country today, Rehn pointed out that the assessment made in 2010 had revealed fraudulent statistics, budgetary irresponsibility and a bloated public sector. He said the decision to support Greece had not been an easy one, but it had been a responsible one because without aid from the eurozone, it would have gone bankrupt and this would have impacted negatively on the rest of the eurozone.
The Commissioner repeated, as on many occasions, his warning about resting on one's political laurels now that the economy is picking up. “For EU citizens, the times continue to be tough”, he said, with high unemployment. In response to a question from Elisa Feirrera (S&D, Portugal), he said that the group of experts examining pooling of the debt would publish its findings by the end of March this year.
In the morning, the two rapporteurs on the investigation into the work of the troika, Austria's Othmar Karas (EPP) and France's Liêm Hoang-Ngoc (S&D), in countries in receipt of financial aid had joined the debate. They said that there needed to be greater democratic legitimacy for the process. Irish parliamentarian Dominic Hannigan said that the Irish parliament had not been consulted enough about the country's aid programme.
The day before, the president of the EP, Martin Schulz, said that there was a feeling that the European Parliament had been sidelined from the decision-making process for dealing with the economic crisis and warned that the EP had to fight this trend. A representative of the Greek parliament, Vangelis Meimarakis, said that the introduction of the specific economic recommendations by the member states had not done the job, and that monitoring was also falling short of the mark. (EL/transl.fl)