The NGO Positive Money Europe presented its new report calling for a stronger supervisory role for the European Parliament over the European Central Bank (ECB) on Tuesday, 9 April, at a conference held at the Parliament in Brussels.
More specifically, the report, co-authored by Stanislas Jourdan, Head of Positive Money Europe, and Sebastian Diessner, researcher at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, aims to propose concrete and pragmatic measures that could be put in place by the European institutions, in particular by Parliament, to strengthen the ECB's democratic legitimacy.
“It is necessary to strengthen the ECB's responsibility as of now in order to ensure that it has the necessary legitimacy to act when the next crisis strikes”, Mr Jourdan said.
To this end, the authors make recommendations on three major topics: the ECB's accountability to Parliament; the appointment process to the ECB's Executive Board; and the ECB's institutional transparency.
Among their proposals, they recommend in particular that Parliament use the monetary dialogue - during which members of Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) can put questions to the president of the ECB - much more effectively, for example, by organising preparatory meetings before the monetary dialogue to improve the consistency and complementarity of members' questions, or by allocating speaking time in a more flexible way.
Secondly, while the terms of office of three of the six members of the ECB's Executive Board expire by the end of 2019, the report proposes to strengthen Parliament's role in the appointment process for members of the Executive Board. In concrete terms, it suggests that the Eurogroup and the EU Council, instead of following the current practice of selecting a single candidate and then submitting it to the Parliament for consideration, provide MEPs with a balanced pre-selection list of at least two candidates.
In addition, another recommendation is to create an ECON sub-committee dedicated to the ECB and euro area monetary policy, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the ECON committee in monitoring the ECB.
View the report: https://bit.ly/2DiQFxZ. (Original version in French by Damien Genicot - intern)