Brussels, 11/06/2004 (Agence Europe) - The Foreign Ministers of Germany, Italy, Greece and Poland sent a letter on Thursday to the Irish Presidency bringing into question a paragraph of the draft European Constitution text which confers more power on the European Commission within excessive deficit procedure. The implementation of the Stability and Growth Pact should be discussed on Monday during the ministerial meeting of the IGC, the Irish Presidency said on Friday, considering that this subject is among the still outstanding issues.
The draft Constitution gives the Commission the right to submit a proposal to a State in excessive deficit, a proposal that the Ecofin Council can only reject or amend by unanimity. The four Member States would prefer to keep the current procedure which authorises the Commission to send these countries only recommendations that the Council can modify by qualified majority.
The signatories of the letter stress the "great importance" they attach to the question as to whether, within the framework of the Excessive Deficit Procedure, the Commission should have a right to submit proposals to the Council. Joschka Fischer, Franco Frattini, Petros G. Molyviatis and Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz consider the Commission "should instead maintain its right to submit recommendations to the Council - as originally provided for in the Stability and Growth Pact (…) as the recommended measures relate to areas of national competence". For the above four countries, this is the only way the Council can "retain the necessary flexibility" in addressing recommendations to Member States in the field of economic and financial policy.
The Commission protested against this initiative and called for the provisions of the draft Constitution to be retained. According to the spokesperson for Commissioner Joachim Almunia, it would be more consistent for the Commission to be able to make proposals in a way that guarantees Community interest. In his view, if ministers in the enlarged Union had the power to amend Commission recommendations "without its agreement", this could lead to texts in which "the Community point of view would be lost".