Brussels, 15/02/2005 (Agence Europe) - At an interview with a group of journalists, French Socialist Pervenche Berès on Tuesday stressed the need for the reform of the Stability Pact to serve the Lisbon objectives. This kind of reform is not helpful unless it allows us to “bring the budgetary monitoring instrument into step with the Lisbon Strategy”, said the president of the Parliamentary committee on economic and monetary affairs, adding that “Lisbon lacks tools”. She said that the Stability Pact and the competition policy should be part of the tool kit, because the open method of coordination (launched in Lisbon in 2000: Ed) alone will not help towards the objectives set for 2010.
Speaking of the “risks of side-slipping” in case the Heads of State and Government have too much of a stranglehold on the final version of the revised Pact, Pervenche Berès said that she was convinced of the willingness of the finance ministers to “conclude between themselves” this revision before the March Council. She said that Jean-Claude Juncker, both finance minister and head of government, “is right” at this stage to block the calls by Member States for categories of expenditure to be excluded from the calculation of the budgetary deficit. “If France comes with its military expenditure and Germany with its net contribution to the EU budget, there's no more European budgetary policy”, she said. The main uncertainty, she said, concerns the debt criterion, on which the positions of the Member States vary enormously. On other elements of the reforms, Ms Berès said that peer pressure and goodwill are not enough and that she was not “opposed to the debate on the use of revenue in periods of strong economic performance”. However, she voiced her concern about the idea of taking account of expenditure from the pension system reforms, as there is the risk that “Brussels will get too involved in the national debate on the choice between pay-as-you-go schemes and interest capitalisation ones”.
On a more general level, Ms Berès hopes that the reform of the Pact will help the EU out of the current phase of economic debate. The Pact must evolve from a mere budget discipline tool to a genuine element of budgetary coordination and the European Parliament and the national parliaments must take ownership of the debate on economic policy, which has until now remained in the closed circle of the Eurogroup, said Ms Berès. When asked about the initial opposition of the European Central Bank to an adjustment of the Pact, Ms Berès said that “it should be in the ECB's best interests to go with the flow”.