Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-02-24-Speech-3-036"
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"en.20100224.13.3-036"2
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"Mr President, first of all, let me come directly to what I would call the most urgent problem today. We can talk about 2020, but we have a more urgent problem today: the eurozone and Greece. We have to find solutions to that.
I think we, the European Parliament, have to take the initiative in this field. It is important to determine what exactly happened in Greece. Today, we received contradictory information. Greece says that it has given all the information to the European Union and European institutions. At the same time, the European Commission and Eurostat are saying that they did not receive all the necessary information. At the same time the investment banks – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank – are minimising what they have done in the Greece case.
I therefore think it is the task of this Parliament to organise hearings with the relevant committee as quickly as possible, so that we can hear all the parties concerned on this matter and find out exactly what is happening in the case of Greece. We cannot talk about remedies, about solutions, about reforms in the European Union if, first of all, we do not know what really happened in the case of Greece in 2008 and 2009 and before that, and I think it is absolutely necessary that the different parties are heard by this Parliament.
The second point is that we also have to tackle the problem of the Greek debt. I think there is only one good solution to that. Yesterday, I read the article by George Soros in the
on the matter, and a few days ago I read the article by Joschka Fischer in the German press. He is saying what many people are saying: the best solution to the Greek debt is a European solution – euro obligations, or a European monetary fund, without any costs to the European taxpayer, but with a solution for the future. I think it is also the task of this Parliament to ask the Commission and the Council to reflect on that possibility and to go beyond the national interests of the current Member States of the European Union to examine this possibility.
Thirdly, I think the most important part of this debate is, naturally, what to do about 2020. I think Greece is a very good example of what went wrong with the Lisbon Strategy. The Lisbon Strategy was too weak; the gap between the German economy and the Greek economy widened over the last 10 years: it became bigger, not smaller, after the Lisbon Strategy. What we need – and it is the first decision to be taken by the Commission and the European Council – is to recognise that the open coordination method was not a good method; it was too weak a method. We need a bolder instrument inside the European Union. This bolder instrument is economic governance inside the European Union.
Mr Barroso, I hope that in a few days’ time, at the beginning of March – I think it is 3 March – you come forward with a paper on this. I hope it will include a bolder strategy than the things that were concluded or not concluded at the informal summit. It is still an intergovernmental, open-coordination method. They make it a little bit better, a little bit faster, but at the end, it continues to be an open coordination method based on intergovernmentalism. What we ask from you is to take the lead on that, on this economic policy and on this economic governance, and to come forward, together with Olli Rehn, with a bold proposal to have economic governance inside the European Union. It is nonsense to have monetary union on the one hand and not to have an economic and social and political union on the other. The problems with Greece are proof of that.
I think this is a time when we can expect something bold from the Commission, and I hope that on 3 March, the Commission will propose a document that is far more ambitious than the – in my view – disappointing conclusions of the informal summit."@en1
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