Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-05-Speech-3-404"
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"en.20100505.73.3-404"2
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"Mr President, as a born anti-revolutionary I shall be speaking with rather less passion than Mr Cohn-Bendit, but I understand now why 1968 was a success for him; I could only follow events on television as a child.
Ladies and gentlemen, I share the concern of the European people about current developments. Savers and pensioners, for example, are asking themselves where this is heading. The question and the concern are both legitimate. A EUR 110 billion package is an enormous amount of money.
We first talked about 35 billion, then 60 billion, and now 110 billion. This is a huge sum, and the austerity package in Greece is also huge; yet we must not forget that Greece has lived on credit for too long, with a retirement age of 53 years. Who would not want that? The question is whether or not Greece will come out the other end. We are now seeing strikes, rebellion, rioting and so on. This makes the Greek problem a European problem, our problem.
The problem in Athens, Mr Cohn-Bendit, affects the Dutch, Flemings, Germans – all of us – and the contamination risk remains. I take the view that Greece should have been thrown out of the euro area once the budget misappropriations were discovered. We should have set a cut-off point, but we failed to do so and now we have to continue and hope against hope for success.
We must also rewrite the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact. It is providing neither stability nor, at present, economic growth. In my opinion, supervision must be strengthened, the European Commission must show more courage and there must be greater monitoring of compliance with the rules. This has been absent in recent years.
As I see it, however, we also need an exit procedure for countries that can no longer cope in the euro area. We have an exit procedure for the European Union but not for the euro area, and I believe we do need this option, so that a country may introduce and devalue its own currency to get itself back onto dry land. Why is there an exit procedure for the European Union itself, via the Treaty of Lisbon, but not for the euro area?
Commissioner Rehn told me last time that a country’s departure from the euro area would run counter to the ever closer union, but Greece is currently demonstrating where the limits of this ever closer union lie. Suddenly we have a weak euro and a low growth rate. Ladies and gentlemen, we are held captive by the theory of the ever closer union. We are holding European taxpayers to ransom, and those taxpayers are becoming more uneasy with each passing day; this should not be forgotten."@en1
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