Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-09-22-Speech-3-014"
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"en.20100922.3.3-014"2
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"Mr President, first of all, I wish to thank President Van Rompuy for the report on this important Council. I want to start with the last part of his intervention, on the Roma issue.
I would say very clearly and personally to my colleague in the PPE Group, Mr Daul, that the Commission has acted in the right way on the Roma question and we should not criticise it. We have to help the Commission in this fight. I call on the Commission to stick to its point of view, because what we are facing today is a fundamental question.
Values are as important as market rules in the European Union, and it is important that everybody sees too that the Commission treats every Member State equally – be they small or big Member States. When it comes to values, there is no difference between small and big Member States. They all have to apply the same rules.
Unfortunately, it is true that the European summit has been a little bit hijacked by this issue, but that happens in politics. Certainly, in Europe, matters are often hijacked by the issue of the day. That is naturally a pity because, on the issue of economic governance, we have no time to waste. We cannot afford to face a new economic and financial crisis without these new instruments on economic governance in place.
We know that a monetary pillar cannot work without an economic pillar. If you look at the spreads today, the spreads between the German interest rates and other interest rates are still very high. We need a package on economic governance on the table as soon as possible, and I hope that the Commission will come forward with this, as it has promised, on 29 September.
In my opinion, to be credible – because that is the most important thing – this package has to respond to and fulfil three primary conditions. President Van Rompuy, the first condition, which you have always defended, is that this is not only about enforcing fiscal surveillance but also about improving macro-economic surveillance, because that is the lesson of the Greek debt crisis. It is not only about the Stability Pact, it is also about the state of the economy in that country.
The second condition is that the package should contain effective sanctions. I personally think that the best way to do this is, firstly, through progressive sanctions; secondly, there must be a combination of financial penalties and political penalties – not a choice between one or the other but a combination of both; thirdly, in some cases, this can also mean suspending the voting rights of those who are breaking the rules. That is so in normal life and that has to apply also in political life, I should say.
The third and final condition, in my opinion, is that the trigger has to be in the hands of the Commission and the ECB. I believe – and I have said this a few times already – that surveillance by Member States simply does not work. It did not work with the Lisbon Treaty, it did not work with the Stability Pact, and it will not work in the future. We have seen this with Germany and France, who did not apply the Stability Pact in 2005 and simply changed the Stability Pact at that moment. This will happen again in the future, so the trigger has to be in the hands of the Commission. I hope that on 29 September, based also on the work of the task force, a credible package will be on the table both of the Council and of Parliament."@en1
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