Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-06-06-Speech-1-080-000"
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"en.20110606.17.1-080-000"2
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"Madam President, honourable Members, let me first thank you for a very substantive debate. I believe that there is a broad consensus in this House – not a full but a broad consensus – on the selection process of the next Managing Director of the IMF. It has to be open, transparent and merit-based.
I also sense that there is broad support – maybe not full but broad support – for Mrs Lagarde, who has already been endorsed by the EU Member States and by the Commission as their candidate for Managing Director of the IMF.
I want to make three points to respond to some of the views expressed in the course of the debate. First, the IMF has played a key role, in cooperation with the European Union, in overcoming the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, for which Dominique Strauss-Kahn made a major contribution as the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.
While we still face considerable turbulence in some segments of the sovereign debt markets of certain countries, we have been able to contain the sovereign debt crisis and protect the ongoing economic recovery in Europe. Of course the work has to go on, and we still have difficult decisions ahead of us, not least in the coming weeks in June. But let us recall that there has been no Lehman Brothers catastrophe on European soil, and we have to make sure that there will not be. That would be detrimental to economic growth and improving employment in Europe.
Secondly, we have had very good cooperation between the Commission, the ECB and the IMF, which was not self-evident when we started about a year and a half ago in terms of fire-fighting the financial turmoil. Each of these three institutions has its own rules, its own philosophy and its own independence, and it was not self-evident that they could work together in order to overcome these challenges. However, I dare to say that a pragmatic sense of crisis-awareness has prevailed and helped us to cooperate in order to contain the sovereign debt crisis and protect economic recovery.
Thirdly, I do agree that we need to reform our external representation. As I said in my opening remarks, we now have a huge task, firstly to conclude the internal economic governance reform. We are just about to do this, and I count on you to enable us to do it in the course of June, before the summer break. This is extremely important for the credibility of the European Union in these times of crisis. So let us all do our best in order to ensure that we will complete this indispensable reform of EU economic governance.
In the long term, our goal is a single seat, at least for the euro area. In the short term, we need better practical and pragmatic policy coordination among the EU Member States that are represented in the G20 or G7 or in the IMF. I must say that I have seen plenty of concrete improvement in that regard, so that the EU Member States that are represented in the G20, or in the IMF or in the G7, mostly share common goals and are mostly working together as an orchestra and not with different voices.
Yes, we have plenty of room for improvement and we have to discuss this thoroughly. But, as I said, let us first conclude the internal governance reform and then we can come back to the issue of how to improve our external representation. The rights of the emerging economies mean that it is in the fundamental interest of the European Union, its citizens and its Member States for us to be more united and thus more effective in advancing our causes and our interests on the global scene."@en1
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