Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-10-25-Speech-4-400-000"
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"en.20121025.29.4-400-000"2
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"Mr President, in principle I support the European Semester, to keep national budgets in control and prevent budget derailing as we have seen over the past years. A monetary union without fiscal discipline will explode. Country-specific recommendations make sense but add little new. The IMF and the OECD have been making the same recommendations for years. It is like a severely overweight person visiting the doctor. His doctor will tell him ‘you have to lose weight’, but obviously the patient knows this already. The remedy looks very simple – exercise up, calories down, but you have to do it.
Member States are also recommended to do things they already know and when this is not the case they simply ignore it and live in denial. The number one recommendation for France is that people should work longer, but the first thing Mr Hollande did was to cut the retirement age. Likewise, it remains to be seen if France will take orders from Brussels on budgetary policy. French public opinion is mainly in denial about the oversized welfare state. When public sector unions are confronted with facts they start striking and the political leadership of France does little to raise the much-needed awareness.
With regard to the economic dialogue, I would like to remind Parliament of the exchange of views we had in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) with the Finance Minister of Belgium, Mr Vanackere. He painted a very rosy picture of the Belgian economy. He depicted the Belgian economy as a rose garden. A few weeks later it turned out that he had used overly optimistic figures in his presentation. Instead of being a top performer, Belgium is heading towards recession. Its economy is shrinking at a much higher pace than the eurozone average. Serious budget cuts are needed.
The economic dialogue with Belgium was no more than a good news show intended for domestic consumption. The value of such exchange is rather limited. Those who live in denial are punished by the facts later on, as was the case with Mr Vanackere, so the proposed form of the European Semester is an exercise in irrelevance. Forecasts are far too rosy year after year. The Commission wants to spread optimism but predicted growth is often followed by even more contraction. A European semester only works when we stop fooling ourselves, face reality as it is, and act accordingly."@en1
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