Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-03-Speech-3-083"
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"en.20031203.7.3-083"2
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"Mr President, first of all, I welcome the fact that we are holding this debate, which I requested in September, before the recent decision of the European Union’s Finance Ministers not to apply penalties to France and Germany for having breached the provisions of the Stability Pact. In the end, they actually proved that we were right to condemn the irrationality of the criteria for nominal convergence, which have led to the well-known and disastrous consequences of economic recession, rising unemployment and poverty levels that Portugal is currently experiencing.
We have already said here on more than one occasion that this Stability Pact is useless. In the debate of October last year we confirmed our agreement with President Romano Prodi and Commissioner Lamy’s observations to the effect that this pact is stupid, like all rigid decisions, and that it is a crude instrument for economic governance, which must be replaced by something more intelligent, since the 3% rule is positively medieval. Unfortunately, these gentlemen were not consistent with their observations and failed to present a proposal for the pact’s revision. They were afraid of launching the excessive deficit procedure against France and Germany, as they had done against Portugal. And then the inevitable happened: Germany and France did not accept the Commission’s proposal. Of course, the Commission said it would continue to apply the Treaty and that it reserves the right to look at the consequences of the Council conclusions and to decide on any action it might take. Does anyone believe, however, that the Commission will do anything to France and Germany if the governments of those countries do not agree? As we all know, it will not. The question that remains is: why keep a Pact that is meaningless?
We know that the text approved by Ecofin only imposes rules previously announced by the German and French governments, thereby accepting that these countries have failed to meet the Maastricht criteria for three consecutive years. There is furthermore no doubt that if they need more time, they could stretch this to four or five years … It is now clear who controls the Stability Pact, who wields power and strength in the European Union even before the new Constitutional Treaty has entered into force. It should be noted that it was Germany that demanded the Stability Pact, with these unacceptable criteria for nominal convergence. As we now see, however, it did so in order to enforce compliance on others. Well might Commissioner Solbes Mira state that the Council’s decision respects neither the rules nor the spirit of the Stability Pact. Will he now resign, his authority having been undermined in this way? France was, of course, more realistic, stating that the Council has another way of implementing the Stability Pact, thereby justifying its non-compliance, whilst advocating changes through what it called the ‘enriching’ of the Stability Pact. This is an approach that others have also advocated here. Some, indeed, have said that the Pact is not dead; it is merely frozen until the rich and powerful countries decide it can be defrosted because their problems have been solved. We know that the Governing Council of the European Central Bank also supported adopting the Commission’s proposals. Will the Governing Council also resign for allowing itself to be ignored by the Council?
We, who have always been opposed to this Stability Pact have long called for it to be suspended, in order to revise its stupid criteria for nominal convergence, which fail to take account of the real situation in each country and of their different levels of socio-economic development and which confuse productive expenditure with non-productive expenditure when calculating the budget deficit. One thing is certain, however: the hypocrisy of those people – and they exist in Portugal too – who use the argument of the Stability Pact to justify anti-social policies, now becomes even more striking.
Let us bury this Pact! Let us seek alternative policies that give priority to employment, to high-quality public services, to sustainable development and to the well-being of the people!"@en1
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