Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-13-Speech-1-080"
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"en.20061113.16.1-080"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this report contains several interesting and welcome recommendations for which I would like to thank the rapporteur.
Thus, instead of simply calling for public spending cuts, the report recommends freeing up resources to make what are presumably necessary public investments in education, training, infrastructure and research.
Furthermore, instead of recommending wage cuts, the European Parliament admits - that is in fact the term that is used - that, in the long term, real wages and productivity should grow simultaneously. I would thank the rapporteur for his efforts at moderation and conciliation.
However, the subject of this debate is the economic performance of the euro zone. In fact, I believe that, despite the recent and even unexpected improvement of growth indicators, the economic situation remains fragile and unsatisfactory. After all, the Commission’s macroeconomic policy affects the daily lives of millions of Europeans whose purchasing power, I would point out, is threatened by stagnating salaries and by an increase in the cost of living and whose working conditions continue to decline, while social protection is also dwindling.
The practical response offered by the Commission and the European Central Bank is always the same: to fight inflation through budgetary austerity and wage cuts, while increasing competition in the services, capital, products and labour markets.
Perhaps the time has come to evaluate the results of this policy and to consider whether dismantling public services, deregulating the labour market and cutting public expenditure really is a sustainable way of driving growth in the euro zone and in the European Union. Unfortunately, no period of reflection is on the agenda. In two days, we shall have to give our opinion on a ‘services’ directive that is admittedly improved, but that remains true to Fritz Bolkestein’s deregulatory model.
In a few months’ time, we will have on our agenda a directive proposing the end of the public postal service. As for energy, despite the chronic instability of the oil-producing zones, despite the gas blackmail exercised by a neighbouring country, despite global warming and despite power cuts extending across half of Europe, it is all to no avail and the response remains the same: to complete the liberalised and deregulated internal energy market in Europe. The euro zone’s economic report is perhaps a little better this year, but its social and political performance remains, in my eyes, as bad as ever."@en1
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