Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-15-Speech-3-021-000"
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"en.20120215.4.3-021-000"2
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"Mr President, European politics is no longer anchored in reality. EU summits are becoming a political ritual, somehow divorced from the real world.
Every summit – and we have seen lots of them in recent months – comes and goes with the same old mantras and demonstrations of hope triumphing over experience. A little bit more austerity and immediately confidence in the euro will somehow magically come flooding back. Another Treaty package to tinker with the rules and the markets will suddenly realise that they have been wrong all along and the euro is, in fact, completely sound. And then at the end of them all, we see the same ritual – the stern-faced leaders emerge, they gaze at the cameras and they repeat the same old mantras: ‘we will do all we can to save the euro’. But they never actually quite specify exactly what they are going to do to save the euro.
If politics has traditionally been seen as the art of the possible, the EU is turning it into an art of delusion. Surely, eventually, this nonsense needs to stop. The risks are becoming too great for yet another of the many summits that come and go, and which fail to face reality.
Let me start with Greece. I was amazed that neither the Commission nor the Council mentioned anything about Greece in their opening statements, as if it has suddenly disappeared off the map. Nobody believes that the latest package will save Greece. None of the MPs in Greece who voted for it on Sunday night seem to believe this, none of the international commentators or economists believe it; even the German Finance Minister who insisted on it does not seem to believe that it will save Greece. Because even if all of the measures that were voted for on Sunday night are implemented – and, given Greece’s record, that is probably unlikely – then by 2020, after eight more years of grinding austerity, Greece would still be in a worse position than Italy is today.
Greece is suffering from a 30% loss of competitiveness against Germany. How do you eliminate such a deficit? Economic reform in the long term will clearly be essential, but in the short term, there really is now only one solution: a default, coupled with a devaluation, is the only way now to salvage something from the wreckage of the Greek economy, and to save a generation or more of young Greeks from a miserable economic inheritance.
All of the energy currently being devoted to drafting and ratifying a new Treaty that is completely irrelevant to the ongoing crisis would be better employed drafting and implementing a plan for the orderly withdrawal of Greece from the euro, including carefully prepared support for the banks that will be most affected. That is the sustainable solution and everything else is just a very expensive way of further kicking the can down the road."@en1
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