We'll always have Deauville. Nicolas Sarkozy with Angela Merkel at the Normandy seaside resort, 18 October 2010.

The Merkel / Sarkozy hijack

Ahead of the EU summit to stabilize the troubled euro, the French president and German chancellor not only agreed on new budget rules, but have also called on reopening the Lisbon Treaty. A stitch-up, mutter officials at the Commission.

Published on 20 October 2010 at 11:04
We'll always have Deauville. Nicolas Sarkozy with Angela Merkel at the Normandy seaside resort, 18 October 2010.

Germany and France have agreed to soften a rigid new regime of fines for countries breaking the eurozone's budget rules a week before a crucial EU summit is supposed to ratify a punitive system aimed at shoring up the single currency.

Senior EU officials preparing the new rules, which have been devised to immunise the euro against a similar kind of collapse that it faced as a result of the Greek debt crisis, put a brave face on the sudden Franco-German hijack. But European Commission officials conceded that there had been a Franco-German stitch-up to weaken the way the new euro regime would operate and to leave it more vulnerable to political horsetrading.

In a another highly contentious move, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, also agreed to reopen the Lisbon Treaty, the EU's quasi-constitution, in order to force countries that find themselves in a crisis such as the one suffered by Greece to declare insolvency and to forfeit their voting rights in EU councils.

At a summit on the Normandy coast on Monday evening, Sarkozy yielded to German pressure to reopen the treaty in return for Berlin dropping its insistence that sanctions for fiscal sinners in the eurozone be automatic. The call to reopen the treaty will run into strong resistance, with European leaders exhausted by the bad-tempered nine years it took to finalise the Lisbon pact which came into force last year. Read fullarticle in the Guardian...

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A missed opportunity

“Europe has let go of an opportunity to sanction irresponsible governments, who fail to respect economic agreements,” complains Hospodárske noviny. The Czech business daily notes that Slovakia — the most recent state to adopt the euro, and criticised for its reluctance to contribute to the Greek rescue package — has announced that it was in favour of automatic sanctions to punish countries that overspend. However, “everything will remain the same: sanctions will not depend on economic results but on political decisions," reports the Bratislava based newspaper.

In Spain, La Vanguardia complains about what it describes as "a decaffeinated reform," and insists that the final touches to the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact were not hammered out in Luxembourg by the Eurogroup, but in Deauville at a meeting between Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, where the two leaders agreed to create a permanent rescue fund to preserve stability in the euro zone. Writing in the Flemish daily De Tijd, American economist Melvyn Krauss argues that "Germans now see themselves as ‘the financial saviours of Europe’. However, the rescue operation for the countries of southern Europe is in fact an indirect bailout for German and French banks. So the Germans are not ‘victims of the euro." On the contrary, Krauss believes that the issue is not one of "Germany saving the euro, but of the euro saving Germany."

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