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- Ελληνικά
The European Parliament Week, co-organised by the European Parliament (EP) and the current Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), continues today in Brussels.
The 25th anniversary of the euro and the future of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) were discussed during yesterday's work of the EP's Economic and Monetary Policy Committee (ECON). MEP Onoufrios Koulla, Member of the Parliamentary Committee on Finance and Budget, made the following intervention. I believe the same happened in 2014 with the Banking Union. But what we have to admit is that, on the fiscal policy side, not everything that should have been done was done. And in an EMU, there really has to be coordination, there really has to be common rules that are followed. We have always had rules, but they have almost always not been followed. That was the problem, I think, and in the early stages of the 2000s, it was the big countries that kept asking for exceptions and then the southern countries followed suit.
But in any case, what we have agreed now I hope will be respected, as well as the reforms that need to be made at the national level to attract more investment so that the EU really becomes a globally competitive economy as a whole. I hope now with the Recovery Fund that we will indeed strengthen these reforms at national level so that we can achieve much better results. That is the reality. We have to, to reduce debts, to reduce budget deficits, not to keep asking for exceptions. For the thirty years that I have been studying, we have been asking for exceptions.
I want to add two things: One is that if we really want the EU to be strong and to be able to absorb asymmetric threats and asymmetric economic shocks, we need to increase its budget from 1%. The common European budget for so many years cannot be at 1% of GDP. And one last point, to say that we need to make the euro an attractive currency so that countries want to join. Some countries that joined in 2004 have still not joined the euro and probably do not want to join, even though it was theoretically compulsory. Let's see how we do it with the new enlargement, because the euro will become stronger as more countries adopt it."
(Text as sent by the House of Representatives)
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