EU demands right to dictate national budgets
The European Union called Wednesday for sweeping new powers to override national budgets and decide when governments should be placed under the wardenship of Brussels technocrats.
"Without stronger governance, it will be difficult if not impossible to sustain the common currency," Jose Manuel Barroso, head of the executive EU Commission, said of plans presented as a pre-condition for pooled eurozone government borrowings, seen as a way of helping resolve the debt crisis.
Chancellor Angela Merkel immediately repeated Germany's opposition to joint eurozone bonds, saying it was an approach which would not work -- just as investors shunned an issue of German 10-year bonds, considered the eurozone gold standard.
The Netherlands meanwhile warned that plans for fiscal convergence also face an "uphill struggle," Finance Minister Jan Kees De Jager adding without naming the objectors: "There are those who resist further discipline." The proposals, which concern the eurozone, now journey through the EU's 27 member states and the European Parliament.
Barroso argued that to complement democracy at the level of national parliaments, for instance in the setting of annual budgets, a "democracy of the EU" also had to be given its say.
Otherwise, he said, Europe would "hand sovereignty to markets."
The EU has rules on annual deficits and cumulative debts but these have been trampled over for years by its governments.
This time, the Commission wants the power to send inspectors in to finance ministries around Europe, and demand changes it believes better meet the needs of the common good before funds are legally allocated.
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