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Integration
Berlin, Aug. 29, 2017 (Reuters/NAN) Leaders of Germany and France on Tuesday said they are ready to press ahead with deeper European integration, promising a tighter euro-zone at the core of the European Union shaken by Britain’s vote to leave.
French President Emmanuel Macron, elected in May on a pro-EU platform, said he wanted to strengthen Europe’s single currency union in light of Brexit and pledged to announce proposals after Germany’s election on Sept. 24.
“This is a revamp that we need,” he told an annual assembly of French ambassadors in Paris, promising“concrete steps in around 10 areas.”
He said that the EU could not afford to “get stuck in routine or technocratic quarrels”.
“Brexit should not take up all our energy,” he added as British and European Commission officials hold a third round of talks this week on Britain’s departure from the EU.
In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met Macron on Monday, endorsed the idea of a European Monetary Fund.
She said she could imagine creating a combined European finance and economy minister.
In power since 2005, the conservative chancellor, 63, is comfortably on course to win re-election, which would allow her to pursue deeper euro zone integration together with Macron.
Merkel while talking to reporters, described a European Monetary Fund as a very good idea.
“It could make us more stable and allow us to show the world that we have all the mechanisms in our own portfolio for the euro-zone to be able to react well to unexpected situations.”
Such a Fund would evolve out of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) a rescue facility set up in 2012 to help defuse the euro-zone crisis that threatened to tear apart the common-currency bloc at the heart of the EU.
Merkel, who wants to proof the currency union against future crises, said she did not rule out a French idea to have a common euro zone finance minister.
“I could also imagine a (combined) economy and finance minister,” she said, adding that this could allow for better coordination on budget and economic policies.
Merkel addressed a wide range of issues in good humour two days after her main election challenger, Social Democrat Martin Schulz, accused her of being aloof and out of touch with voters.
She also called for more European cooperation on migrant policy.
She pressed Turkey to release German citizens it has detained, and said she could not hold her tongue on the issue of the rule of law in Poland. (Reuters/NAN)
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Edited by Celine-Damilola Oyewole/Sadiya Hamza