French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire called on Germany to stop delaying EU decisions about taxes and the eurozone budget. The people of Europe are running out of patience, he warned, while populists love EU indecision.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has politely asked the German government to come out of its domestic malaise and start addressing key European initiatives that France has been pushing for months – specifically a tax on international internet giants and a eurozone budget.
Le Maire employed fairly strong language on both issues, demanding that the EU implement a tax on Google, Facebook, and Amazon by the end of the year, before saying that a eurozone budget would save the eurozone itself: “There will be a eurozone budget or there won’t be a eurozone at all some day,” he said.
“My patience is endless, because that’s part of my job,” Le Maire said in a long interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Thursday. “But the patience of the people is running out … it should be clear to everyone: not making any decisions is nourishing populism. It’s better to act quickly now and then refine afterwards. Nothing is worse than not deciding.”
Excuses and distractions
France has been pushing for more EU assertiveness since last year, when President Emmanuel Macron made a celebrated speech in Paris in which he called for a “new foundation of Europe,” but Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration has spent the last few months bogged down in internal crises, especially rows over migration policy with Interior Minister Horst Seehofer.
Awkwardly, one of the indirect consequences of those squabbles was the elevation last month of Ralph Brinkhaus to the position of chief whip in Merkel’s parliamentary group. Brinkhaus is a fiscal specialist who happens to be an opponent of the eurozone budget. Not only that, Seehofer’s Christian Social Union (CSU) has also spoken out against the budget, and they are facing a state election in Bavaria this month. The last thing Merkel needs is another row with her Bavarian sister party.
The paralysis was acknowledged by members of her own party on Thursday. “In the face of the domestic political tensions we could not yet drive our foreign and European projects with the strength that would have been necessary,” Roderich Kiesewetter, Bundestag member for her Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told DW. “But I am confident that the CDU/CSU and the SPD [Social Democratic Party] will be able to concentrate intensively on the business at hand again.”
Franziska Brantner, parliamentarian for the opposition Greens, was less kind, and squarely blamed Seehofer for hampering the German government’s European work – specifically at a Brussels summit in late June, when the government crisis over Seehofer’s migration plan imposed itself on the agenda.
“Le Maire is right in calling for action from the German government,” she said in an emailed statement. “The June summit was intended for the stabilization of the eurozone and was then hijacked by Seehofer. The government is being careless and cowardly.”
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