Peter Spiegel (FT Brussels blog): Merkel-Sarkozy weaken Commission?

After Protesilaos Stavrou, we look at what another valued euroblogger wrote about the joint letter, or should we say letters, from the German chancellor Angela Merkel and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy to Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council invited to come up with concrete proposals by October.


FT Brussels blog

On the FT Brussels blog, Peter Spiegel discussed the sidelining of the European Commission. Van Rompuy would chair the summits, aided by a new secretariat, and new analytical capacities would be created (to complement those of the Commission, the ECB and the IMF).

The intergovernmental approach would play into the hands of the governments of the bigger eurozone countries, like France and Germany.

Spiegel foresees some nasty institutional fights: Is the Sarko-Merkel plan anti-Commission? (18 August 2011).

Since then, Stanley Pignal has discussed the ideas of the Belgian acting finance minister Didier Reynders on eurozone reform, a finance minister for the euro area and eurobonds, on the FT Brussels blog: Reynders redux (19 August 2011).

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I agree with the analysis about the intergovernmental thrust of the Franco-German letter, but the eurozone summits would undermine the Euro Group as well as the Commission.

When chancellor Merkel and president Sarkozy say that ”(t)he European Parliament, the European Commission and the national parliaments should be associated to this process in their respective capacities”, it looks like a polite way of telling them not to expect any crumbs from the table of the leaders of this silent coup.

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Ralf Grahn