The French government continues to argue in the face of strong German resistance that the ECB should be deployed urgently to help build a firewall against financial market attacks on big debtor countries such as Italy and Spain – and France itself.
“We are stuck with a major difficulty – that is to convince Germany that we should arm the eurozone with an instrument of defence for our currency through a certain evolution of the role of the central bank”, said François Fillon, the French prime minister. It has become clear in Paris that, far from giving up on the issue, Mr Sarkozy’s government is linking it to French willingness to meet Ms Merkel’s insistence on changes in European governing treaties to embed centrally-enforced budgetary discipline within the 17-member eurozone.
Alain Juppé, the French foreign minister, stepped up the pressure, saying intervention by the ECB was a matter of urgency. Mr Juppé said the market’s cool reception of Wednesday’s German Bund auction showed that the crisis “touches all the economies, including the most solid”. “There is urgency. We will talk about (ECB intervention) today in Strasbourg. I think and hope that the thinking will evolve and that the ECB should play an essential role to re-establish confidence.”
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