Poland shouldn't rush to set a date for euro adoption, a decision that should be left to parliament in the next term set to begin in late 2015, the country's president said, revealing a disagreement over the issue with the more euro-friendly government.
President Bronislaw Komorowski said late Monday no date was necessary at this stage. “Today, instead of discussing a theoretically possible question of Poland’s membership in the euro, we should focus on the first stage, which is meeting membership criteria”, the president said.
Poland in November 2012 didn’t meet any of the required fiscal and monetary benchmarks, with inflation, public deficit and interest rates all above the EU’s limits. In the current parliament, Poland also lacks a required majority in the lower house to change the constitution, which says the zloty is the country’s legal tender and the National Bank of Poland is its central bank.
Poland’s conservative opposition sees the national currency as an attribute of sovereignty, and has also said the country needs to become much more affluent before it can join the euro. Poland’s central-bank governor, Marek Belka, has said near-zero interest rates in the eurozone are inappropriate for Poland, which has its benchmark rate at 4 per cent, and would lead to boom-and-bust economic cycles.
Poland’s finance minister, Jan Vincent-Rostowski, said earlier the eurozone had restructuring to do in order for euro adoption to be safe, while Poland needed to carry out more structural reform to boost competitiveness. In 10 years from now, however, Mr Rostowski said he couldn’t imagine Poland sitting with its own currency between an integrated eurozone and Russia.
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