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Addressing the closing session, the chairs of the committees most involved, Sharon Bowles (ALDE, UK) for the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, Alain Lamassoure (EPP, FR) for the Budgets Committee and Pervenche Berès (S&D, FR) for the Employment Committee, summed up the sector-specific work that their committees had done with national MPs on Tuesday.
European Commission President José Manuel Barroso stressed the need to ensure maximum democratic scrutiny at whichever level power is exercised. European Council President Herman Van Rompuy urged parliaments not to see themselves as rivals, a message echoed by many others present.
The European Semester is changing who sets economic priorities and how they are decided, said EP Vice-President Anni Podimata (S&D, EL). These changes are widening the democratic deficit, which makes it all the more necessary to devise a new parliamentary means of exercising enhanced control, she added.
Irish Parliament Speaker Sean Barrett noted that national parliaments are currently ill-equipped to scrutinise EU policy-making. If an MEP is not a member of an EU affairs committee, he or she would find it very hard to follow what is happening at EU level, he added.
Many MPs echoed this view in various ways, some highlighting how rarely the EU makes it onto national parliamentary agendas and others criticising the European Council for acting so opaquely as to escape any possible parliamentary scrutiny.
Work will continue in various fora over the coming months to develop mechanisms to enable parliaments to get involved in, and excercise control over, the economic coordination mechanisms being put in place at EU level.
Press release - ECON
Democratic deficit and austerity
The new economic governance arrangements being introduced, inter alia through the European Semester, directly affect every aspect of national economic policy, and hence must be subject to stronger democratic control, acknowledged MEPs and MPs in the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee debate. Without this control, citizens may eventually just stop accepting reform recommendations, they warned. A paradigm shift towards stronger economic governance necessitates a similar shift in the way parliaments are involved and work together, noted one MP.
However, not all participants agreed that such changes on the EU landscape require moves towards a generally more integrated union. There was still less agreement on whether policy-makers should move away from prescribing austerity as the solution to the crisis. Many on the centre left argued that austerity was having exactly the opposite effect to that intended. Others countered that reforms are hard but inevitable, and are producing positive results.
EU budget
European Parliament Budgets Committee Chair Alain Lamassoure (EPP, FR), called for a proper discussion of what can be expected from the EU budget. "Ireland's population makes up less than 1 per cent of the EU total, and Greece's GNP is less than 2 per cent of that of the EU as a whole. Yet their budgetary problems have kept us busy for a long time", he said, pointing out that EU Member States' national budgets are interdependent. He also called for a genuine EU "own resources" system to make the Union less dependent upon contributions from national budgets (which currently account for 85 per cent).
The EU budget should not be seen as a "burden" on national budgets, but "a means to do things more cheaply by doing them together", said MEP Anne Jensen (ALDE, DK), who will steer next year's EU budget through Parliament. "In Denmark we save money on the diplomatic service now that we have the European External Action Service", she explained.
Ms Jensen criticised the compromise proposal circulating among Member States for the EU's long-term budget (2014-2020). "This implies that we would have the same budget in 2020 as we had in 2008", she said. Like Mr Lamassoure, she made the case for a budget that is sufficiently flexible to deal with changing circumstances.
Social impact of fiscal consolidation
MEPs and MPs also discussed the social impact of austerity measures. "This issue is important at a time when several economists have acknowledged that the negative multiplier effects of austerity measures on employment and social conditions have been underestimated", said Employment Committee Chair Pervenche Berès (S&D, FR). "It's now time to implement proportionate and differentiated fiscal consolidation to avoid negative effects on growth and employment", said Veronica Lope Fontagné (EPP, ES), rapporteur on the Employment aspects of the Annual Growth Survey 2013.
Press release - EP