On Tuesday 9 October the Committee on Economic and Financial Affairs in the European Parliament adopted its position on the report “The European Semester for economic policy coordination: Implementation of 2012 priorities”.<\/p>\n
The Greens, ECR (European Conservatives and Reformists) and GUE (European United Left) voted against the report but couldn’t hinder the majority of Conservatives (EPP) and Socialists (S&D) of adopting it.<\/p>\n
The three key elements why we had to vote against the report by Emilie Turunen (Green shadow):<\/p>\n
1) Oral amendment by ALDE to 51: ALDE succeeded (supported by EPP and probably ECR) in deleting the sentence: “is concerned by the growing tendency of the Commission to infringe on the autonomy of social partners”. Furthermore, it removes the critical stance towards the Commission\u2019s recommendations on wage formation systems (by deleting that this tendency is “not acceptable and should be reversed”) – and even worse: it deletes that the autonomy of the social partners is protected in TEUF – instead the autonomy should be “taken into account”. That’s very, very critical – and a breach of fundamental rights!<\/p>\n
2) Split vote in paragraph 6C by ALDE: They managed (with EPP and ECR) to delete this: “Urges the Commission to address both Member States showing persistently large current-account deficits and competitiveness losses and Member States that accumulate large current account surpluses”…. bad.<\/p>\n
3) And finally on paragraph 9: fiscal compact – the following text was adopted by ALDE and EPP: “urges all other member states to ratify the Treaty as soon as possible; louds the positive outcome of the Irish referendum on that Treaty”. EPP did not support the oral AM by ALDE, by GREENS or the split vote by S&D.<\/p>\n
All in all, what was left was not strong enough to counter these steps backwards. Greens will try to improve the text before plenary vote. If we can push for improvements on these three points we will vote in favour of it. But it remains uncertain whether the socialists are very keen on trying to do so (even though Elisa Ferriera says so)…<\/p>\n