Hollande to insist on European growth strategy

Angela Merkel, the leader of Hollande’s Socialist Party in parliament Jean-Marc Ayrault said France would seek major concessions.
Opinion polls forecast that Hollande will defeat the right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in France’s two round presidential vote starting on April 22, and he has already warned he will seek to renegotiate the budget pact.
This plan has been angrily rejected by Merkel and other European leaders, who see the agreement on budget discipline signed on March 2 by 25 of the 27 EU leaders as the sole means to escape the eurozone debt crisis.
Merkel has gone so far as to openly express support for Sarkozy in France’s election and has refused to meet Hollande during the campaign, but Ayrault told AFP that his candidate remained committed to renegotiating the deal.
“We won’t be content with a cosmetic declaration alongside the budget pact. We need to talk about a European growth strategy,” Ayrault told AFP.
The March deal was a bid to restore market confidence in EU member states’ finances — which have been battered by a threat of sovereign debt defaults in Greece and Italy — by mandating deficit-cutting austerity measures.
But some, especially but not exclusively on the European left, fear that the plan concentrates too much on cutting public spending and not enough on measures to boost the near stagnant growth in the wider European economy.
Hollande has vowed to renegotiate the hard-won pact, and Ayrault said he would push for investment in the energy sector and environmental projects funded by joint eurobonds pooling member states’ debt liability.
This too would be anathema to Merkel, who has firmly rejected eurobonds.
If, as expected, Hollande wins France’s May 6 presidential run-off, the French left will be on course to win a majority in June parliamentary polls and thus in a position to ratify or not the treaty signed by Sarkozy.
Even if Sarkozy’s camp retains an edge in the lower house, the Senate has already fallen into the left’s hands, and could block the treaty.
Ayrault said that Hollande would go to visit Merkel shortly after his election, and that he hoped a compromise could be reached, but warned: “Ratification is not a formality, parliament will have to decide.”
He insisted that Hollande was not isolated in Europe in having concerns about growth, and said: “The goal is to develop a European investment strategy without harming the financial situation of each member state.”
Ayrault tried to reassure German doubters by recalling that the Socialists have promised to balance France’s budget by 2017, even if they do not support Sarkozy’s plan to enshrine such a requirement in the constitution. French Socialists want to “co-operate closely with Germany”, he said, but not to see Europe run by a Berlin directorate. — AFP.