Financial Times
June 20, 2011
Corien Wortmann-Kool, a Dutch MEP, trekked to Luxembourg for breakfast this morning with finance ministers from her political group, the European People’s Party. The hope was that meeting over coffee and croissants might help to narrow differences between the European parliament and the member states over the sprawling “six pack” legislation, which would force eurozone countries to rein in spending and make their economies more competitive. It is one of the eurozone’s chief policy responses to a crippling debt crisis.
But the breakfast meeting yielded no breakthroughs – in part because many of the finance ministers did not turn up. After a contentious meeting to discuss the Greek debt crisis that lasted into the wee hours of the morning, they either could not rouse themselves from bed or were simply too busy.
The empty seats at the breakfast table highlighted a broader concern of Wortmann-Kool: that the Greek crisis is so consuming that there is little energy or capacity to complete the six pack, let alone anything else. “As you can imagine at the moment, Greece is the issue,” she told Brussels Blog this morning, complaining that “the decision-making power in Europe seems to be lacking.”
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