“Crucial but not sufficient in itself”. These are the words with which the director general of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, qualified the Franco-German agreement for a new European treaty. In fact, only yesterday, on the sidelines of a bilateral meeting, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the "recipe" for the solution to the European crisis and for support for the single currency: the heart of the proposal, a system of sanctions automatic for states that breach the 3% deficit rule and a renewed negative opinion on the birth of Eurobonds.
This agreement, described as "the most complete possible" by the French President, however did not fully convince Lagarde who expressed a diametrically opposite opinion. The IMF director focused his attention on the confidence of operators, affirming the concept according to which stringent fiscal rules alone cannot give the right input to a rapid recovery of confidence on international markets and a recovery of credibility on the European "project" .
The Franco-German proposal will be sent next Wednesday, for careful evaluation, to the President of the EU Council, Van Rompuy, and will initially concern the 17 countries of the Eurozone, to then potentially be extended to all 27 Member States of the European Union.
