Ten pages to save the euro. They call it the "Draghi Plan", but the president of the European Central Bank developed it together with the president of the EU Council, Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the Commission, Josè Manuel Barroso, and the number one of the Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker. The draft will be presented at the European summit on Thursday and yesterday the head of the Eurotower discussed it at the Elysee with the French president, François Hollande.
The goal is to find a compromise between Paris and Berlin, but to prevent the summit on which the eyes of the whole world are fixed from turning into yet another unsuccessful meeting, it is first of all necessary to reassure the German chancellor. The main hypothesis under study leads the transfer of sovereignty to the extreme consequences: the idea is to grant the European Commission the right to correct or even rewrite the financial maneuvers of countries with messy accounts, even before the law lands in national parliaments. All to enforce the commitment to reduce deficits by 3% between now and 2013.
Hollande seems willing to accept this regulation to send a signal of goodwill to the Bundestag. In return, Angela Merkel should in turn relax her veto on anti-spread measures. Eurobonds would remain excluded from the plans, which Paris seems to have already given up on, however. For the moment, the matter has been postponed to a date to be determined.
The new form of fiscal union would in any case – as Germany wants – be an indispensable premise for reaching the longed-for banking union. In turn, this reform presupposes a new centralized supervision, which could be entrusted to the ECB itself or to a new authority. Other issues remain on the table, such as the guarantee of deposits at European level and the creation of a resolution fund.
All of this will be discussed tonight during the dinner scheduled between Hollande and Merkel in Paris. But that's not all: a meeting will also take place in the French capital between the ministers of the economy of Germany (Wolfgang Schaeuble), Italy (deputy minister Vittorio Grilli), Spain (Luis de Guindos) and France (Pierre Moscovici). The European Commissioner for Economic Affairs, Olli Rehn, will also participate.
