| Germany backs ECB policy for quick recovery |
OTTAWA German Chancellor Angela Merkel voiced support for ECB President Mario Draghi’s crisis-fighting strategy late on Thursday and pressed her European partners to move swiftly towards a closer integration of fiscal policies, saying time was running short.
On a visit to the Canadian capital Ottawa, where she held talks with Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the euro crisis, an EU-Canada free trade agreement and the situation in Syria, Merkel sent a message to her fellow European leaders ahead of a series of top-level meetings next week.
“I made clear once again that we need a long-term, sustainable solution,” Merkel said at a joint news conference with Harper in the Canadian parliament building.
“It is a question of taking the steps that weren’t taken when the currency union was created, namely a political union,” she said. “Germany knows that in a common currency area political responsibilities need to be shared. We are on a good path on many of these issues, but time is of the essence. We are fully aware of this.”
Merkel has resisted pressure to introduce common euro zone bonds as a solution to the bloc’s three-year old debt crisis and is instead pressing her partners to move towards a so-called “fiscal union” under which states would cede sovereignty over their budgets to Brussels. However many euro zone leaders, including France’s president Francois Hollande with whom she will meet next week, are reluctant to go along.
Merkel said the European Commission should receive stronger powers to intervene when the budgets of euro states went off course, a push that puts her on a collision course with Hollande and others.
Merkel won support for her strategy from Canada’s Harper, whose government has criticised Europe in the past for moving too slow. He said Canada had “every confidence” that European leaders would meet the challenge posed by a crisis which some experts fear could rip the 13-year old euro bloc apart.
Agencies
|
 |
|
|
| NEWS UPDATES |
|
|
|
|
|
|
