Text tabled : RC-B7-0003/2012

  Jean-Luc Mélenchon (GUE/NGL), in writing. – (FR) This joint motion for a resolution by the right, the social democrats and the Greens signals their agreement with the basis of the draft international agreement currently under negotiation, which amounts to the imposition of a reinforced ‘balanced budget rule’. This rule compels States to keep their budgets balanced or in surplus, working to a reference structural deficit figure of approximately 0.5% of nominal GDP. It obliges them to carve this diktat into the stone of their national legislation, preferably their constitutions. It demands that they put automatic mechanisms in place to ‘correct’ their budgetary policies in line with the Commission’s guidelines.

Far from being concerned about such measures, the four groups who tabled this motion have confined themselves to insisting on their right to play a part in the process of creating the new agreement and incorporating it into EU law within five years. They are not even insisting on the people’s right to have their say on this latest turn of the ‘austerity’ screw through a referendum. I voted against.