Ska Keller, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – Mr President, on Friday we will have a Eurogroup meeting. Again and again it looks like there might not actually be real progress on the Greek programme and the Eurogroup, as we know, is led by a man who told us very clearly what he thinks about women and what he thinks about southern Member States. By his absence today he shows us also what he thinks about the European Parliament.

While he is a very big problem, he is not our only problem in that matter. The whole Eurozone, and hence also the whole future of the European Union, is being held hostage by the dogma of austerity. To believe growth will come if households are shrinking, if they have to be cut and also the state expenditure is being cut – well, that is not going to happen. That is just economic nonsense.

Extreme poverty has increased by almost seven times in the last years in Greece while state spending has been cut by more than 30%, which is the biggest reduction per capita in the whole Eurozone. While all of that is happening the IMF and also some Member States are demanding more and more cuts. They ask for further reductions in pensions, saying that the Greek pension system is too generous, but actually the truth is that Greek pensioners are much worse off than pensioners anywhere else in Europe. In Greece 43% of pensioners live on less than EUR 660 per month, making those who worked hard for their whole life extremely vulnerable to poverty and to social exclusion.

The whole future of Europe is also being held hostage by some Member States who think they can win elections by causing hardship elsewhere, and that should not happen. Labour rights, social rights and EU law are applicable everywhere in the European Union and by telling Greece that it should not apply collective bargaining we are imposing an arbitrary deviation from that European social model.

While we are saying the whole time that Greece should follow European rules, what we are actually telling them to do is abandon those very rules and that is just schizophrenic. If we truly want recovery in Greece, if we truly want to work together for a common future we cannot allow Greece to be made into an experimental ground for zero labour rights.

And sure, to overcome the dogma of austerity, to invest in a sustainable economy, to carry out intelligent reforms and to get real on debt relief, that might not be popular in every single Member State. It actually takes courage to argue that we are all going to benefit from this in the long term, that we should invest in our common good rather than cutting the ground from under our feet, to show solidarity instead of contempt. But this courage is necessary if we want to build our common future.