Mr President, monetary union binds the Member States of the European Union together in a permanent, mutually supportive community in which national approaches are possible but are not permitted to play a crucial role. The regulatory policy necessary to supplement the European market on the road to a socially and environmentally sustainable European market economy cannot succeed in the European Union unless priority is given to community interest. Hence, also, the importance of the macroeconomic dialogue. The macroeconomic dialogue is not an end in itself. It serves to bring about growth with a positive impact on employment in the European Union and to help to overcome mass unemployment. It thus complements structural and labour market policies. However, I wonder if we have really grasped the scale of this dialogue yet. In a society with such a great division of labour, it is essential for the economic actors’ activities to be coordinated, either by the market or through economic planning. I believe that market-led coordination will not work. We need political guidelines. That is why the Maastricht Treaty rightly emphasised in Article 103 that coordination of this kind is necessary. All we need now is the implementation measures. Unfortunately, national governments are either unwilling or unable to achieve the implementation measures, as mentioned in the Delors White Paper. We know a good many national governments which have seen that there is a major interdependence between monetary, financial and wages policies and which, like Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland or Denmark for example, have drawn the obvious conclusions, with positive consequences for the labour market and for budget consolidation as well. That is why I think it is incredibly important to make it clear that coordination means understanding the conflicting interests of the individual economic actors and getting them to act without having to limit their autonomy. Even today there is no real insight into this coordination, and I think that the ECB contribution to the last sitting highlighted the dangers we need to be aware of and how great the fears here are. We accordingly need a genuinely successful coordination of wages, monetary and finance policy. This will provide the basis for coordination across the European Union. It will not just imply good governance but also a European multi-level system of governance. What actually strikes me is the failure to involve the European Parliament. I would like to stress once again that the European Parliament was calling for the coordination of policies long before the Maastricht Treaty existed, as a means of genuinely achieving European added value. I believe that nowadays transparency is a given for all democratic institutions. Just as we demand it of the European Central Bank in the dialogue, we must also call for greater transparency on the part of the Council of Finance Ministers, the Jumbo Council, the Social Affairs Council and the European Council, and demand direct European Parliament participation. It is not a question of confidential information or of keeping state secrets – although Members of Parliament are quite capable of that – it is really all about how we shape our future in the twenty-first century, and in that respect there should be no information, no analysis, no forecast that is dealt with sub rosa, no, everything must be genuinely accessible to the public. That is why I believe that European Parliament participation should really be required again. We are not talking about information like that at this sitting, or, following this sitting, at the joint meeting of the Council and the Commission with the two committees responsible. This is actually about dialogue with Parliament, because we really must ensure that we are involved here, so that in the interests of our citizens the macroeconomic dialogue truly creates really concrete guidelines that can then be taken up in the employment forum under the Portuguese Presidency.

Political group: PSE