Lagarde (IMF) considers a common budget for the euro area

AIX-EN-PROVENCE (Reuters) – The director-general of the international monetary Fund (IMF) Christine Lagarde has estimated Saturday that the establishment of centralised fiscal capacity of the euro area was indispensable, in particular to reduce inequalities between member States.

This project led by the French president Emmanuel Macron continues to divide Europeans and its realization has been postponed to the Greek calends at the last european council, at the end of June.

To “raise (the) machine to the convergence (…) it is imperative to interfere in the national policies (…) and a fiscal capacity, common centralized within the euro area,” said Christine Lagarde during a speech at the economic meetings of Aix-en-Provence.

“It seems to us indispensable to both be an expression of political sovereignty asserted and assumed within the euro area, and because we can’t let (…) the recovery policy to be conducted exclusively by the european central Bank” as this has been the case in recent years after the crisis, she added.

In the Face of reservations expressed by German conservatives, she noted that the budget capacity of common had “no need to be a kind of facility of payment” and could very well be put in place “without that it becomes, ipso facto, a policy of systematic transfer of rich countries to the destination country poor.”

“It may very well be conditions attached to discipline – both in terms of contribution, grant and reimbursement – that help keep fiscal policy that is common to the Ten-nine,” she said.

Angela Merkel has left to spend several months before you decide on the proposals of Emmanuel Macron to the european recovery, but the two leaders have reached an agreement in mid-June.

The “declaration of Meseberg” adopted by Paris and Berlin provides for, among other things, the establishment of a euro zone budget from 2021 onwards, even if no amount has been set.

(Leigh Thomas and Miriam Rivet, edited by Eric Faye)