To the President of the European Parliament
To the President of the European Commission
To the President of the Eurogroup
To the President of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic
We, European citizens,
in denouncing the fact that it is now the governments, above all, that are
hindering the creation of the indispensable political union of Europeans
note that European integration has, for over half a century, ensured peace, unprecedented prosperity and the consolidation of democracy. But the crisis of recent years has shown that the euro needs stronger institutions in order to meet the challenges of globalisation. In particular, there is a need for a federal government at the level of the eurozone to promote a great European New Deal, capable of ensuring sustainable economic development and boosting employment.
To overcome the present state of affairs and regain the trust of the citizens, it is time to start institutional reforms leading to fiscal, economic and political union, and to do so by indicating the necessary milestones and the deadlines that must be met. The strengthening of monetary union through its transformation into a federal union is crucial in order to respond positively to the challenges and threats of disintegration now facing Europe.
Aware of the gravity of the moment, and of the fact that fiscal union, economic union and political union are closely inter-related and cannot feasibly be achieved in succession and separately from one another, we request
- that an additional budget be created for the eurozone – a budget that is: i) funded by own resources, obtained through European taxes, such as the financial transaction tax and the carbon tax, and the emission of Union bonds, ii) not dependent on national governments, and iii) democratically controlled by the European Parliament;
- that, in the meantime, a solution be found to the problem of the democratic government of the eurozone, in order to guarantee the necessary tools for promoting convergence among the EMU member countries through: a) development and solidarity policies – in particular a European system of insurance against unemployment; b) the necessary structural reforms, thereby establishing a framework of growing mutual trust at European level and winning back the citizens’ support for the completion of the European project;
- that the process of implementing the institutional reforms necessary to ensure effective powers of supranational governance at eurozone level and powers of democratic control in the hands of the European Parliament be got under way, fixing as of now the timetable for and ways through which to achieve full political union.
