Press release (Italian version)
Italy and Europe have no future without the European Federation
The European Council’s decision to cut the EU budget is a further dramatic sign of the inability of the European Union to rise to the challenges it faces. Paradoxically, this inability also emerges from a passage of the final conclusions issued by the European Council, in which it states that new own resources should come from a system based on initiatives by groups of states (along the lines of the recent undertaking by eleven eurozone countries to introduce a tax on financial transactions), rather than from the European Union as a whole.
The leaders of the major European political families within the European Parliament were therefore quite right to protest against the European Council’s decision. However, it is not enough simply to call for an increase in the EU budget, given that this is a decision that, under the Treaties, must be taken unanimously.
As the MFE has long maintained,
- it is necessary, starting in the eurozone, to raise new own resources through a tax on financial transactions and a carbon tax, a move that must be driven by a demand, at grassroots level, coming from at least a million citizens through a European Citizens’ Initiative for a European sustainable development and employment plan;
- it is necessary to link the creation of an adequate budget and the relaunch of a European development policy to a constituent political project within the eurozone; and in this framework it is essential to create, immediately, the banking, fiscal, economic and political unions that are prerequisites to the economic and political government that Europe must have in order to emerge from the present crisis.
Only in this way will the Europeans be able to regain sovereignty and democratic control over the decisions that determine their future – sovereignty and control that they have lost at national level but not yet won back at European level.
For this reason, the MFE has asked the candidates in the forthcoming Italian general election to undertake:
- to support the creation of an additional budget for the eurozone containing the resources needed to launch a European New Deal and also the introduction of the reforms that must be in place to ensure democratic control of the management of this budget;
- to promote the creation of the European Federation, initially in the eurozone, through a democratic constituent convention, with a view to transferring to supranational level the key powers and resources linked to the areas of taxation, budget and economic policy.
9 Febbraio 2013
