Nordalliansen foreslår blant annet at den langtrukne prosessen med å få på plass en felles patentordning for hele EU endelig skal avsluttes. Reguleringsbyrden for små og mellomstore bedrifter skal reduseres. Og de vil at EU skal få på plass frihandelsavtaler med India og Canada.

Her er dagsorden for det “uformelle” toppmøtet i Brussel (pdf).

Guardian kjører som vanlig på med sin live-blogg om eurokrisen.

Skal fikse biffen, men hvordan? Angela Merkel og Nicolas Sarkozy hadde i dag et av sine mange møter, denne gang i Berlin. De lover å løse krisen og rekapitalisere Europas banker, og løsningen skal være klar før slutten av oktober. De fleste følte seg like kloke; vanskelige spørsmål om detaljer ble avvist på pressekonferansen. Men det er detaljene som teller.

Bruk bazookaen: Briter og amerikanere står på sidelinjen og er misfornøyd med sendrektig kontinental kriseløsning. Britene vil ikke være med i euroen, men mener mye om hvordan den burde reddes. Statsminister David Cameron krever nå at bazookametoden tas i bruk. Det må sendes et signal som markedene endelig tar alvorlig. (Saker fra FT krever registrering/abonnement for å leses. Det finnes en vei rundt – søk etter saken på Google og klikk deg inn derfra).

Dexia skal reddes av Frankrike, Belgia og Luxembourg. Det blir ikke billig, og Belgia kan bli nedgradert som følge av kostnadene.

To ferske meningsmålinger:

Irland: Irene er lite imponert over hvordan EU-lederne takler krisen, men de er stadig sterke tilhengere av medlemskap. Bøndene er mest overbevist om EUs fortreffelighet — 81 prosent av dem sier ja til EU!

Tyskland: Flere tyskere vil ha nasjonale løsninger framfor felleseuropeiske, men merk at det fortsatt er 58 prosent som vil at flere problemer skal løses i fellesskap. Men når det kommer til å avgi mer suverenitet til Brussel, ønsker hele 80 prosent av tyskerne at det først må holdes en folkeavstemning.

Hver femte ungdom i Europa er nå arbeidsledig. Foto: stock.xchng.

En ny rapport fra EU-delegasjon (se pdf) i Brüssel viser at hver femte ungdom i Europa nå er arbeidsledig. Ungarn som hadde formannskapet i EU den første halvdelen av 2011 hadde mye fokus på ungdomsledigheten (arbeidsløse under 25 år), og en generell bedring kan anes. Polen overtok formannskapet i EU nå i høst, og vil bl.a. fokusere på den demografiske utfordringen som en stadig eldre befolkning medfører.

I EU skal det være om lag 900 000 færre arbeidsledige nå enn for et år siden, og arbeidsledigheten ligger på ca 9,3 prosent (ned 0,4 prosentpoeng siden mai 2010). Men ledigheten faller mest i land hvor den allerede var under gjennomsnittt, som f.eks. Tyskland, Belgia og Sverige.

Det er store forskjeller innad i Europa, og ledigheten varierer fra 4,4 prosent i Nederland til hele 20,7 prosent i Spania. I Spania er ungdomsledigheten på hele 43 prosent. Andre land hvor ungdom er spesielt hardt rammet er Latvia (34 prosent), Litausen (35 prosent), Hellas, Irland og Slovakia.

(via eu-norge.org)

This article titled “Europe needs debt relief, not decades of austerity” was written by Heather Stewart, for The Guardian on Monday 28th March 2011 05.59 UTC

From Donegal to the Algarve, to the streets of Athens, voters on Europe’s “periphery”, as economists dismissively call it, are slowly waking up to a sobering truth – they face years of austerity, yet wage cuts, job losses and crumbling public services will not extricate them from financial crisis. In fact, by driving their economies into an ever deeper slump, it may even make things worse. The pain could just bring more pain.

Paul Krugman, the US Nobel prize-winning economist, calls it “the austerity delusion”. As Ed Miliband said of the coalition’s austerity policies last week: “It’s hurting, but it’s not working.”

The Irish would certainly agree with that – Dublin has been widely praised for its draconian spending cuts, but the latest official figures, released on Thursday, showed that the economy has now been in recession for three years. Domestic demand is 27% lower than during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger heyday. Investment is down by 60%, exports are falling, and, as any cash-strapped homeowner could tell you, when your income shrinks, it gets harder to service your debts.

This “debt trap” is familiar to campaigners who spent years fighting for the cancellation of Africa’s multibillion-pound loans from the west. Millions of taxpayers in wealthy countries were moved to sign petitions and march on their capitals as part of the Jubilee 2000 movement.

The plight of Portuguese nurses or Irish homeowners can hardly be compared to the grinding poverty of Africa’s indebted millions, but the stark logic of the situation is the same. Adopting the harsh deflationary policies imposed by international lenders, and meeting punitive interest payments, sucks the life out of already fragile economies, and that makes repayment even tougher.

Nick Dearden, director of Jubilee Debt Campaign, points to the case of Zambia. It was bailed out by the International Monetary Fund in the early 1980s, to prevent the government defaulting on the debts it owed to western banks, which had been on a reckless African lending spree. Zambia compliantly took the medicine the IMF prescribed, including severe spending cuts – but these simply drove the country into a deeper and deeper slump, making its debts ever more unsustainable. By 1995, Zambia’s economic output had contracted by 30%, but its debt-to-GDP ratio had doubled, to 150%. It’s hard to argue that it wouldn’t have been better for the country simply to have defaulted on part of its debt.

What creditors were eventually forced to admit in the case of much developing country debt was that, in practice, there was absolutely no likelihood of getting their money back; and morally, it was wrong for the debts to be honoured when many of the loans should never have been made in the first place. It’s time for more people to start making the same argument in Europe.

The backlash is already under way: in Ireland and Greece there are increasingly noisy public campaigns demanding an independent audit of these countries’ debts, so that voters can see exactly who owes what to whom – and by implication, who precisely is being “bailed out”.

Andy Storey, the University College Dublin economist involved in the Irish campaign, says: “The reason the bailout was instituted was because European banks wanted to get their money back.”

Much of the increase in Dublin’s deficit results from huge bailouts of its clapped-out banking sector – and by implication, the bondholders who backed the banks. “In Ireland, an audit would be about separating the private from the public debt,” Storey says. “How much of this is actually going to reimburse speculators, who shouldn’t get their money back because they were stupid enough to invest in a bank with a very bad business model?”

Drawing a line between the money owed to the banks’ bondholders, and the cash Ireland has borrowed to meet the costs of the recession – in increased welfare payments, for example – could pave the way for some of the private sector debt, at least, to be written down.

Illegitimate

In Greece, Costas Lapavitsas, the London-based economist who is involved in the debt audit campaign, says part of its task would be to identify whether some of Athens’ debt is actually illegitimate. He insists that, as in developing countries, there are moral as well as economic issues at stake.

“Is it morally or economically acceptable to destroy the welfare state, and to destroy schools and destroy hospitals to pay off these debts?” he asks. Like Storey, and a growing number of economists, he believes a default is only a matter of time – so it would be better to face it now. And he believes it won’t be long before the Irish people follow their Greek cousins on to the streets: “My view is that Ireland is about six months behind Greece in terms of mood.”

Although few dare to say it aloud, European leaders seem to agree that they need to open the door for countries to default gracefully, at least on their future borrowing.

When they cobbled together the so-called Euro Plus Pact in Brussels last Thursday, including a commitment to plough money into a giant permanent bailout fund to be known as the European stability mechanism, they specified that all new bonds issued by eurozone governments will in future have to include “collective action clauses”.

These clauses should make it easier to negotiate a dignified exit when the burden of debt has become unsustainable, because they force creditors to negotiate. If the defaulting government can win over a majority of its lenders to accept a “haircut” – a reduction in the value of what they are owed – the rest are bound by the deal. That prevents rapacious bondholders delaying a restructuring by holding out for a better agreement; but debt campaigners say that it won’t be enough to prevent future crises.

Dearden, together with many other international campaigners, argues that there needs to be an international “debt court” – an independent, formal arbitrator which would oversee something like a bankruptcy process, but for sovereign states. The court would decide which debts should be honoured in full, and which creditors must take a haircut, or lose out altogether. Financiers loathe the idea, arguing that allowing default creates the problem of “moral hazard” – countries might have an incentive to borrow recklessly, in the knowledge that they can always turn to the debt court if times get hard.

But it would hardly be an easy way out for a government to publicly declare itself bankrupt to the rest of the world: it would be acutely embarrassing, and any country that did so would find it painfully hard (and expensive) to borrow in the future.

And it’s simply a fact that countries sometimes do default – Russia did in 1998 and Argentina in 2001, for example. The consequences would be much easier to assess, and almost certainly less painful, if investors knew what would happen next.

Legacy

None of this helps Portugal, Ireland or Greece, however, which are still left wrestling with the legacy of the boom years. So far, their populations have largely accepted the harsh strictures of the EU and IMF, because governments – and the bond markets – insisted there was no alternative. But they could be signing up for many years, perhaps decades, of austerity. The social consequences will be severe, and even then, the medicine may not work, and the debts may still be unsustainable. An independent debt audit for each country would be a good first step towards making the right decision about which debts are worth enduring that kind of pain for.

The Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, who came to power promising to abide by his predecessor’s pledges of austerity, is beginning to turn his fire on the financiers who have been some of the main beneficiaries of the bailout. “It is grossly unfair to expect the taxpayer to have to pay 100% for the reckless lending practices of banks which caused this in the first instance,” he has said.

Markets and voters across the eurozone have grown wearily accustomed to watching the cycle of a looming fiscal crisis as bond yields rocket, followed by just enough action from Brussels to jolt investors out of panic mode, followed by another bout of the jitters as they realise the rhetoric from euro leaders isn’t matched by reality.

As Steen Jakobsen, chief economist at Saxo Bank, put it in a note on Friday: “It’s clear that the electorates are beginning to realise that all solutions offered by the policymakers are based on the promise to do something in the future, and never right here, right now.”

But time is running out, and Europe has two choices. It can continue hammering the economies of Greece, Ireland and soon Portugal deeper into crisis, while their already furious voters become increasingly resentful about the pain being imposed by their European “partners”; or it can accept that the scale of debts has simply become unsustainable, and open negotiations now about an orderly default.

• This article was amended on 30 March 2011. The original referred to hammering the economies of Greece, Italy and Portugal deeper into crisis. This has been corrected.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Det er spørsmålet stadig flere EU-land må stille seg. Krisen i euro-sonen har ført til et stadig tettere samarbeid om den økonomiske politikken. Det er i ferd med å dreie debatten fra spørsmålet om gjeldstyngede land må ut av valutasamarbeidet – til om ikke flere må med. Presset om euro-medlemskap øker på utenforland som Danmark, Sverige, Polen og Storbritannia.

En forsmak på debatten kom på gårsdagens EU-toppmøte i Brussel. Der ble de 17 euro-landene enige om den nye europakten for økonomisk samarbeid. Den er en utvannet versjon av den fransk-tyske “konkurranseevnepakten” som tok til orde for harmonisering av reglene for skattenivå, lønnstillegg og pensjonsalder. Landene skulle også innføre en såkalt “gjeldsbrems” som skal hindre at landene lager gjeldsbomber i fremtiden.

Etter massiv motstand fra landene uten euro måtte Tyskland og Frankrike la EU-kommisjonens Jose Manuel Barroso vaske ut de strengeste formuleringene, men retningen er den samme. EU-landene – med eller uten euro – vil i fremtiden samordne stadig mer av sin økonomiske politikk. I Danmark er det allerede en gryende euro-debatt – etter at landet to ganger tidligere har sagt nei til euroen.

På toppmøtet sikret grekerne seg bedre betingelser for sine kriselån fra sine EU-partnerne, mens irene ikke fikk til en slik forbedret avtale. Diskusjonen om hjelp eller hjelp til selvhjelp var hard mellom de gjeldsplagede landene i sør og vest og de økonomisk stabile landene i nord  som bidrar mest til hjelpepakkene.

Hellas kunne stråle som flink gutt i klassen og vise til omfattende privatisering og sparetiltak som gir mer penger i den greske statskassen. Dermed oppfylte landet kravene de andre euro-partnerne hadde satt til å forbedre landets økonomiske situasjon med lavere renter. Også Portugal fikk ros av Tysklands kansler, Angela Merkel, for kraftige kutt i offentlige utgifter.

Irene var under press for å heve sitt lave skattenivå for bedrifter. Den franske presidenten Nicolas Sarkozy omtalte det irske skattenivået som “ødeleggende element”, men irenes statsminister Enda Kenny kjempet hardt for å beholde ordningen. Men så fikk han heller ingen premie i form av lavere rente på lånene i hjelpepakken fra EU.

Ny statsminister blir Enda Kenny. I valgkampen gikk han inn for å reforhandle betingelsene Irland måtte godta for å få EUs økonomiske redningspakke. Dette kravet har han gjentatt etter valget. Dette har ført til reaksjoner i de andre eurolandene, og kan bli tema på de kommende toppmøtene i mars. En av Labours forhandlingsledere sier de nå må snakke med EU-partnerne:

We have to repair broken bridges across our European partner to build up an understanding of our position. It is in everybody’s interest, not only the national interest of Ireland, but in Europe’s interest and in the interests of the maintenance of the euro that we have a path that is sustainable out of the economic hole that we find ourselves now in.

Samtidig er det forståelse i mange europeiske politiske miljøer for at det blir veldig vanskelig for Irland å få økonomien på fote igjen uten lettelser i betingelsene for tilbakebetaling av EU-lånet.

Parlamentsvalg i Irland

This article titled “Irish election: a daunting task for Enda Kenny” was written by Michael White in Dublin, for guardian.co.uk on Sunday 27th February 2011 15.43 UTC

When Enda Kenny began constructing a coalition to run the most embattled government in Europe he did so without knowing exactly how many MPs his Fine Gael party and its rivals will each have in the new Dail – almost 48 hours after polls closed in Ireland’s watershed general election.

As Labour, Sinn Féin and the independent left all clocked up record gains, analysts were quick to predict the belated end of the archaic civil war feud between Fine Gael and the now-routed Fianna Fáil – which has dominated the republic’s politics since the 1920s – and the emergence of a more normal left-right model. But Ireland’s economic crisis will take priority over the chance of reform, the more so because, in decisively rejecting Fianna Fáil, Irish voters have come close to rejecting the EU and IMF’s €85 bn (£73bn) package.

With allocation of the final seats going to 13 counts or more under Ireland’s much-loved single transferable vote (STV) system, politicians and their constituents are normally happy to sit back and enjoy the nail-biting and bickering, a familiar part of the process for 90 years. In a few seats it will continue on Monday – and beyond, perhaps to court.

Compared with sudden-death results in the average late-night count under Britain’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, an Irish election count is like watching paint dry. The important difference is that, while it dries, the painters – activists from all the parties who attend the count – are busy fighting over the paint pot and brushes.

In the 43 multi-member constituencies across the country, activists known as “tallymen” and women stand on the other side of the tables where officials sort and count ballot papers. Carrying each candidate’s photo in this highly personalised system, ballot papers can be nearly two feet long. Some voters express a dozen or more preferences, numbering their papers 1-2-3-4. A jumble of crosses and ticks can make them invalid.

Tallymen are restrained by crowd barriers and must not enter the officials “corral.” But when they see something they don’t like, they say so. A spoiled ballot paper that should have been counted (unless it favoured a rival party), or a paper placed on the pile of first preferences for Labour’s Eric Byrne (eventual loser in an eight-day recount back in 2002) instead of Fine Gael’s Catherine Byrne, produces cries of “that’s wrong” or “that voter’s intentions are quite clear”.

Only when the contest gets down to the “bear pit” stage, where tallymen fight over every “transfer” – votes reallocated for 2nd or even 8th preference – to win the last available seat, do tempers fray. Dublin SW’s 13th count finally ended at 6.30 am on Sunday when Sinn Féin and an independent joined two Labour and two Fine Gaels in the 166-seat Dail. As elsewhere, the outgoing Fianna Fáil regime was wiped out.

Despite widespread anger and despair at the clannish political culture and 2008 bank bust it has fostered, Irish voters seem to love STV. As six huge constituencies were being counted at the Royal Dublin Society’s cavernous exhibition centre this weekend, many urged Britons to take the plunge at the UK’s AV referendum on 5 May. Ireland’s own president is elected on AV, a simpler, less proportional system than STV.

“You don’t have to be 18 to be a tallyman. I’ve been doing this since I was 9,” says Karl Rock, 37, who has the very modern Irish career of tax consultant and is backing Catherine Byrne, who once beat him to a council seat (both Byrnes won in Dublin South Central this time). “Political anoraks love PR voting, it’s their meat and potatoes,” explains another activist watching the count. “This is proper democracy, you can see the votes literally laid out on the table, how people vote, how their second preferences transfer,” says a third.

But Enda Kenny, whom the Dail will formally elect as the new Taoiseach on 9 March, has a timetable that does not allow for protracted coalition negotiations, let alone for tallyman tales. Since the bank bust of 2008, Ireland has acquired crippling debts to the EU and IMF which kept its ATM machines open, but may yet bankrupt it.

With a vital EU summit due on 24 and 25 March, Kenny must either cut a deal with Labour – now the second largest party– or risk going it alone with the help of sympathetic independents who may give him greater freedom of manoeuvre to slash the deficit more than Labour deems wise. Last night he was still being pulled both ways with new TD Shane Ross, an ex-stockbroker, columnist and ex-senator, offering an 8-strong block of independents as the alternative to Labour – if the maths work.

Either way Kenny must impress his foreign creditors with the stability and determination of his team, while also being tough enough to argue that reducing the penal 6% rate of interest on Dublin’s borrowing is not enough. It is a daunting task for the 57-year-old Taoiseach, a TD since 1975 – four times as long as David Cameron’s apprenticeship – but only briefly ever a minister.

Many voters fear the ex-teacher from Mayo on the Atlantic coast, who narrowly fought off a leadership coup last year, is not up to it. He will argue that Ireland must be part of a wider EU renegotiation that also eases the cost-cutting austerity that countries like Germany have imposed on the eurozone’s debtors. So far Brussels says no, but Ireland’s election, the eurozone’s first post-crisis test, is being monitored closely in southern Europe. And after the old government’s disastrous attempt to deny it was engaged in any bailout talks, Kenny will have to negotiate openly to keep voters on board.

Such calculations were briefly submerged during the ritual drama of this weekend’s count. It confirmed the spectacular collapse of Ireland’s dominant party, Fianna Fáil, from 41% to 17% – its Dail seats reduced to a likely 18 – leaving the middle class, moderately conservative Fine Gael to become the largest party for the first time with about 78 – five short of an outright Dail majority.

Potentially as significant as the voter switch between the two old civil war rivals was the emergence of the strongest vote for anti-establishment independent candidates and left-leaning parties. This was disaffected voters’ answer to the bank bust’s dramatic exposure of corrupt, cronyist and incompetent political and financial management, which also fuelled a spectacular property bubble and crash.

Strongest in Dublin itself, Labour, which Fine Gael successfully labelled the “high tax” party, was also heading for a record 38 seats – with its leader Eamon Gilmore set to become deputy PM, or Tánaiste. As the Greens, Fianna Fáil’s tainted coalition partners until Christmas, crashed to oblivion, the United Left Alliance (ULA) and other independents, including local champions, were hoping for around 20 seats.

In the populist backlash against the political elite, Sinn Féin also had a good election. Despite Gerry Adams’s inept performance on key economic issues and rival efforts to tar him with past murders and the IRA’s Gaddafi links, the Sinn Féin president topped the poll in the border seat of Louth – and will now move there from Belfast. As Sinn Féin tripled its seats to around 14, Adams, still toxic to mainstream Irish parties, will be joined by a younger generation of TDs, untainted by the Troubles. They will claim they are the truly Irish party – from Antrim to Cork – and thereby expand their appeal to working class voters in Northern Ireland in May’s local elections.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

• RTE News valgside
• Irish Times valgside
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• Vår oversikt over europeiske valg og regjeringer

It should be noted that when it comes to the re-invigoration of Germany’s urge to dominate, that our own damned stupidity has created the appalling scenario where our future is decided by Frau Merkel’s need to retain the support of Hans, who spends every Friday night in the local Bierkeller complaining about the feckless Greeks, Irish, Turks and other lesser races. (…) During their long love affair with fascism, our moral German friends decreed that while the British and the French were part of the superior races, the mere Irish were given the same middle ranking as the unfortunate Poles. As Germany returns to old habits it is starting to look as though we need to build a modern league of small nations to curb the imperial ambitions of Frau Merkel and her devious French collaborationists.

Irritasjon over Tyskland og Frankrikes opptreden har økt blant de andre EU-landenes ledere de siste månedene, det er det neppe tvil om (se tidligere sak). Merkel og Sarkozy har gjort det til en vane å presentere de andre 25 (eller 15 i eurosonen) for mer eller mindre ferdiglagde planer. Men det kan ikke rettferdiggjøre en utblåsning som denne — vi vet alle hva “Tyskland vender tilbake til gamle vaner” og “franske kollaboratører” henspiller på. Hvis dette er noen indikasjon på debattklimaet i Irland og EU-landene i mellom, er det grunn til å bli urolig.

Saken fant jeg på den glimrende bloggen The Irish Economy, hvis skribenter tar avstand fra avisens beskyldninger.