A cimeira do nosso descontentamento

A cobertura da recente cimeira da UE na Tech Central Station.

Winners

1. Jacques Chirac

JC got almost everything he wanted out of this week's summit. The Stability and Growth Pact has been reduced to just The Pact (no more Stability or Growth please, we're Europeans!), the Liberalization of Services Directive to just The Directive. The only minor setback was over selling arms to the world's largest dictatorship.

2. Gerhard Schröder

His finest hour came when the Council ratified the German-inspired proposal to dismantle the Stability and Growth Pact. The Berlin-based newspaper Die Zeit called it "A License to Borrow." More accurately would be to say that it's a license for all European governments to spend as much as they want on anything they like. No wonder Italian finance minister Domenico Siniscalco called it "an excellent European solution to a European problem." Make-believe budgets are the new norm. It's another great triumph for German fiscal rectitude - Weimar Style.

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Losers

1. José Manuel Barroso

(...)Barroso hasn't been on the job long yet, but he's starting to sound like a real European leader: spineless, that is.

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3. European taxpayers

The abolition (I'm sorry: reform) of the Stability and Growth Pact will prove a double whammy to Europe's taxpayers. First of all, the newly won freedom for governments to increase spending through deficit-financing means higher tax bills in the years to come. That's the way it works with increases in government spending: it's pay now or pay later - but pay you must. Taxpayers throughout Europe better prepare for tax increases in the medium term to pay for debt repayments and interest charges. In the short term, they will be hit by interest rate increases which will increase the costs of mortgages and personal loans. As one of the governors of the European Central Bank, Yves Mersch, explained, "A loosening of fiscal policy will inevitably have consequences for monetary policy." In plain English: as budget discipline goes out the window, interest rates will inevitable go up.

4. Illegal workers in Eurocrat households

Finally, spare a thought for what the Wall Street Journal called "The elephant in the room" at this week's summit, namely the army of illegal Eastern European workers currently employed by European civil servants as cleaners, carpenters and care-assistants. Until Belgium decides (or rather: is finally forced) to lift the restrictions on workers from the new member states living and working in Brussels, they will continue to live in fear of arrest and deportation. Their crime: providing a service at a competitive rate. Yes, it was another fine week in European summit history.