Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias and his Italian counterpart Luigi di Maio exchanged ratification instruments for the Greek-Italian maritime demarcation agreement in Rome on Monday. THE Southgerman newspaper notes that Athens and Rome “mainly send a message to Turkey, which is arguing for gas fields with Greece.” The Munich newspaper recalls that before the signing of the Greek-Italian agreement last June, “Ankara and the Libyan transitional government had delimited the limits of their own EEZs to the detriment of Greece and Cyprus, citing, among other things, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a convention to which, however, Turkey has never acceded, unlike Greece. “
The columnist notes that “the dispute between Athens and Ankara may be obviously the most important, but in the Eastern Mediterranean a number of border disputes are pending, which have not been resolved. Israel and Lebanon, for example, resumed negotiations in the spring, mediated by the United States, with the aim of demarcating their disputed maritime borders. And there is talk of submarine gas deposits. Greece again agreed last October with Albania, which has been hostile for decades, to refer the dispute between the two countries to the International Court of Justice in The Hague over their disputed maritime borders. For Athens, Rome is the neighbor with which the least disagreements are recorded. “Both countries are also involved in the EastMed pipeline project, which is expected to transport gas from Israel to Italy via Greece and Cyprus – something that Turkey considers to be in its own interests.”
Deadlock on the Stability Pact?
The pandemic has suspended the EU Stability Pact, and French Finance Minister Bruno Lemerre is trying to use the “break” to negotiate a
revision (commonly: relaxation) of the pact. However, an initial discussion in the Eurogroup on Monday ended in a “dead end”, the Daily newspaper (TAZ). Among other things, we read: “The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) under Klaus Regling proposes to raise the threshold for public debt to 100% of GDP (from the current 60%). Berlin does not want to commit, due to the ongoing negotiations for the coalition government. Recently (future Chancellor Olaf) Soltz was in favor of maintaining the old rules. It is mainly France that is proposing a reform. Lemmer states that new rules are needed. Paris’s wish is to achieve this during the French presidency, from January. In Brussels, they believe that the agreement will be reached later “.
“Maastricht has failed”
He expressed his own view on the Stability Pact in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) Joffrey Roux de Bezier, head of France’s largest employer Medef. “Maastricht has failed,” de Bezier said. “And this for two reasons: First, the rules were too strict. Second, they did not make sense. Why should the deficit criterion be 3%? It was a bureaucratic decision. I’m not saying we do not need rules, because we have a debt problem. “But we need rules that are understandable and can be adapted to the reality that prevails in each country.”
Asked about the “debt brake” that Germany envisages for the state budget, the head of Medef points out: “We need rules, but they must also leave room for us to breathe. It is wrong to set inelastic goals. “In both of the major crises of recent years – the European debt crisis and the coronavirus crisis – European debt rules have not helped us.”
DW – Giannis Papadimitriou
.
