A mass anti-austerity protest called by unions took to the streets Saturday, as EU ministers cut short talks on the eurozone debt crisis a day after Washington told them to end their bickering. With trade unions from across the 27-member European Union aiming to draw tens of thousands of demonstrators to the southwestern Polish city of Wroclaw, police cleared barriers outside the Centennial Hall conference centre.
“The ministers will leave early,” said an official with the talks’ Polish hosts at the centre, where the final press conference was also brought forward to 0930 GMT. Despite the early end to fractious debt crisis talks already marred on Friday by a clash between top European figures and US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, ministers had never planned to take binding decisions at the informal talks. Europe’s crisis has made ministerial meetings a more frequent target of protests than ever.
European Trade Union Confederation spokeswoman Patricia Grillo raised the numbers organisers said were attending to 40,000 on Saturday morning, similar in scale to another such protest in Budapest, Hungary, six months ago. As ministers focused on tighter enforcement of deficit and debt ceilings across EU borders, a union statement said: “Other choices have to be made. We have to agree on European economic governance centred on solidarity and employment.”
Ministers from the 27 EU states arrived shortly before 9:00 am (0700 GMT) for a session at which Belgian Finance Minister Didier Reynders said he would push France and Germany for the eurozone to implement a financial transactions tax. On the Greek and wider eurozone debt crisis, Luxembourg’s Finance Minister Luc Frieden told reporters it was time for deeds, not just words, about fiscal responsibility and economic coordination, primarily within the EU’s 17-nation eurozone.
“I think we have not yet arrived where a full currency union should be and the crisis has shown that it’s not enough to have club rules, they need to be enforced, and everything that can contribute to that is absolutely necessary,” he said. At Friday’s talks, eurozone nations decided to postpone until October a decision on whether to hand over the next tranche of an agreed emergency loan package to Greece – the eurozone member in the eye of the storm – worth eight billion euros ($11.0 billion).
Athens, desperately trying to show its austerity drive meets bailout conditions, has warned it will run out of funds by the middle of October, endangering pensions and state salaries while awaiting a breakthrough. But renewed aid for Greece, after an earlier bailout proved insufficient, has been mired in rows with Finland over its demand for collateral for loan guarantees, and with Slovakia which has threatened to delay parliamentary ratification.
