A CALL by Nicolas Sarkozy to expand the role of the European Central Bank has been played down by Germany and seized on by his chief rival for the presidency, François Hollande.
Mr Sarkozy told a rally in Paris on Sunday that, if re-elected, he would initiate a debate on widening the bank’s mandate to allow it to promote stimulus measures for growth in the euro zone.
Germany strongly resisted French attempts to put pressure on the ECB into taking a more interventionist role in calming the debt crisis. With tensions running high over the issue last November, Mr Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to refrain from making any public demands of the Frankfurt bank.
However, Mr Sarkozy has been stung by Mr Hollande’s success in positioning himself as the candidate of growth and stimulus.
“If the ECB does not support growth, we will not have enough growth,” the incumbent told supporters. “It’s our duty to reflect on this issue. We cannot have taboo subjects.”
Playing down Mr Sarkozy’s comments, Dr Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert told a regular government press conference: “The German position on the ECB and its role – independent of encouragement and assistance from politics – is known, also in Paris, and has been unchanged for a long time.”
He said Berlin and Paris agreed on the need for sustainable growth in Europe, “and therefore have taken a number of initiatives, which has helped to set the issue of growth and employment on the agenda of the EU summit”.
Mr Hollande said Mr Sarkozy’s comments on economic growth were “a declaration of what he hasn’t done . . . It’s a pity that he forgot about it [growth] for the past five years . . . We would not be in this situation had the ECB, from the beginning of the Greek crisis, intervened by buying up sovereign debt,” he said.
The socialist has called for the ECB’s mandate to be revised to add a responsibility for promoting growth, while radical presidential candidates have said the central bank should be allowed to lend directly to governments.
Some French analysts brushed off the president’s remarks on the ECB as campaign rhetoric.
Citing an unnamed senior official at the Élysée Palace, Le Monde said Mr Sarkozy did not envisage seeking formal changes to the ECB’s mandate. “The president is using the liberty he has as a candidate, but which he doesn’t have as president,” the official was quoted as saying.
Jean-François Copé, secretary-general of the ruling UMP party, said Mr Sarkozy would seek a broad debate on the ECB’s role if he won re-election on May 6th.
“After the election it will be one of the issues that deserves to be dealt with, even if for now it’s premature to talk about what kind of format the talks could take,” Mr Copé told foreign journalists in Paris. “We could bring up the role of the ECB with our European partners after the election, for sure.”
A string of poor opinion polls for Mr Sarkozy continued last night when the Ifop tracking poll showed Mr Hollande regaining the lead in the first round. The survey put Mr Hollande on 27.5 per cent (up 0.5 per cent), ahead of Mr Sarkozy on 27 per cent (down 1 per cent). Marine Le Pen of the National Front was in third on 16 per cent (no change) while the left-wing radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon was fourth on 14 per cent ( up 1).
