"We have an atomic bomb that we can use in the face of the Germans and the French: this atomic bomb is simply that we won't pay," said Pedro Nuno Santos, vice-president of the Socialist Party in the parliament.
"Debt is our only weapon and we must use it to impose better conditions, because recession itself is what is stopping us complying with the (EU-IMF Troika) accord. We should make the legs of the German bankers tremble," he said.
The comments came as Portugal slides deeper into recession, with the economy expected to contract by 3pc next year. Protesters marched through Lisbon on Thursday denouncing plans by the new conservative government to raise the working week to 42 hours. Wages are being cut 16pc for higher paid, and 8pc for lower paid public workers.
The parliament passed a fresh austerity budget earlier this month under the terms of its €78bn loan package from the EU and the International Monetary Fund.
Mr Nuno Santos said Europe's southern states should join forces to resist the austerity dictates and contractionary policies being imposed by the core powers. "It is incomprehensible that the peripheral countries don't do what the French president and the German Chancellor do. They should unite," he said.
Left-leaning parties in Europe are becoming increasingly defiant, accusing the Right of exploiting its grip on the European machinery to force through polices that are in effect dismantling parts of the welfare state or undermine trade union power. Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, and Holland's Mark Rutte are all conservatives, and will soon be joined by Spain's Mariano Rajoy.
Francois Hollande, France's Socialist leader and front-runner in the presidential elections, has vowed to renegotiate last week's EU summit deal if elected next May, saying it violates the fiscal sovereignty of the French parliament, imposes perpetual austerity, and fails to offer struggling states any way out of economic crisis. "There must be growth," he said
Oskar Lafontaine, a leader of Germany's Linke (Left) party, said the euro was hurtling towards destruction on current policies. He blamed Germany's system of screwing down wages to undercut other EMU countries – or "wage dumping" – for causing the imbalances behind the eurozone crisis. "A shared currency cannot work without coordination of wage policy. Once wages have diverged as far as they have in recent years, devaluation and revaluation is the only way out."
He accused Merkel and Sarkozy of driving Greece into a downward spiral and now trying to inflict the same "demented" policies on the whole of Europe.
No comments:
Post a Comment