Yesterday’s Brussels4Breakfast meeting was dominated by the topical discussion of the imminent European elections and next European Commission. It was generally agreed that the election outcome would depend heavily on voter turnout across Europe, with the polls at the moment predicting a fairly symmetrical parliament for the first time in its history. It was pointed out that the 15-20 per cent of extremists predicted to be elected on the right/left would be relatively insignificant to financial services as the main parties would be forced to cooperate in order to build majorities.
A further subject of discussion was the future committee structure of the EP, notably the idea to split the ECON committee into a main and a sub-committee, one of them charged with macroprudential and one with micropudential issues. The EPP, currently leading in the polls by a slight margin and hence probably chairing the ECON committee is said to be against such a split. Committee compositions will be decided in July.
In terms of the future Commission President, opinions differed: A stand-off between the two main political parties and European governments was deemed unlikely, yet both the left and the right would each have, according to all polls, less than half of the votes in the new parliament. The Liberals (ALDE) might therefor either be the decisive force to decide on the new Commission President, or their candidate might become a “compromise candidate” after all. In this context the resignation of Jyrki Katainen as Finnish PM was mentioned as well as Pierre Moscovici’s nomination to become the next French commissioner. The recently talked-about Super-commissioner model seemed off the table.
In the more technical part of the morning, an overarching theme was the revived talk of securitisation. Barnier mentioned this in his speech at Eurofi, the BoE and ECB published a joint paper on “The impaired EU securitisation market: causes, roadblocks and how to deal with them” and the EBF, InsuranceEurope and TheCityUK all welcomed these developments in recent statements. In a recent speech, Yves Mersch from the ECB said there was “a need to restore coherence across financial sectors in particular amid the unfavourable regulatory treatment of (high quality) securitisation instruments”.
Graham Bishop - Consultant on EU Integration - Political, Financial, Economic, Budgetary
Rolling blog
© Graham Bishop
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