Mark Rutte and his government's finance minister, Jan Kees de Jager, said the new “commissioner for budgetary discipline” should be given the authority to impose a gradually more painful series of penalties on profligate eurozone countries, including the withholding of EU development funds.
The European Union should appoint a new budget tsar with powers to dictate taxes and spending in eurozone countries and who could ultimately adjudicate whether countries should be kicked out of the euro, the Dutch prime minister has argued. “Countries that do not want to submit to this regime can choose to leave the eurozone”, Mr Rutte and Mr de Jager write. “In the future, the ultimate sanction can be to force countries to leave the euro.”
Senior European officials say the Netherlands has become one of the most demanding countries in the negotiations over how to resuscitate the faltering bail-outs of Greece, meaning domestic Dutch politics have a big influence over eurozone debates.
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