Left group in Parliament will not endorse nominee for president of ECB
Left MEPs will be voting against Christine Lagarde as the next president of the European Central Bank today.
Her eight years at the helm of the International Monetary Fund – as part of the Troika along with the ECB and the European Commission – have been characterised by policies that have exacerbated inequality across the globe while benefiting the 1%.
Commenting ahead of the vote, GUE/NGL co-chair Manon Aubry (France Insoumise, France) said:
“Christine Lagarde said the ECB must ‘listen to the market and the people’, but the people don’t want what the markets want. As long as ECB monetary policies serve only the market – not the planet and the people – our group will vote against the nomination of Lagarde as head of the ECB.”
“At this morning’s hearing, I challenged Lagarde on the twin issues of inequalities and tackling climate change. But her defence of the monetary policies of quantitative easing and price stability mean that speculators and the rich will again benefit. She had no answers on how to use the ECB in order to tackle rising inequality.”
“She did pretend to care about climate change but then refused to commit on concrete actions. Will the ECB stop funding polluting industries? Will ECB funds go to member states directly so they can invest in a green new deal? We got no answers today,” Aubry concluded.
Also voting against is Dimitrios Papadimoulis (SYRIZA, Greece), who said:
“The European Central Bank is obliged to have more transparency and democratic accountability than the International Monetary Fund so by moving from one institution to the other, Christine Lagarde needs to uphold that.”
“At the hearing, I also asked her about Greece’s suffering at the hands of the first two memoranda as well as the IMF’s notorious ‘wrong multipliers’ that tripled unemployment and deepened our recession. Was it really just to save French and German banks, as Strauss-Khan and Dijsselbloem once said?”
“My concern therefore is that by going from the IMF to the ECB, we are just recycling the leadership – nothing much will change. I will therefore vote against her candidature tonight,” he added.