EU fiscal treaty - Defer vote to help build a fairer Europe

Elections in France and Greece have left those countries in very different positions. Europe, in all of our splendid diversity, can only look on and wonder which situation most accurately presages our fate.

France has given François Hollande a mandate to demand additions — or changes if you prefer — to the EU fiscal treaty to try to encourage growth and job creation. The absence of these measures is the focus of considerable and appropriate opposition. Their omission is a central plank in the campaign in Ireland to have the required constitutional amendment rejected on May 31. Inclusion of such measures would be a game changer and, even more importantly, it would reassert that the EU represents far more than just economic union. It would begin to re-establish the primacy of the great, peace-sustaining European social project over even the most important number crunching. It might even begin the overdue reassertion of governments’ control of the destructive excesses of tooth-and-claw markets.

Greece has had its election but the consequences are far from clear other than to say the country is in such a precarious position that German and European authorities have warned that unless a coalition that supports the EU/IMF bailout is formed then the country faces bankruptcy and all of the mayhem that would follow.