GERMANY-EU: Opposition SPD Says Germany's Presidency Was a Failure

BONN, Dic 01 (IPS) - Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government got a bashing Thursday for its "failure to bring forward" the European Union (EU) during its six-month presidency which ends this month.

In the run-up to the EU summit Dec 9-10 in Essen, nearly an hour's drive from Bonn, the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) said the performance of the German presidency had been "rather poor".

"Nothing has remained of the government's grandiloquent declarations in summer on how it wanted to advance the EU," said Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, deputy chair of the SPD.

The German presidency intended to avail of "new opportunities emerging from the Maastricht Treaty (signed Dec 1991) after the disappearance of the East-West conflict" to improve the EU's capacity to act and react, she added.

But this has come to nought, she said. In practice Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel has not shown any interest in what could be described as a European foreign policy. In fact, twice he did not attend European parliamentary sessions to report on the EU's foreign policy objectives.

Wieczorek-Zeul said that in fact the balance sheet the Bonn government had itself had drawn of its activities showed that it had not come up with any new points of emphasis in its agenda.

A case in point was the EU's failure to take any initiatives worth mentioning in the Balkans where there continues to be hostilities.

"The (Bonn) government had made loud-mouthed announcements of its plans to mediate between Greece and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia. But nothing was done by way of implementation," the SPD deputy chair charged.

Even the "big promises to back the peace process" in the Middle East remain unfulfilled. Only a fraction of the aid promised by the EU to the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Yasser Arafat, have been actually disbursed.

The international donors, which last year promised 2.4 billion dollars in development assistance over five years, agreed in Brussels Wednesday to provide 125 million dollars, EU's share being 48 million dollars.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service