<Tenders, Govt contracts & EU funding for SMEs / >

A real Economic and Monetary Union should be accompanied by stronger democratic legitimacy. The European Parliament leaders adopted negotiating position on full EMU stressing this point. The negotiating mandate points out that accountability structures are already in place, in the shape of the European Parliament and national parliaments, and the goal should be to strengthen them further. In September 2012, a MEP draft report already underlined that the EU already has the tools to tackle the crisis. Moreover, more transparency and representativeness is needed for national budget and economic policy coordination. To this end the European Parliament would need to be more formally involved in the Annual Growth Survey and the Economic Policy and Employment Guidelines in the framework of the European Semester.

MEPs also highlighted that all systems and mechanisms related to the new EMU - the European Stability Mechanism, the Troikas, and the financial supervisor, for example - must be subject to thorough scrutiny by the European Parliament which would go beyond the current scrutiny rights of the EP in the economic and monetary area. The mandate also stresses the need for a "European political sphere", primarily through European elections in which the European political parties put forward their candidates for the Commission presidency.

The negotiating mandate underlines the benefits of cooperation between the EP and national parliaments to ensure that closer economic integration is accountable at all levels. The mandate calls for national parliaments to be brought more often into the EMU picture to allow them to hold their governments to account on these matters. It also argues that although a treaty change is inevitable in the medium term to complete the EMU, much can be already achieved with the current structure. Additionally, enhanced cooperation should be used more often, for example in the fiscal area.