Swoboda slams Van Rompuy, Barroso over Greece

EU leadership mismanaged Greece’s crisis, the leader of the Socialist group in the European Parliament says.

The leader of the socialist group in the European Parliament, Hannes Swobada, has launched a stinging attack on the treatment of Greece by the European Commission and the European Council.

He castigated José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy, the presidents of those institutions, for not going to Greece to shoulder responsibility for the policies being imposed by the EU as conditions of the eurozone’s bail-out.

It was not enough, he said, to send inspection teams of officials from the troika of the Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

They were, he said, “simple technocrats with a primary school knowledge of economics”.

He said that the lack of sensitivity shown to Greece might have been justified if the troika’s policies had worked, but they were making a bad situation worse.

“The work of the troika is a disaster,” he said, adding “There is no economic content behind it.” 

Swoboda was fully supportive of Spain’s attempt to avoid the prescriptions of such a troika, which would normally be a condition of a loan from the European Financial Stability Facility, the current bail-out mechanism.

He said that he believed that Spain’s predicament did not justify such treatment, since the government was making efforts to reform its public finances. The difficulty was specifically one of the liquidity of its banks.