European Council: stop speculation, honour your commitments.

"Last week's Council has taken another step towards completing our economic union. Our crisis is an economic crisis. But our mistake was not to have respected our commitments and the rules we laid down for ourselves."

During Parliament's debate on the results of last week's European Council, the Chairman of the EPP Group, Joseph Daul, warned that there is no time for speculation and that the decisions taken by the European Council must be implemented as soon as possible. The Chairman urged all Member States to behave responsibly and find a solution on the Union's 2014-2020 budget before the end of this year.

Joseph Daul stated that a failure in one sector, in one bank, has an impact on the whole EU system: "I believe that one of the key lessons of this crisis is that we cannot exclude certain sectors of our common market from common legislation. For example, banks need to be regulated and the proposal made by the Council last week on a European Banking Supervisor is one that my Group can support."

The Chairman of the largest political Group in the European Parliament also stressed the importance of implementing existing legislation related to the Single Market, considered by the EPP Group to be the backbone of the European Union: "For the past twenty years, the Single Market has been our success. But for this success to be sustainable, we need to finish the work we started. We need to force the Heads of State and Government to close the existing gaps within the Single Market. I'm thinking, notably, of putting in place a digital single market. Not doing it means that we have to suffer 1 billion Euros in lost revenues every year", concluded Joseph Daul MEP.