SPD joins growing clamour for IGC action on unemployment

Date: 07/03/1996

By Thomas Klau

GERMANY'S opposition Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) has added its voice to the growing chorus of governments and political forces demanding a strengthening of the EU's anti-unemployment policies.

In what amounts to a pre-electoral bid to paint her party as a champion of employment, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, the Social Democrat's European policy spokeswoman, declared the SPD might block ratification of the results of the Intergovernmental Conference if they did not include new measures to promote job growth.

Experts view this, and similar demands put forward by Austria and Scandinavian EU members, with considerable scepticism. They point to the fact that neither the Commission nor the Council of Ministers have clearly identifiable competencies in this field and that many measures to further payroll growth should be decided at local level, as the structure of long-term unemployment varies from region to region.

Undeterred by such considerations, Wieczorek-Zeul has called for a “European alliance for jobs” including “binding rules” on economic, employment and finance policy to be added to the Maastricht Treaty at the IGC.

She accused the German government of torpedoing suggestions by the Commission and the Swedish and French governments to coordinate the fight against unemployment, which now engulfs at least 18 million citizens in the EU and indirectly affects many more.

The timing of the SPD's thrust appears to be motivated by the approaching elections in three German Länder on 24 March, the last before the general election late in 1998.

The SPD will be able to block ratification of measures needing a two-thirds' majority in the Bundestag or in the Bundesrat, the parliament's upper house where Länder governments are represented.

Yet while the threat to bloc ratification of the IGC's outcome can probably be dismissed as electoral posturing, it is another worrying sign that influential forces within the SPD are increasingly inclined to fiddle with European policy to gain electoral advantage.

Traditionally, the European policy debate in Germany has been marked by a strongly bipartisan approach. But the SPD's desperate search for topics that might galvanise the voters and increase the pressure on Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government means that the consensus to keep Europe out of the partisan debate is increasingly becoming a thing of the past.

This has become particularly apparent in the debate over monetary union, where party leader Oskar Lafontaine has recently been playing off the goal of reaching the Maastricht criteria against the need to fight unemployment.

At the same time, the SPD is fuelling inflationary fears in the German population by insisting the Maastricht criteria be met strictly before the start up of EMU, arguing the stability of the Euro could not otherwise be guaranteed.

Yet while the party's leadership seems to be coming out increasingly in favour of a postponement of EMU, it has so far refrained from making this the official party line. The SPD in the south-western state of Baden-Wurttemberg was ordered to drop a provocative anti-EMU campaign slogan which ran: 'Stable money instead of more unemployed - no EMU in 1999.”