Socialist leaders to back plan for a ‘Social Europe’

Former European Commission president Jacques Delors and former Danish prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen will next week launch a ten-point plan linking economic reform with a guarantee of social and employment rights.

The plan for a new, so-called Social Europe, will be presented to leaders of European Socialist parties from the EU’s soon-to-be 27 member states at their annual congress in Porto, Portugal, on 7-8 December.

The meeting will be attended by the Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, his Portuguese counterpart José Socrates as well as Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi and Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist Party’s presidential candidate.

Speaking in Brussels this week, Rasmussen said that the programme was intended to ensure that economic reform went "hand in hand" with growth to create more jobs rather than Commission President José Manuel Barroso’s approach that growth would follow reform.

If the Party of European Socialists’ approach to growth and investment was followed an extra five million jobs could be created in the EU by 2020, Rasmussen said.

He said the plan was intended to show that Socialist parties had a better response to the challenges of globalisation than just opposing all reform. "The worst thing we could do would be to close our eyes," said Rasmussen, because failing to match reform with social policies would hit the poorest sections of society hardest.

Lowering taxes or lowering wages was not the way for Europe to compete, he insisted. Instead, Europe should compete through better qualifications.

At the same time, centre-left governments should commit themselves to an ambitious "green growth strategy", he said.

Rasmussen said that the aim was to apply the programme at all levels of government, local, regional, national and EU.

The main points of the programme, which should be endorsed at next week’s congress, are a new set of rights and duties for government, businesses and citizens. He called for a new philosophy of "co-responsibility" for governments and businesses to create jobs and ensure welfare protection in return for citizens taking up opportunities for training to meet employers’ needs.

He also called for full employment through an active labour market strategy. While it was no longer possible to guarantee job security for life, there should be a focus on employment security so that welfare systems reforms ensured that gaps between employment were as short as possible and income losses during the transition from old to new jobs were minimised.

Other priorities include investing in people through training and education, especially for those who missed educational opportunities early on in life. The programme will also include calls for improving the inclusiveness of societies, universal childcare, equal rights for men and women, social dialogue, emphasising diversity and integration and tackling climate change.

Former European Commission president Jacques Delors and former Danish prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen will next week launch a ten-point plan linking economic reform with a guarantee of social and employment rights.