GERMANY yesterday ruled out a renegotiation of the stability pact governing Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) despite the doubts expressed about it by the new French government. But Bonn indicated that it is prepared to abandon its long-held objections to incorporating an employment chapter in the revised Maastricht Treaty due to be agreed at Amsterdam next week.
The German Foreign Minister, Mr Klaus Kinkel, sought to play down the significance of the French announcement that it would not be ready to sign the pact until after the Amsterdam summit.
"Plans for the stability pact remain, the euro will arrive and the stability pact will arrive. France's behaviour will in no way mean we are going to be ham-strung. I cannot see that there is a change in the basic position of the French," he said.
But the Finance Minister, Mr Theo Waigel, insisted that, although he did not object to the new French government studying the pact, its terms could not be changed. "I have made it clear that there will be no renegotiation of the stability pact," he said.
German newspapers yesterday reacted angrily to the French move, accusing Paris of endangering the entire single currency project. The business daily Handelsblatt said that France had plunged Europe into crisis and risked delaying the euro launch.
"If Paris seeks to put new elements into the stability pact, that means nothing less than a delay - as well as calling into question whether the stability pact will ever come about," the paper said.
The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine suspected that the move was a ploy to use monetary and financial policy to reduce unemployment.
"The idea of a stability pact, which Germany and France had great trouble in developing, was to prevent exactly this kind of misuse of financial policy," the paper said
Mr Kinkel is due to outline Bonn's aims at Amsterdam in the Bundestag today; he is expected to drop Germany's opposition to incorporating an employment chapter in the new treaty.
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Mr Kinkel suggested that Bonn would not oppose the chapter as long as it did not involve a job creation programme that would require EU funding.
The opposition Social Democrats yesterday threatened to use their majority in the tipper house of parliament to block the ratification of the new treaty unless it included a jobs chapter. Members of the governing Christian Democrats also indicated their willingness to drop their opposition to the chapter.
Reuter adds: East European countries should not read too much into being left out of the first round of EU membership negotiations, the External Relations Commissioner, Mr Hans van den Broek, said yesterday.
Fearful of a backlash of public resentment in the countries having the greatest difficulty in distancing themselves from their Soviet past, Mr Van den Broek said different starting dates would not amount to discrimination.
Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania,
Latvia, Bulgaria and Roman in have all applied for EU membership.
