Roberto Gualtieri, one of the three MEPs drafting the agreement on fiscal discipline, says the UK's veto could have been avoided - the summit deal is flawed.

Interview: Fleshing out the Intergovernmental Agreement

https://api.multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/documents/20125/15799073/N003-0161-ENb.srt

Roberto Gualtieri,  you're a member of the working group

drawing up  this intergovernmental agreement

that's supposed to help to save the euro.  Do we need it?

I think that the current EU treaties  provide many elements,

to get a closer, stronger,  more efficient fiscal union.

So, in my opinion, by using Article 136,

enhanced cooperation  and the flexibility clause,

we could have avoided both the UK veto  and the need for a new treaty.

so we as a Parliament have been invited  to attend, to participate,

not with voting rights, but with  all the other rights of the Member States

Of the 14 points in the agreement,  as agreed at the summit,

Some were in Maastricht, some were  in the Stability and Growth Pact.

the chance for the budgets  to be seen by the Commission

before they're put before  national parliaments

and also this automatic penalty  for countries that build up too big a deficit.

Economically, I think that  fiscal discipline is necessary,

We need governance, true EU  governance, not only stricter rules.

We need growth, solidarity, democracy...

We need many things  that are not in this agreement.

Institutionally, the problems you  mentioned are two very different ones.

The treaty itself says  that nothing can be done

So the problem is that the current  formulation of Article 3 of this draft treaty

and new procedures to define the  benchmark for individual Member States,

which are external to the current  mechanism put in place by the 'six pack'.

So this formulation, I think,  could create overlapping, confusion,

and the risk of having both stricter rules,

but also a less efficient and strict system  of surveillance.

So it's a bad formulation  and we're trying to change it.

But it had to be  an intergovernmental agreement

because Britain vetoed  it becoming a full EU agreement.

Does it have the same legal weight  in that case?

Are there still problems about the use of  institutions and institutional mechanisms?

This is a crucial problem.  Nothing that goes against EU law is valid.

So it means that the agreement  can only contain two types of elements:

a political commitment  to act in a certain way

in the EU institutions,  as I tried to explain before,

and an agreement to go even further  in some elements of the benchmarks.

But this is very difficult to establish.

So there are a lot of open problems  in this draft treaty

and that's why the Parliament  must do its duty to try to improve them

and, at least,  to avoid dangers to the EU institutions.