Europe

Europe

EU summit delivers no "spectacular" solution: Merkel

19 July 2011 23:23 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday that the upcoming European Union (EU) summit could not bring about a "spectacular" or all-round solution for the Greek debt crisis as well as the eurozone woes, APAreports referring Xinhua.

"If you are politically responsible, and this is what the (German) government wants to be, you know that such a spectacular, single step cannot happen, including (summit) on Thursday," Merkel said in a press conference in Hannover, where she and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have co-chaired a high-level consultation since Monday.

The chancellor of Europe’s largest economy, and also the largest contributor in the bailout for Greece, believed that Thursday’s summit in Brussels could help ease Greece’s debt pressure, but "further steps will be needed, not one spectacular event can solve all problems."

Instead of finding quick solutions, Merkel suggested that the eurozone nations "need a controlled and manageable process of successive steps and measures, which has one single purpose, namely getting to the origin of the problem."

"This means the issue of reducing Greece’s debt and the issue of raising its competitiveness," she added.

With an aim to ease recent market worries over the eurozone economy, Thursday’s EU summit is expected to hammer out a deal on the second rescue plan for Greece, which already received more than 110 billion euros (156 billion U.S. dollars) of bailouts last year from the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

However, the summit was overshadowed by the long-time rifts between Berlin and the European Central Bank (ECB) as well as other EU nations, as Germany insisted that private bondholders should share part of the bailout burden in the new rescue package.

The ECB and other eurozone states warned that such a move could put Athens into default and cause more turmoil in countries with poor financial records, such as Italy and Spain, eurozone’s third and fourth largest economy.