A senior member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Bavarian allies rejected French President Emmanuel Macron's plans to reform the euro zone by installing a joint finance minister and creating a common budget, in an interview published on Saturday. The suggestions from Macron, who was elected in May, have been met with caution by Merkel, amid suspicion in Berlin that German taxpayers might be left to shoulder common debts.
Markus Soeder, Bavaria's finance minister and a senior member of the Christian Social Union (CSU) - the region's sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) - told Der Spiegel magazine that Germany needed to consider how it could, together with France, strengthen financial stability in Europe.
But he raised doubts about the idea of a euro zone finance minister, saying he was "very sceptical about whether an extra political office alone would improve the objectivity of decisions".
Soeder said a joint finance minister who might get the right to intervene in the budgets of euro zone states if they did not stick to stability criteria would amount to a "huge intrusion". He was also concerned that changing EU treaties "would create new European financial equalisation or a transfer model through the back door".
Soeder suggested taking the responsibility for ensuring states stick to the stability criteria out of the European Commission's remit and passing it to a beefed-up European Stability Mechanism (ESM), in the form of a European Monetary Fund with wide-ranging powers.
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