GERMANY will meet the fiscal goals for European currency union membership without seeking any softening of the criteria or using accounting tricks, Germany's finance minister Mr Theo Waigel has stated.
"The German Finance Minister will spare no effort in meeting the criteria," Mr Waigel said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. EU members are scheduled to decide in early 1998 which countries will be in the first wave of monetary union, which is due to begin in 1999. Their decision will be based on financial data for 1997.
There has recently been talk of softening the criteria, but Mr Waigel insists that Germany will adhere to the requirement for would be members to reduce budget deficits down to or below three per cent of gross domestic product by year end.
Mr Waigel said: "Three is three. We have developed our budgetary concept in such a way, and agreed this with the different states and local authorities, so that the deficit in 1997 will be three per cent of GDP. The banks and building societies have always demanded that the criteria must be met. We want a strong stable euro, one just as strong as the deutschmark," Mr Waigel said.
"The treaty contains sensible economic criteria. With these we have succeeded in establishing a culture of stability which, no one in Europe would have thought possible ten years ago." There was no question of Germany using creative accounting to meet the criteria either.
Meanwhile, 77 per cent of Germans want Europe's planned economic and monetary union to be postponed from its 1999 start date, a survey has indicated.
The poll for the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel found only 18 per cent of respondents favoured introducing the single currency on time.
The survey was the latest in a series of polls to show increasing German anxiety about the planned single currency, the euro. Some polls have also indicated, however, that the euro ranks fairly low on the list of Germans pressing concerns.
The European Commission President Mr Jacques Santer also takes a hard line on meeting the criteria. Mr Santer said on Saturday it was vital that the criteria for EMU membership laid out in the Maastricht Treaty be strictly adhered to.
"I wouldn't hesitate to say that the euro has every chance of being at least as strong as the deutschmark," Mr Santer said. He dismissed calls to delay the planned 1999 EMU start date. "I am worried that if we delay the start date now, we will delay currency, union for a whole generation, Mr Santer said.
Not everyone is convinced that the criteria will be met on time and that there should be no thoughts of delay. A former Bundesbank member, Mr Wilhelm Noelling, threatened to lodge a legal challenge to the German government if Germany went ahead with EMU while missing strict entry criteria.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday Mr Noelling called for EMU to be postponed, saying he believed not even Germany would meet the entry criteria. He went on to reiterate comments he made in German newspapers last week - that he was determined to go the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe if, having clearly missed the criteria, the government decides in spring 1998 to take part.
