Merkel defends concessions in euro crisis

BERLIN (AP) – Chancellor Angela Merkel defended concessions she made at a European Union summit, telling German lawmakers on Friday that help to struggling countries and banks will still come with strings attached and insisting that some decisions were misunderstood.

Merkel had been opposed, at least in the near term, to some of the measures that she and the other 16 leaders of the euro countries agreed on Friday. They include allowing Europe’s bailout fund in future to give money directly to a country’s banks, without imposing strict austerity conditions on the government.

German media headlines immediately after the summit portrayed the outcome as a political defeat, but Merkel said her tough-love approach was intact.

She spoke to lawmakers as they prepared to vote on approving Europe’s German-pushed budget-discipline pact and its permanent rescue fund, the €500 billion ($623 billion) European Stability Mechanism — but not the summit decisions. Merkel made clear that those plans will also go to lawmakers at a later date.

Merkel told Parliament it was a “sensible decision” to allow countries that pledge to implement reforms and budget policies demanded by the EU’s executive Commission to tap rescue funds without having to go through the kind of tough austerity measures demanded of Greece, Portugal and Ireland — a concession to Italy and Spain in particular.

Leaders were “very inconsistent” in explaining that, “which led to a lot of misunderstanding,” Merkel said. She insisted it was only about helping countries whose financial stability is threatened by high interest rates but don’t need to be taken off markets altogether.

She said there will always be conditions and a time frame, which will be supervised, and told lawmakers they should read the EU Commission’s current economic policy recommendations for Italy and Spain — “they are tough conditions.”

Germany’s opposition leader, who had previously failed to convince Merkel to adopt such measures to ease fellow European countries’ borrowing costs, welcomed her decision at the summit. But the Greens’ Juergen Trittin couldn’t resist drawing a parallel with Germany’s 2-1 European Championship defeat by Italy on Thursday.

“She lost the game that was played in Brussels last night at least 2-1 against (Italian Premier Mario) Monti, if she scored a goal at all,” Trittin said.

Merkel looked set to secure the required two-thirds majority for the budget-discipline pact, the fiscal compact, later Friday after winning the opposition’s support last week by offering a greater emphasis on economic growth and support for a financial transaction tax. Similar backing looked likely for the ESM.