His comments, reported Thursday in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, will come as manna from heaven for David Cameron, who made a pre-election manifesto to hold an In-Out referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the EU. This is likely to take place now in the summer of 2016.
Cameron is desperate not to leave the EU, despite rising Euroscepticism within his own party and in Britain as a whole, and is campaigning hard with his European counterparts for reforms of the EU, which would satisfy the demands of anti-Europeans back home.
Grexit Crisis May Avert Brexit Crisis
Schäuble has been a fierce critic of the Greek Government and has clashed with his Chancellor Angela Merkel over the third bailout, saying the creditors should force Greece out of the Euro until it has got its house in order.
Schäuble wants to reduce European Commission remit by creating more bureaucracy LOL http://t.co/XA3LtKhDlx #EURef #moreEUnow #europeanunion
— Alex von Witzleben (@AlexWitzleben) July 30, 2015
But Schäuble has become ever more frustrated at the increasingly political role being played by Juncker and his colleagues — Juncker himself personally telephoning Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on several occasions for direct talks.
According to the leading German newspaper, Schäuble wants to ensure that the original function of the Commission as the so-called guardian of the EU treaties is separated from its increasingly political activities.
Schäuble is thinking of outsourcing some of the functions of the European Commission – which include enforcing anti-trust and internal market rules, managing the EU budget and implementing policies – to politically independent authorities.
This would emasculate the Commission and would represent a fundamental loss of power from Brussels, which would play into the hands of David Cameron, who is fighting for such reforms. The Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem is a close ally of Cameron and sources say he wants to make the issue a priority of the Dutch EU Presidency in the first half of 2016 – helpfully, the year Cameron is slated to hold his referendum.
Angela Merkel is desperate to keep Britain inside the EU, but has remained adamant that the fundamental principles of the EU remain in place. The irony is that her finance minister has just given Cameron the ammunition he needs to argue for the fundamental reforms he wants.
