Today 23 February 2012 the EU has revised macroeconomic data from the 
national economies and a striking fact: we are entering a recession, again. Specifically, the growth will contract by 0.3% according to the forecast check a few hours by the Commission Vice-President Olli Rehn , and it is estimated that Spain will contract by 1%, and puts inflation for the euro area by 2.1 % in the forecast. This means that we have major problems of competitiveness and a time when Europe's voice in the world is diluted, the result of the crisis and the pitiful step back to what was for the EU to not have a European Constitution and therefore lack of fiscal policy, which had to be encouraged in the growing season, as was the beginning of the XXI century. Not to mention a clear and authoritative voice in the external field, despite having a figure for this: the High Representative for Foreign Policy.
Moreover, in the Spanish case is now a major dilemma. When it was agreed our deficit for 2012 stood at 4.4%, but with a growth forecast of 2.2%, when the expectation today is a decrease of 1%, and that taking into account that it was based on an expected deficit of the EU from 6.6% this year, when according to the present government is 8%. This further complicates the situation in our state. And of course, further complicate the flexibility requested by calling the deficit from Moncloa, especially when the forecast of the EU is better than the IMF . This will definitely take some of the State Budget scariest we've seen in a democracy. The health co-payment, increasing tuition fees, and cutting basic social rights, are just around a publication in the BOE via Budgets.
In addition, another factor that makes me very pessimistic about our future, for a precedent anteirior: The failure of the Lisbon Strategy , now see it more as a symptom than a coincidence of factors that put paid to the same at the end of the last decade. I speak of symptoms, because they are repeating many of the steps that put paid to the objectives of growth that marked the same, by the end of the first decade of this century, and at the rate we're going to condemn in advance not to reach the objectives of Strategy 2020.
For starters, the 2020 strategy lacks a core value at this time. Not built as a measure of shock to the current scenario of crisis in the continent, and it is more a document of minimum to comply, to the end of the decade just begun Europe can remain competitive in a sustainable manner, taking into account the demographic problems that cross and the flexibility needed to address problems that arise during the evolution of these next 10 years. Not to mention the historical shift from a Eurocentric model to a model transpacific, Asia and America will write.
However, the big problem in my view, is that this document is largely unknown in the planning of the activity of the governments of Europe, and what is more worrying for businesses, particularly SMEs, which are the 85 % of the production in Europe. Strategy 2020 mark a path, a guide to how to proceed in future years (although not with the crisis scenarios), which may make it easier to exit the current scenario.
There is a basic question: Cuts + Austerity not produce growth. We astonished attending in the last 4 years in Europe to this formula does not produce any results, I lie, if it produces: more poverty and despair among citizens, and this is not the appropriate social cocktail out of the crisis. Austerity, yes, all the necessary, but the cuts do not produce growth and what it does lack is a plan to stimulate growth that is based on a sustainable growth strategy that involves a change in production model and yes, there is, this model is called Strategy 2020 .
Therefore need to change course, as already has U.S. with the new stimulus plan that Obama has promoted , and especially the EU need to regain control from its legitimate institutions in Brussels and not in an autocratic directory from Berlin that aims at a Germanization of Europe from the assimilation. We must move away from the tenets of Merkel as soon as possible and look for new goals and plans, and in this scenario has the main role as the European People's Party, who is the ruler of all the institutions of the Union, what is to establish a for the legitimacy of the Union fall again in the Belgian capital and there they make their decisions, and not in a dispatch from the German Foreign Ministry.
Times are depleted and the windows of opportunity are closing. Unless we begin a new growth process driven from the public, to encourage the private sector, re-injecting capital outside the financial system, so that the money will end up in European SMEs, very difficult as we have.
The theoretical framework exists, is the 2020 Strategy and its development needs of financial and political courage to develop it. But maybe that's the problem in the European Union, which no one has courage to lead in dark times, where one country imposes its criteria to ensure their welfare, forgetting what it meant at the time the Treaty of Rome.
