Meinung: Barroso sollte Lissabon als Fehlschlag verwerfen

In einem Kommentar, der die Präsentation der
strategischen Prioritäten der Kommission durch Barroso
bereits im Voraus bewertet, bezeichnet das Wall Street Journal
die Lissabon-Agenda als einen „Schwindel“ und schlägt darüber
hinaus vor, dass die ‚Regulierungswut‘ auf Ebene der EU
und der Mitgliedstaaten gedrosselt werden sollte.

In an opinion piece entitled ‚Bursting the Bubble‘,
the  Wall Street Journal argues that Lisbon, known
at the time as the ‚dot-com summit‘ needs to be scrapped.

Billing its piece as ‚our midterm review‘ of the Lisbon
Agenda in advance of the Commission’s official version on 26
January, the US paper says: „If the Lisbon Agenda were a dot-com
itself, it would have gone bankrupt within months of its
founding“.

It says that Lisbon is „long on rhetoric and short on
practicality“, arguing that nobody wants to be against
‚competitiveness‘ and that it has been used by reformers and
anti-reformers alike to further their arguments. Although conceding
that the aims of Lisbon were refreshing, „the political
will to pursue those goals never existed, and half a decade of
rising joblessness has done nothing to change that fact“.

Its advice to the Commission – write off Lisbon as a failure and
slash the volume of regulation at EU and member state level.