And a “Spitzenkandidat” is not an elected President. Any such moves towards closer fiscal integration will need time. Some of them require treaty changes for which I currently do not see political willingness. Given the urgency of the crisis, the minimum consensus was therefore to temporarily opt for intergovernmental arrangements to increase the Union’s resilience.
This ought to be a temporary solution to avoid tensions of a political and legal nature between community and intergovernmental institutions. For instance, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was established as an intergovernmental institution that, for tasks such as payments, still requires prior consent from national parliaments.