Sent back like a beginner. Moscovici had started his speech on Thursday 2 October radiating confidence. In the Socialist camp, everybody is convinced now that he was sent back because of the Socialists‘ delaying the Spanish EPP Cañete, but it did no good to have Moscovici be attacked from the start by a Frenchman, Alain Lamassoure (EPP): “Your candidacy creates among us a state of “malaise”. You failed in your own country as minister of economy. Your own president removed you from your job. What is your credibility?” Moscovici insisted that as finance minister he managed to reduce the deficit from more than 5% to 4.1%, but he also created irritation when he insisted that France had not been privileged when it asked for, and obtained, two supplementary years in order to bring its deficit inside the EU norms. He also antagonised the right with his insistence on the “social side of EU programs”. “Europe should be budgetary, monetary and social at the same time”, he said. He tried to win by showing his humane side: “I’m a pure European. I am Polish by my mother and Romanian by my father.” Also: “My father is a psychoanalyst and I can say that I am fairly balanced, with no paranoia or schizophrenia”… But he simply couldn’t convince that he would stay neutral when having to deal with France’s financial deficit, and couldn’t answer directly whether he would be ready to penalise his French Socialist allies for breaking deficit limits set for countries in the Eurozone. Nevertheless, he tried hard to convince that he would not be “an advocate or an ambassador”for the country of which he was finance minister from 2012 to spring 2014. He had to fend off attacks both from the right, and from left, as when the ECR Greek MEP Notis Marias asked him whether he was happy with “the disaster the Troika created in Greece”. “We had to maintain the unity of the Euro”, flatly said Moscovici. We should indeed have been more attentive to the fate of the populations, but I am glad that Greece remained in the Eurozone.” Dutch Sophie in’t Veld (ALDE) told him: “You haven’t convinced us. Your CV does not correspond to your promises. You downplay the problems, because your political convictions.” Moscovici just answered: “Juncker chose me for the job because he trusts me.”
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