The FINANCIAL -- The German
government and opposition agreed Thursday that parliament would vote on
approving the EU fiscal pact and the bloc's new bailout fund on June 29,
the ruling parties said.
The deal between Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre-right coalition and the centre-left opposition indicated that the eurozone's top economy would succeed in ratifying tools seen as key to fighting the raging debt crisis.
"The just-agreed timetable ensures that the European Stability Mechanism, together with the fiscal pact, can come into force on time," the head of the Merkel's Christian Union parliamentary group, Volker Kauder, said.
"We are now on track for Germany to live up to its responsibilities in Europe," he added in a statement.
The German parliament must pass the draft laws on the fiscal pact, a new European budgetary rule book, with a two-thirds majority.
However its quick passage, which the government aimed to see completed by the start of the summer recess in early July, had been thrown into question by squabbling between the ruling parties and the opposition.
A spokesman for the parliamentary group of the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, said the timetable did not imply an agreement on all the contentious points and that negotiations would continue.
According to EUbusiness, the new roadmap would see the Bundestag lower house vote at 1500 GMT on June 29, the spokesman for the Christian Union parliamentary group, Ulrich Scharlack, said, confirming earlier comments from party sources.
The draft laws would then move to a vote in the Bundesrat upper house, where Germany's powerful 16 regional states are represented, Scharlack said.
This would come after the scheduled end of a pivotal June 28-29 European Union summit on the eurozone crisis.
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