German EU commissioner under fire over flag punishment comments

Sep 14, 2011, 13:11 GMT

Brussels - Germany's EU commissioner came under fire on Wednesday for raising a suggestion that heavily indebted eurozone countries could be shamed into action by flying their flags at half mast.

In an interview Friday with German tabloid Bild, EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said, 'There is a proposal to fly the flags of debt sinners at half-mast outside EU buildings. That would only be a symbol, but would have a high deterrent effect.'

He called it an 'unconventional' idea, compared to more widely discussed plans to increase EU oversight on national economic policies and schemes to help to the Greek government improve its bureaucracy.

Some 151 lawmakers from the European Parliament, led by Portuguese Green group member Rui Tavares, sent a public letter to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on Wednesday, calling on Oettinger to 'retract and recant his words, or resign.'

The signatories said the European Union could never stand for 'the symbolic humiliation of European nations, regardless of the administrative, budgetary, or other sins that their respective governments may have committed.'

Someone who supports such plans 'shows to have failed at understanding what the European ideal is about, and is unfit to be a European Commissioner,' they charged.

Eight German EU deputies - from the Green and the Left parties - signed up to the letter. None did from the conservative-liberal government coalition or from the opposition Social Democrats.

Oettinger's office released a statement late Tuesday insisting that the commissioner mentioned the flag idea but did not back it himself. The proposal was characterized as 'probably misleading.'

But the commissioner's spokeswoman Marlene Holzner, facing a barrage of questions at the EU commission's Wednesday news briefing, was unable to clarify who had put forward the idea that Oettinger was said to have simply publicized.

'It just came out in the conversation we had there at Bild,' she said. 'You know how discussions and conversations develop, people throw in ideas and then you say, 'yes, I have heard about it',' she told reporters.

European Commission spokesman Alejandro Ulzurrun added that 'it goes without saying' that the EU executive as a whole was not in favour of the plan.

In March, Oettinger was embroiled in another controversy when, in a speech to the EU parliament, he described the nuclear incident at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant as a 'disaster' and 'out of control.'

Pro-nuclear France attacked him for 'feeding the neurosis' about nuclear safety in Europe, while EU diplomats suggested that he was providing cover for Germany's dramatic policy u-turn to abandon nuclear power.

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