Des députés membres de la coalition qui soutient Merkel veulent qu’en cas d’insolvabilité d’un pays membre, ce soient les investisseurs, les porteurs de fonds d’état , qui paient automatiquement et non plus les contribuables. L’idée est que les marchés financiers doivent discipliner les Etats emprunteurs et que ceci ne peut être obtenu que si on fait payer les détenteurs de dettes publiques. 

« Members of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition are seeking to amend euro-region rules to ensure private investors bear the financial brunt of an insolvency by a member state of the currency union.

The lawmakers are pushing to tweak the rules for the euro area’s financial backstop to allow an arbitration court to mediate between debtors and creditors at the request of a cash-strapped country. Currently, those buying euro-region bonds can rely on taxpayer-funded bailouts to cover losses.

“We need to create a legal framework to clean up the debts of a country in cases like Greece,” Heribert Hirte, a law professor and CDU parliamentarian on the Bundestag’s European Affairs committee, said in an interview. “The process needs to be freed from purely political considerations.”

The initiative reflects German thinking that governments must be disciplined by financial markets and that orderly resolution procedures are needed in the case of an insolvency by a euro-area state. The euro region, having excluded the possibility that any of its members could default or leave the currency bloc, lacks provisions currently to deal with such eventualities.

Frustrated by the negotiations with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, some of Merkel’s lawmakers are raising pressure on the chancellor to fix what they view as the shortcomings in the euro region’s composition. They have an ally in Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who backs stricter rules, while also saying they can’t be implemented now as that would fuel uncertainty in financial markets.

In Hirte’s draft motion, a “resolvency court” would manage competing claims by creditors and ensure that the debtor can return to markets after a clean-up. The proposal would require clauses in new bond sales and other loan agreements that bind the parties to the court’s decision.

Any push for change would potentially put the euro region’s biggest creditor on a collision course with the European Commission and other member states. A report by the presidents of five European Union bodies on ways to deepen monetary union makes no mention of state insolvency procedures and instead calls for the long-term establishment of a common “fiscal stabilization function” to help countries with widening budget deficits.

A state insolvency regime “will neither end the crisis nor make the architecture of Europe sustainable for the coming decades,” Marcel Fratzscher, head of the DIW economic institute in Berlin, said in a statement. “The belief that one can reduce joint European liability and re-nationalize it is unrealistic.”

Germany’s Council of Economic Experts, which advises the government, disagrees. The group this week urged Merkel to learn from the conflict-ridden talks with Greece over economic reforms and austerity and throw her weight behind the creation of a sovereign insolvency mechanism in the euro area.

The new tool “should stand firm against any uncooperative, debt-stricken government,” the council said in a report on July 28. “This would reduce the chance that taxpayers would again have to take over the risks of sovereign bondholders when a state stumbles over its debt mountain.”

The Finance Ministry said in an e-mail that it welcomes the expert council’s report. Still, binding state insolvency rules face “considerable political and legal hurdles” and are difficult to achieve at present, it said. That’s because even if the Bundestag passes a resolution calling for the change, the German government would then have to convince all the other 18 euro members to go along with the proposal.

Yet there’s a growing push among the 60 Merkel lawmakers who earlier this month voted against providing more aid to Greece. Carsten Linnemann, chairman of the CDU’s small businesses association and one of the dissenters, said he’ll continue to refuse assistance for the country as long as no insolvency regime has been put in place.

“If a country — such as Greece — continually violates the rules in the euro area, then you need a set of rules in the euro zone to manage the debt,” Klaus-Peter Willsch, one of the bailout critics in the chancellor’s bloc, said in an interview. “The point is to create a mechanism in which private creditors will get pulled in automatically.”