German parties offer first response to France's Macron on Europe

Berlin

GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) pledged on Friday to work closely with France to strengthen the eurozone, in their first substantive response to President Emmanuel Macron's ambitious EU reform proposals.

In a 28-page policy document agreed after all-night talks between the German parties, they backed the idea of an "investment budget" for the single-currency bloc and turning the ESM bailout mechanism into a full-blown European Monetary Fund under parliamentary control and anchored in EU law.