Podcast: In The Room
Georges Heinrich: "Trust was thin on the ground"
© Banque Raiffeisen, by Christian Wilmes 2023
As the right-hand man to Jean-Claude Juncker - the chairman of the Eurogroup from 2005-13 - and vice president of the Euro Working Group (EWG) from 2011-14, Georges Heinrich found himself in the eye of the euro's financial storm in his late-30s.
"Eventually, the right decisions were taken. Solidarity did prevail. Everybody chipped in,” he says. “But we had very, very long discussions on how to split the bill or whether to do a runner and leave one or two guys at the table who aren't so fit and who will then have to answer to the police or wash up the dishes".
During a short hiatus between the EWG presidencies of Vittorio Grilli and Thomas Wieser in late 2011, he chaired and - much to his and everyone else’s surprise - concluded negotiations to tighten the euro area's budgetary rules. Although this "fiscal compact"- which embedded existing rules in national legislation - was his personal legacy, Heinrich is an embarrassed father. "Miraculously, apparently if something is explicitly approved by a national parliament, it is more credible than something which is in the Treaty of the European Union ... The logic of the whole thing just escapes me ... If we need to resort to gimmicks like that in order to make those rules that we had back then credible, I mean, the whole mechanism to me is already incredible ... [It's] a framework for fine-weather monitoring of public finances but it is not a framework that is appropriate for enforcement of fiscal discipline".
Educated in economics at Namur, Glasgow and Heriot-Watt universities, Georges Heinrich joined Luxembourg's finance ministry in 2001, quickly became Juncker's Eurogroup liaison, and assumed the directorship of the Treasury from 2009 until 2014 when he resigned to work at Banque de Luxembourg. In March 2023, he joined the management board of Banque Raiffeisen.
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In The Room is a series of conversations with officials who played crucial (behind the scenes) roles in the history of the EU.
Edited and produced by davidstudio.