Remarks by Paschal Donohoe following the Eurogroup meeting of 12 November 2025 21:55 Remarks by Eurogroup President Paschal Donohoe on macroeconomic situation, competitiveness,[...]

We started with an update on the macroeconomic situation from the Commission and the ECB. Uncertainty does remain high. But the latest figures continue to indicate the resilience of our economy, with better-than-expected economic growth in many parts of the euro area, and employment continuing to remain high.

A number of colleagues updated us on their ongoing budgetary negotiations, key measures, and challenges - a core part of our ongoing budget coordination. We will come back to these issues at our December meeting.

We then moved on to a broader and interesting discussion on euro area challenges in a global context. A year ago, we published our Eurogroup statement on competitiveness. But over the year, we see a world that continues to change at rapid pace.

A very wide-ranging discussion took place with an exchange of experiences on the concrete challenges that we are now confronting with respect to the different approaches to industrial policy of key global counterparts, with particular reference to China. The lack of a level playing field, and what this means in terms of policy options available to us at European and national level, were some of the key take-aways.

This led to a discussion regarding the value of the work we can do on policy priorities for the euro area, and how this can help navigate our way through this challenging area. We will return to that topic again very shortly.

We continued with a discussion on fiscal policy coordination, and the role that the Eurogroup can play there. This is a topic that we engage with every June and December. We are now working to find ways to strengthen this role and better address the short- and medium-term challenges that we're all aware of.

We then continued our meeting in Banking Union format including the regular hearing from the chair of the ECB Supervisory Board and an update on the work of the Single Supervisory Mechanism. We had excellent presentations from Claudia Buch and Dominique Laboureix with regard to this.

The reports overall were reassuring: the stress tests of this summer gave our banks a positive assessment, but we know that the competitiveness of European banks continues to be essential.

We want to uphold this with the right standards and high standards of financial stability, look at how we can implement simplification measures carefully and find ways to encourage our banks to invest in long term growth, particularly in the context of accelerating digitalisation. With the work that is now coming to a close on the crisis management framework, how we can continue to deliver this work is something that we will come back to again, beginning in our December meeting.

To finish, we moved into inclusive format for a discussion on the future of digital finance. We looked at all of the work that is underway now with regard to the digital euro. It has been some time since the Commission brought forward their proposal on this project.

We are committed under the Danish presidency to reaching a general approach on this legislation by the end of the year. We heard from the ECB and from President Lagarde about all of the work that is underway now to anticipate a successful conclusion of the legislative work on the digital euro, and then turn that legal agreement into an actual reality. A huge amount of work is underway now with regard to this.

We then continued our discussion on stablecoin developments happening elsewhere in the world and on the opportunity for the development of this sector within the euro area. We heard many views in relation to trade-offs between opportunity and risk. This is a subject that we are going to do further work on. We're going to launch a work stream on this topic. Both the Eurogroup and our deputies will be back to this issue very shortly.

We then dealt with two final matters. We were briefly informed about the forthcoming vacancy for the Vice President of the European Central Bank. The mandate for Vice President Luis de Guindos runs out in May, so the Council Secretariat took us through the various steps with regard to that.

Finally, we welcomed our new colleague, the finance minister of Lithuania, who gave us an update on his programme and that of the new government of Lithuania. We look forward to working with Minister Vaitiekūnas.