Guy Verhofstadt today categorised the European Council's conclusions as  "a missed opportunity to produce an ambitious and far-reaching reform of Europe's economic governance and competitiveness strategy as EU leaders contented themselves with half measures that fail to live up to the challenges presented by the current crisis."
 
"Member States have failed to learn the lessons of the recent past and repeated the mistakes of the Lisbon Strategy that was high on expectation and low on enforcement."
 
"The Council has not understood the message of the Parliament, united behind a resolution on economic governance and one on Europe 2020. The European Parliament stressed the necessity for more Community method instead of intergovernmentalism and for more enforceable measures instead of the open coordination and peer review, which has been proven in the Lisbon Strategy not to work.?
 
The strategy approved by an overall majority of the Parliament is based on five pillars:

• a bolder Growth and Stability Pact;
• real economic governance with the European Commission in the driver's seat;
• accelerating sustainable growth based on the Monti report on completing the Internal Market and a European investment plan for infrastructure in central and southern Europe;
• new permanent instruments (European Monetary Fund and a Eurobondmarket) to be better prepared for future crises;
• a bolder Europe 2020 strategy with ?sticks and carrots?.

Guy Verhofstadt: ?Council has opted for a weak Europe 2020 strategy,more intergovernmentalism and nothing at all on sustainable growth. If the Council remains deaf to the Parliament, we might refuse to cooperate on some of their demands."
 
Lena Ek (Sweden, Centre Party) who led the negotiations for ALDE group on Parliament's resolutions on the 2020 Agenda added:
 
"Peer review and occasional monitoring will not be enough to effect the necessary policy changes in Member States if there are no genuine sanctions for non compliance. The bottom line is simply a lack of vision and political will to think and act collectively despite the very testing times in which we live."
 
"A focus on only five headline targets is a positive improvement on the Lisbon Strategy but unless it is clear how the targets can be enforced, they remain just empty aspirations."
 
The ALDE group does welcome the European Council's decision today to accept Iceland's application for membership, which coincides with a national holiday there on the anniversary of the country's full independence from the Danish Crown on 17th June 1944.