I do not think that is a new currency at all. It would be the equivalent to say that the Euros deposited at a bank are different from the Euros that have in your wallet. In fact these euros are more different than the ones that would be emitted as electronic since the banks are entitled to print their own money by lending more than they have in deposits. The Euro will be the Euro even if it is stored in a different way, there is no need to submit that to the 19 on those grounds. The initiative may however require a certain level of acquiescence from all the countries involved, but IMO not any constitutional changes.
Not that simple!There is a problem with issuing euros, the ECB does not issue coins, those are done by the CB, the roles are clearly defined so unless they will only print clear denominations of CBDC that match the current values they will not be able to do it lawfully. So,
- the ECB has no current legal way of doing so, it needs a status update in order to issue currency on their own
- national banks don't have this power either, and on top of that in some of the countries, it's clearly said that they can only issue a well-defined currency and in the case of the eurozone every currency that would be issued by the CB would become legal tender and everyone in the country would be forced to accept it for payment. Not going to happen! Take a look at Germany, they simply can't stop using cash, how are you going to make them use a digital currency when they didn't want to use a debit card?
It's not as simple as you think, this Union has a lot of treaties that hold it together, and because each joining country has ratified these if one of those is broken a lot more become invalid also. Given the current mess and constant infighting updating everything will not be done without a vote, nobody is going to risk another fragmentation on this.
If, however, it were necessary to amend the treaties, in principle this would have to be done through a new treaty, with the attendant difficulties linked to the need for unanimity and ratification processes in the Member States. Exceptionally, under a derogation in Article 129(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), the Statute of the ESCB and of the ECB can be amended using the legislative procedure. However, the derogation is restricted to a limited number of Statute articles, including Article 17 on opening accounts, and authorises only marginal amendments to the content of the articles. Making wholesale changes to the content of one of the articles covered by the derogation might, in particular, be viewed as circumventing the restrictive nature of this procedure.
and the legal tender part:
As the law stands, only banknotes issued by the Eurosystem (TFEU Article 128) and coins (Article 11 of Council Regulation EC/974/98) are legal tender in the euro area. Assuming that it was possible, given the constraints detailed above, to introduce a retail CBDC that was equivalent to a digital form of banknotes, under TFEU Article 128, it would automatically benefit from legal tender status.