Eurozone leaders agreed to make dramatic changes to the way the single currency works on July 21. And then an anticlimax. Job done, the leaders thought, and they and their national parliaments went on holiday, ready to pass the changes into law when they got back, probably sometime in September.

Although lawmaking stopped, the usual bickering between politicians continued.

Of course, the financial markets panicked. And once again, eurozone leaders have responded by arguing about whether or not they should hold another meeting.

The fiasco is proving to the world that if the common currency is going to survive, euro nations will need to give up many of their powers to one leader. Not a committee that takes weeks to take action, but a strong individual who can act quickly.

The global economy suffered “as markets panicked that no single leader or central bank appeared to be taking charge of the response to the turmoil,” wrote Britain’s Independent.

Former European Commission President Romano Prodi warned that the eurozone has a “problem of power.”

“We don’t know who is in charge,” Prodi said.

The Spanish La Vanguardia wrote that on August 4, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet raised “a fundamental problem: The governance of the euro requires a political and institutional system that is more agile and more effective.”

Reuters reports, “Many EU officials say the crisis has been exacerbated by a leadership vacuum, partly due to the lackluster performance of Eurogroup chairman Jean-Claude Juncker, the veteran Luxembourg prime minister who has been an EU deal-broker for two decades.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is pushing to give European Council President Herman Van Rompuy more power over the eurozone, according to Le Monde. Reuters cites two senior EU sources saying that the cacophony of multiple voices that undermines market confidence in the eurozone must be stopped. “There has to be one voice,” it quotes a senior official as saying.

If this happened, “it would take a lot of power from the Eurogroup of ministers,” one of its sources said.

It would take a lot of power from national parliaments too. For the new agreement to go into effect, it must be ratified by all eurozone members. One of the parties in Slovakia’s ruling coalition has promised to derail it. On August 8, parliamentary speaker and head of the Freedom and Solidarity party Richard Sulik said, “We will do everything we can in order for the parliament not to approve it.” Without Sulik’s support, Slovakia’s main political party would require the help of the opposition party, which has been fiercely critical of the government.

For the eurozone to become the agile and effective union Trichet wants, it will have to prevent national parliaments from getting in the way of its reforms. Even if the parliaments don’t block the reforms, they slow the decision-making process down further.

Eurozone leaders take an inordinate length of time to decide on reforms. Then it requires another lengthy period before those reforms are approved by national parliaments.

But more than a quick decision-maker, they need a visionary leader. Across Europe, people have been crying out for real leadership.

On August 6, the Express, a British tabloid paper, decried Europe’s leaders as “political and economic pigmies, every one of them—a devastating mix of the corrupt, incompetent and laughing stock.” The same day, Britain’s Independent had an article with the headline “Europe cries out for leadership as global share sell-off continues”; the Telegraph had another headlined, “In this grave crisis, the world’s leaders are terrifyingly out of their depth.” The next day, the Guardian headlined one of its articles, “The cry for leadership goes out—and no one answers.”

It’s not just the British papers saying this. Italian economist Alberto Alesina wrote in the Corriere della Sera: “[T]he Western political class … will go down in history as one of the worst since the Second World War.”

“Give us back De Gasperi, Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton, Blair and Kohl before it’s too late,” he wrote.

“We have often written about how Germany is waiting for a strongman,” wrote Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry in his latest article. “But these events show that all of Europe is waiting for some kind of a strongman to make this system work. They must have somebody with real authority.”

This has become even more obvious since the July 21 meeting. Watch for this strong leader to appear in Europe.