With Obama, Cameron and the rest of the elite rabble (“the consensus” as the Economist grandly informed us) pressing German taxpayers to shut up, hurry up and pay up, the FT’s Gideon Rachman injects some sense into the discussion:

Consider just one of the proposals on the shopping list: a Europe-wide bank deposit insurance scheme. As a senior Dutch politician who shares the German view, puts it: “We cannot push through a banking union when the French have just cut their retirement age to 60 and we have raised ours to 67.” From the Dutch and German point of view, it is unfair for their citizens to underwrite the banks of countries using their own money to pay social benefits that are more generous than those on offer in Germany or the Netherlands.
This dilemma illustrates why a relatively technical-sounding exercise such as bank-deposit insurance has profound implications for national sovereignty. Once you take a big step towards the mutualisation of debt across Europe, you are forced towards much deeper political union. It is not just the much-discussed need for a European “minister of finance”, with the power to override national governments. To avoid bitter disputes over fairness, you would also need to harmonise European social-security systems. That would be the work of decades.
The Merkel government is not ruling out eurozone bonds or EU deposit insurance for ever. It is arguing that any such moves can come only as part of a bigger project – the formation of a political union. Anything else will feel like giving southern Europe a German credit card, without setting a credit limit.
It is hard to see how European politicians could achieve such profound reforms within weeks or months – as the Americans and others are urging. A recent Pew opinion poll showed strong majorities across Europe against ceding national sovereignty over budgetary matters to a central authority. The same poll showed that Ms Merkel was widely admired – not just in Germany but across Europe.
On this, the public shows more sense than the intellectuals who are lining up to give Berlin a kicking.

Quite.

While Ms Merkel’s handling of the crisis has not been faultless (whose has?), she has one huge achievement to her name. She has prevented the political extremes from gaining a foothold in the country.

Well, I suspect that there is much more (history, to start with) to it than that. Nevertheless, the fact that the German Chancellor has been seen to be acting as some sort of guardian, however feeble, of her country’s finances has undoubtedly played well at home. But the real test of Mrs. Merkel’s democratic bona fides has yet to come. Is she prepared to commit Germany to a fiscal union for which there is no genuine popular consent? If she is, Germany will not be much of a democracy. And not much of a country either.