Angela Merkel’s lifeboat is looking increasingly leaky. Here is the Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with his latest take on the German chancellor’s difficulties in drumming up support for further Eurozone bailouts:
German media reported that the latest tally of votes in the Bundestag shows that 23 members from Mrs Merkel’s own coalition plan to vote against the package, including twelve of the 44 members of Bavaria’s Social Christians (CSU). This may force the Chancellor to rely on opposition votes, risking a government collapse…
A CSU document to be released on Monday flatly rebuts the latest accord between Chancellor Merkel and French president Nicholas Sarkozy, saying plans for an “economic government for eurozone states” are unacceptable. It demands treaty changes to let EMU states go bankrupt, and to eject them from the euro altogether for serial abuses. “
An unlimited transfer union and pooling of debts for any length of time would imply a shared financial government and decisively change the character of a European confederation of states,” said the draft, obtained by Der Spiegel.
True enough.
The director of the EFSF (the Eurozone’s bailout fund) has reportedly described all the German grumbling as “hysteria.”
Nope, it’s just democracy, and some long overdue commonsense.
Evans-Pritchard quotes from comments made by German president Christian Wulff last week to the effect that Europe’s headlong rush towards fiscal union strikes at the “very core” of democracy. “Decisions have to be made in parliament in a liberal democracy. That is where legitimacy lies.”
Well it ought to.