There’s good news and bad for Angela Merkel in the new polling data out of Germany. The good news for her is that her approval ratings are up substantially (to an impressive 63 percent), and it’s not so bad that part of this increase will have come from the collapse in support for her coalition partners (to two percent!), the (somewhat classical) liberal FDP. If an election were held tomorrow, the FDP would be highly unlikely to reach the 5 percent threshold it would need to get back into parliament. That makes it less likely to rock the coalition boat.

The bad news for Merkel is that the continuing increase in support for her is at least partly an expression of voters’ relief that their chancellor is taking a hard(er) line on bailing out the Eurozone’s casualties. And it’s bad news because sooner or later Merkel will, if the Eurozone is to survive in its present form, have to turn (one way or another) to the printing presses, and when she does (and she almost certainly will) that approval will turn to rage.

No fool, Merkel understands this perfectly well, which is which she is trying gimcrack scheme after gimcrack scheme as alternatives to the printing press moment, and she has not given up yet. That means that Eurogeddon is not going to end anytime soon.

And the longer it lasts, the worse it will get.