How ironic that during the course of this whole financial meltdown in Europe recently, it is the Greek leaders who have consistently sounded sensible and realistic, and the German leaders who have been making disingenuous, misleading and downright foolish statements. Such as "there is no need to help Greece because they haven't asked for any help". Whereas the Greek finance minister Papaconstantinou recently had this to say:
One wishes that Europe had acted a little differently. Three and four months ago we were saying that the mechanism must be ready and it must be detailed, that the markets must know what exactly is going. Unfortunately, for a series of political reasons, we are down to the wire.
The awful truth. And by "a series of political reasons" he of course means Angela Merkel gambling on blocking aid in order to pander to the Bild demographic ahead of the big election in NRW next week. It's probably the single worst thing she's ever done. And the stupidest. It's hard to imagine Greece or Portugal having their membership in the euro suspended - even a suspicion of that would surely result in a run on their banks, for one thing - so if the current situation becomes unworkable, the only option will probably be to end the whole euro experiment completely.
Here's hoping the Union gets its arse kicked on May 9. Merkel certainly deserves it.
Update: It's good to finally see more and more pieces appearing in the German press highlighting Merkel's share of the blame. This one in Spiegel today is a typical example: "ausgerechnet Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel hat den einzig erfolgversprechenden Weg, die Milliardenhilfen zu vermeiden, blockiert."
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