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Berliners say "when will these bailouts end?"
October 31, 2011
The message was unequivocal Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative coalition was in apparent harmony with the opposition last Thursday as the Bundestag voted overwhelmingly to expand the European Financial Stability Facility, raising its scope to €440 billion. Only the socialist Left party, and a handful of government backbench rebels, voted against the measure.
Outside the machinery of government, however, opinion is much less unanimous. A survey commissioned by public broadcaster ZDF last week showed that 75% of Germans rejected the idea of throwing more money into saving the Euro.
Merkel was also publicly criticized by her ex-mentor and arch-European Helmut Kohl, Germany's longest-serving post-war chancellor and architect of German reunification. He disagrees with her over policy on Europe, the United States and Libya, saying Berlin had "no view or idea" about where it was going.
On Berlin’s streets the mood is somber “I have a divided opinion” says Klaus B aged 36. “In general I was really in favour of the euro, however, other nations have a completely different mentality and different way of handling money and than us and this has crisis affected even the core working classes so much so that they can barely afford anything besides necessities”.
It’s not just other nation’s view that German taxpayers are tight-fisted and that Mrs Merkel is afraid of them. It’s hard to sell them the benefits of further bailouts when Ireland’s unemployed receive more benefits than their own and when the Italy, the main reason for the EFSF being enlarged, refuse to rise its retirement age to 67, a measure Germany introduced in 2007.
“If you want a real stability union, you can’t solve the problem of debt with still more debt,” says Hermann Otto Solms, a leading FDP member of the Bundestag. The bigger the bail-out, the weaker the incentive for countries like Italy and Greece to put their house in order”.
German and Berliners in particular, of which 5,000 protested at Alexanderplatz in support of the Occupy Wall street campaigners, see themselves as guarding democracy as well as the German treasury. In recent rulings the constitutional court has pushed the Bundestag to be more assertive when power or money is transferred to Europe. It’s not up to the Bundestag to solve the problem, Germans think, “Nein danke”, that’s the job of Italians and the Greeks on their own.
Berlin, 31st October 2011.
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