Merkel’s sovereign remedy

‘Europe is speaking German now,’ said Volker Kauder, parliamentary chairman of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, about a year ago. He was urging Britain to back Merkel’s plans for saving Europe’s rickety banks and state budgets. Last week, the Chancellor herself arrived in London to dine with David Cameron and deliver the message in person.

Cameron is in a tricky spot. The summit to determine the EU budget for the next seven years will be held on 22 November. A coalition of opportunistic Labour MPs and dug-in Tory rebels has just passed a non-binding amendment in parliament urging that the government accept nothing less than a cut in real EU spending. Cameron has tried to win himself a bit of wiggle room. ‘If there isn’t a deal that’s good for Britain,’ he has said, ‘there won’t be a deal.’ But Merkel wants to pin him down. ‘One can be happy on an island,’ she said at the European parliament in Brussels before she arrived in London, ‘but in this world they can’t be happy on their own any more.’

For Tories, a productive relationship with Europe’s leaders has always seemed to depend on breaking parliament’s attachment to its ancient sovereignty. If you are being told to throw away the most precious treasure you have, you are either reading the gospels or being played for a fool. Merkel, as it happens, is in a similar fix. She faces her own rebellion in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house, where Eurosceptic Christian Democrat renegades, two dozen and growing, have deprived her of partisan majorities on votes involving the euro bailout. Few of them object to Europe in principle. It’s just that there have been too many bailout votes, and Germany’s liabilities now stretch into the hundreds of billions. The German high court insists that funds can be appropriated to bail out foreigners only by a vote of the Bundestag.