Angela Merkel will get her fourth term as Germany’s chancellor. Members of the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, voted to get into government with her again. Yet neither the SPD nor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union are cheering the idea of four more years in power. Merkel may not be a ‘dead woman walking’, but she’s
Bankruptcy, wrote Ernest Hemingway, happens in two ways — ‘gradually and then suddenly’. By now, Angela Merkel will be beginning to fear that her remarkable career is about to move into that second motion. Barely a year ago, she was being talked about as the leader of the free world. Now she is blamed by
No leader is indispensable, but it does feel like the future of Europe stands or falls with Angela Merkel. She’s been the godmother of the European Union for almost 15 years, and other leaders have learnt to accept one unspoken rule: Merkel is the adjudicator. Her aura of supreme power infuriated Nicolas Sarkozy, who wanted
If the British Conservative party is feeling stunned, having calamitously misread the public mood in a general election, then it is in good company. Across Europe, right-wing parties are struggling to find messages that resonate. It’s not that voters have turned away from conservative ideas: polls show a huge number interested in individual liberty, lower
It sounds a bit odd these days but economics was actually invented by the Greeks. Back then, in ancient Greece, the ethos of economics was to keep the house in order and generally manage finances in a way that would make Wolfgang Schäuble blush with embarrassment for extravagant habits. Now economics is about to get
If the British Conservative party is feeling stunned, having calamitously misread the public mood in a general election, then it is in good company. Across Europe, right-wing parties are struggling to find messages that resonate. It’s not that voters have turned away from conservative ideas: polls show a huge number interested in individual liberty, lower
Most diplomats in Brussels will tell you that Theresa May has just embarked upon a fool’s errand, that Britain might wish for a free-trade deal with the European Union but will have to learn that it can’t cherry-pick. Anyway, they say, nothing of any value can be agreed in two years. This received wisdom can
Most diplomats in Brussels will tell you that Theresa May has just embarked upon a fool’s errand, that Britain might wish for a free-trade deal with the European Union but will have to learn that it can’t cherry-pick. Anyway, they say, nothing of any value can be agreed in two years. This received wisdom can
Donald Trump is not wasting any time on trade. Or is he? In his video message about what he’ll do on day one, he said he’d abandon Barack Obama’s plan to broker a 12-country free-trade agreement for the Pacific region, the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP). But that’s the thing with the Donald – it’s impossible to
I sometimes wonder if the EU has a death wish – that europhiles like myself, when admitted to the cause, are sworn into a secret society with the ultimate goal of destroying the European Project. For a decade or more, the EU has been veering from crisis to crisis – yet presented with an opportunity
Meet Boris Johnson, Britain’s new chief trade negotiator. I admit it is an effort to imagine Boris in that parish, haggling with dry regulators over technical barriers to trade like phytosanitary rules and mutual recognition of standards in nuclear engineering. Yet Boris has great aspirations for Britain’s future trade deals, and his gusto is certainly
European politics hardly needs more excitement, but that’s what in store after the crushing victory for the Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland’s general election. The party is not just pretty far off the European mainstream; its politics breathe what Adam Michnik, the legendary dissident, has called ‘a combination of an inferiority and superiority
The Greek referendum will change nothing. Greek voters already expressed their great dissatisfaction with the bailout packages when they elected Syriza to power in January. The proposition they were asked to vote about now does not exist – and the referendum was just a sham. The bailout agreement that Greece and its creditors battled over for
Veterans of Eurozone crisis summits, hoping for another nail-biting drama, had queued to get ringside seats. But yesterday’s meeting over Greece with Eurozone Finance Ministers ended without result. And you shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve been here many times before – Eurozone committees keep minutes but lose hours – and this was not a meeting during which decisions
There has been much interest in the European Central Bank making a new call on Greek government bonds, saying that ‘it is currently not possible to assume’ the bonds to be safe assets once the bailout programme expires. This is as you might expect: after all Yanis Varoufakis, the new Greek Finance Minister, has been
So Alexis Tsipras is Greece’s new Prime Minister. Syriza, the extreme-left party he leads, may end up (just) short of an overall majority. But it won a landslide today – and no one will stand in the way for making government policy of its party programme. This means we’re guaranteed turbulence ahead, both in Greek and Eurozone politics.
After Merkel’s decision to allow Eurozone funds to be used to bail out Spanish and Italian banks, the press tomorrow may declare – yet again – that some kind of breakthrough has been reached and that the Teutonic queen of austerity has been forced down from her throne. But, as ever with the Euro summits,
