Germany and EU resist push of right wing and nationalists to weaken the EU and Euro.

[pampango]

The Euro is still with us. Indeed the Euro zone has expanded through the entry of little Estonia. While other EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe may not adopt the Euro as quickly as they anticipated prior to the current crisis, they have not renounced their goal of doing so. Meanwhile, through the creation of a bailout mechanism for the Euro zone and the adoption of an accord designed to ensure greater budgetary discipline among member governments, the Euro zone has begun to edge towards a higher degree of economic policy integration.

The same judgment can be made for the EU as a whole. None of the existing member states has left. Several states – including Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey – are still queuing to join. Indeed, with the recent addition of the global financial crisis victim, Iceland, the queue has actually become a little bit longer. The apparent robustness of the Euro and the EU confounds the expectations of the media pundits who, as last year’s crisis unfolded, predicted the collapse of the single currency if not of the entire European integration project.

Merkel’s government can still conduct a European policy based on these precepts because, unlike in many other EU member states, Germany has not yet seen the rise of an extreme right-wing or national-populist political party that threatens to take critical votes away from the mainstream parties and deprive them of their capacity to win elections. Rather, the main German opposition parties, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, are more pro-European than the governing Christian Democrats and Liberals, attacking Merkel and her government for not doing enough or not acting fast enough to tackle the crisis of the Euro rather than for being too “pro-European”.

As so often in the EU’s history, Germany can realistically look only to France for support. In France, however, with presidential elections less than a year away, the shadow of the far-right Front National looms ever larger over the political landscape and charges arising from events that are alleged to have taken place in a New York hotel room have almost certainly destroyed the political career of the IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who, of all the conceivable candidates for the presidency, was at once the best-placed to win and the one with the strongest pro-European credentials.

http://www.bi-me.com/main.php?id=52931&t=1&c=62&cg=4&mset=

[xchrom]

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