STICHWORTE: • • • • • • • • •von

„Angela Merkel has made a mess of the European project – she has to go“

Ich finde bekanntlich den Blick aus dem Ausland auf das, was sich bei uns abspielt, immer wieder interessant. Vor allem die Engländer – ja, ich weiß, die sind prinzipiell gegen die EU und den Euro – sind sehr kritische Beobachter. Hier ein Kommentar zu Angela Merkels Politik. Er liest sich fast so wie meine Bilanz von 10 Jahren Merkel. Nicht positiv.

  • “(…) with catastrophic regional election results over the weekend, the writing is now on the wall for her Chancellorship. Lots will be written about what a terrible loss that will be. But in fact she has been a disaster for the European economy. She has allowed the euro crisis to drift dangerously on. She had presided over an alarming decline in Germany’s competitiveness. And she has permitted Britain to drift toward an exit from the EU, while encouraging mass immigration that the German economy simply can’t cope with.” – bto: Klarer geht es nicht.
  • “Among the political class, where hanging onto power and reaching compromises are valued above everything else, she has a reputation as a masterful politician. The trouble is, that is nonsense; she has weakened rather than strengthened the European economy.” – bto: Das stimmt leider definitiv.
  • “The euro has become the most dysfunctional monetary system ever created. There are two ways out of that. Either break it up into more natural zones, or return to national currencies. Or else make the kind of radical changes necessary for it to work better – such as a single fiscal policy and banking system. Merkel’s choice? Neither. She prefers to kick the can down the road and hope for the best.” – bto: was uns alle in ein finanzielles Desaster führt.
  • “Next, she has presided over an alarming decline of German competitiveness. True, the country exports a lot, but that is no measure of success. Germany has held down wages within the eurozone, and built up a massive trade surplus that appears to be growing out of control. This year it will be close on 9pc of gross domestic product. That doesn’t make ordinary Germans any richer, and it deflates demand across the rest of the world.” – bto: Siehe dazu auch meinen kleinen Beitrag zum Irrsinn der Doppel-Null. 
  • “She has exported deflation to the rest of the world, held down German wages, and created huge financial imbalances as that surplus gets recycled through the banks. Even worse, high energy costs imposed to keep the Greens happy, and a barrage of regulations, have made German firms less fundamentally competitive – and left them reliant on the ECB getting the exchange rate down to keep growing.” – bto: siehe auch: “10 Gründe, warum wir die Verlierer des Euro sind”.
  • “Finally, she has catastrophically mismanaged the EU and the refugee crisis. She has allowed the UK to drift dangerously close to Brexit, when a more meaningful renegotiation would have made the referendum easy to win.” – bto: Und gerade wir brauchen die Engländer!
  • “Meanwhile, her determination to throw open Germany’s borders to refugees looks a strategic blunder of epic proportions. Germany has taken about 1m new migrants in the past year alone, and perhaps many more. To put that in context, Britain welcomed about 700,000 Poles over a decade, and that had a huge impact on the economy. Even more seriously, the UK is actually pretty good at creating lots of low-skilled jobs for recent migrants. Britain’s labour-intensive service industries are great at hoovering up cheap labour. But Germany’s high-end manufacturing exporters? Not so much. It will take years, and a complete restructuring of the economy towards services, to find work for those people. If there is a plan for that, Merkel is keeping it to herself.“

“Her mixture of fudge and compromise, her pandering to special interest groups and her reluctance to take firm decisions,has left the European economy in a mess, and Germany facing a crisis. (…) Her successor, whoever that is, may not be another Adenauer. But they could hardly be worse than Merkel.” – bto: Naja, ich fürchte, da irrt der Telegraph …

→ The Telegraph: “Angela Merkel has made a mess of the European project – she has to go”, 14. März 2016