Beren wrote:British or whatever Euroscepticism hasn't started with Merkel and Brexit would have happened without Merkel as well most likely.
I just finished watching the BBC documentary 10 years in Turmoil(the 2 parts that are available). If you have a discerning eye for detail then you can clearly see in the documentary how Merkel made extremely stupid mistakes for no reason whatsoever, that is quite unlike Cameron, Papandreou and Tsipras who had to sell to their publics deals with grabbing headlines, Merkel on the other hand was stuck in astonishingly stupid details that noone in Germany I would assume cared about. Merkel was not fighting for political survival insisting on such minutia, she was fighting to humiliate the leaders of Greece, Italy and Spain. In part 1 one can clearly see how Cameron got the deal he wanted from the EU on restricting benefits for 7 years for EU migrants, a concession that can grab a lot of headlines, while Tsipras was arguing for 17 hours on whether the funds from the sale of Greek national assets can be invested in the country. Merkel said, "no, all the funds need to go to Germany", to achieve her no, she openly threatened to expel Greece from the EU. Matteo Renzi told her point blank: "Why are you so stupid?" to which she replied: "I am not stupid." Full stop. And after another 8 hours locked in a room with Tsipras and negotiating for the entire EU like a dictator she agreed on the "compromise" that Greece can invest 1/4 of the money she gets from selling Greek national assets into her own economy. These negotiations taking place with the Greek banks closed, having been ordered closed by the ECB at the instructions of the Eurogroup, that was headed by the Dutch Finance Minister and dominated by the German finance minister.
Wolfgang Schauble said: "Varoufakis spent half an hour explaining to us why we are stupid, well I do not appreciate that and so I left the room and told Merkel to throw Greece out of the EU". Schauble of course never bothered to explain how and why he thought Varoufakis was wrong, and the fact is he wasn't wrong. They
were stupid and they were sitting for hours discussing on whether the Greek government should be allowed to hire cleaners as workers or whether the Greek government should assign the job of cleaning the government buildings to a private company. Since Varoufakis would refuse to agree on the second, they closed the banks because they argued that the bailout had expired and without such agreement a new one could not be effected. So they closed the banks because of these cleaners and at the end of the day Varoufakis was actually correct, hiring them as workers would cost 1/4 of the money than having a private company taking over cleaning. 2 weeks later Merkel had invited all refugees to pick up their clothes and come to Germany, all just so we avoid these headlines and the press that would result from all these things coming to light. Suddenly noone cared about Greece, the cleaners & the banks being closed, all the talk in town was about Mama Merkel.
These were not the only mistakes she did during the crisis, when Obama told her that 60 billion firewall to save the EU is laughable and that the ESM should be about 1 trillion, she started crying in the room. "Obama was gobsmacked", Sarkozy said. He just could not believe the drama and stupidity of Merkel. The plan was dropped only to be agreed 2 years later.
But why did the Germans procrastinate in setting up the ESM, in agreeing the final amount, and made all these ridiculous proposals to which they insisted with polemic conviction that every single economist in the world laughed at? allowing years and months to pass without decision, enabling the financial markets to start fires in more than a 1/3 of eurozone countries?
EN EL ED EM ON
...take your common sense with you, and leave your prejudices behind...
- By wat0n
- By FiveofSwords
- By Rugoz