How Germany Prevailed in the Greek Bailout
“The belief that the euro can be used to bring about the economic ‘re-education’ of Europe’s south will prove a dangerous fallacy — and not just in Greece,” Joschka Fischer, a left-leaning former German foreign minister,wrote this week.
.. Meanwhile, Mr. Schäuble, Ms. Merkel’s finance minister, is a hard-nosed politician who was paralyzed from the chest down by an assassination attempt in 1990, and he is more popular in Germany (70 percent approval in a recent ARD-DeutschlandTrend poll) even than Ms. Merkel (67 percent).
.. “Mrs. Merkel has behaved in an incredibly modest way,” said Marcel Fratscher, president of the D.I.W. Berlin think tank. “You couldn’t find her saying a bad word about Greece or anything populist, and even though German public opinion was very strongly in favor of a Grexit and no bailout deal,” he said, using shorthand for a Greek exit from the eurozone, “they secured a deal with no Grexit.”