Austerity politics unpopular in France - who could have imagined?

Well, anybody who paid some attention to how destructive the current European austerity regime imposed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the middle of a depression has been.

The PBS Newshour reports on Sunday's French election in How Economic Austerity Is Driving Voter Discontent in Europe 04/23/2012:



I can't wait to see how our star pundits in the US explain the perverse European cultural strangeness that could lead to such a voter attitude. To our US pundits, Angienomics sounds like just plain Washington Beltway common sense. Angie's version is known as Ordnungsökonomik, which more or less mean "economics of order". Also known as "ordoliberalism" and "Freiburg School" economics. It's pretty much the same approach an earlier German Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, took in the Great Depression. It didn't really work out so well.

Jakob Augstein writes about Angie Brüning's policies in Speigel Online :

Die Deutschen glauben, Merkel habe Europa sicher durch die Krise gesteuert. Das Gegenteil ist wahr: Merkels Zögern hat aus einer lokalen eine kontinentale Krise gemacht. Die Deutschen haben an der Lehre vom unpolitischen Geld festgehalten und Europa in den Sumpf ihrer Ideologie gezogen.

[The Germans believe that Merkel has guided Europe securely through the crisis. That opposite is true: Merkel's dithering has made a local crisis into a Continental one. The Germans held fast to their teaching on unpolitical money and pulled Europe into the swamp of their ideology.]

Tags: eu, euro, european union, france

| +Save/Share | |