Published: Dec 16, 2016 3:04 a.m. ET
Market Watch
Germany is at the center of both austerity economics and the refugee crisis
By
DARRELL DELAMAIDE POLITICS COLUMNIST
Europe may well have reached its tipping point and could now decline at an accelerated pace.
On top of economic stagnation from obtusely misguided austerity policies, the fabric of the European Union has been frayed by Britain’s vote last summer to exit the bloc and by Italian voters’ rejection this month of an overly ambitious constitutional reform, leading to the fall of the government and a fragile political situation.
And now the EU seems intent on taking Greece to the whipping post once again and flaying it for having the audacity to grant a Christmas bonus to its impoverished pensioners in defiance of Brussels’ program to make the Greeks suffer, suffer, suffer.
But the biggest challenge to Europe remains the refugee crisis, and there, too, political leaders are failing spectacularly. The fall of Aleppo and the absence of Western intervention in Syria guarantees the flood of refugees will continue.
Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan — whose evolution into an authoritarian dictator puts him on a par with the dreaded Russian President Vladimir Putin — is now threatening to push thousands of Syrian refugees into Greece every day.
In the midst of all this, ironically, the European leader who is most to blame for these crises, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, is being hailed as the “liberal West’s last defender” as the U.S. embarks on a putative Dark Ages under Donald Trump.
To her credit, Merkel has the sense to reject this accolade as “grotesque, even almost absurd.” But her blinkered policies regarding immigration and the euro nonetheless are rending Europe apart.
Merkel’s decision last month to seek a fourth term as chancellor in next year’s national elections has been painted by mainstream media in the U.S. as the brave stance of the West’s last enlightened leader against the forces of darkness.
“Since the election in the United States,” correspondent Alison Smale opined at the time in a story the New York Times with a straight face carried as news, “speculation had mounted that Ms. Merkel would bow to pressure to run again and uphold liberal values in a world transformed by Mr. Trump’s victory and Britain’s vote last summer to leave the European Union.”
But the backlash against immigration has forced Merkel to uphold those liberal values a little less forcefully as her approval rating dipped to a five-year low of 45% in September. More than two-fifths of German voters favor a complete ban on Muslim immigration, but so far Merkel’s only action has been to suggest a ban on the full-face veil.
While Merkel and President Barack Obama formed a mutual admiration society, candidate Trump last year labeled Merkel’s open-door stance on immigration as “insane.”
Given the social unrest in Germany, the hundreds of sexual assaults attributed to immigrants, and the murder of a German EU official’s daughter by an immigrant, the decision to let in a million refugees does seem to fit the dictionary definition of insane as “utterly senseless.”
As a result, the upstart anti-immigrant party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), actually beat out Merkel’s Christian Democrats in a September vote in her home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and are surging as a significant political force nationally.
While it is Merkel’s policy on immigration that is roiling domestic politics in Germany, it is Berlin’s hardline stance on austerity that is shredding solidarity in the EU. The picture remains murky, but that should not obscure the overall downward trend.
In Spain, the upstart populist party Podemos lost momentum as voters, after two national elections in just over six months, reluctantly settled for a minority government under incumbent Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
In Italy, the rejection earlier this month of the constitutional referendum forced Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to resign, but Italian President Sergio Mattarella designated Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni as new prime minister and urged him to hold on until regularly scheduled elections in 2018. However, the antieuro Five Star Movement is agitating for early elections.
In France, the decision of President François Hollande not to seek re-election marked the complete abdication of the country’s left, and gave French voters a likely choice between the far-right conservative party candidate, François Fillon, and the extreme right National Front leader, Marine Le Pen.
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ anti-immigrant Party for Freedom may capture some 20% of the vote in national elections in March, which would make it the largest party in Parliament. Wilders’ conviction this month for “inciting discrimination” — a verdict that carried no penalties — seems to have only increased his popularity.
The eurozone’s decision to freeze debt-relief measures for Greece after last week’s announcement of the pension bonus may be the final push for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to call for a snap election early next year and let the opposition New Democratic Party, which is almost sure to win, deal with the debt mess.
To imagine that one national leader, under siege in her own country, can cope with all this is itself a little “insane.” It might be true that Merkel is the only leader of any stature left in Europe, but it seems highly unlikely that she can halt the decline she has played a major role in fomenting.
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