Posted on 07/03/2015 6:12:43 AM PDT by canuck_conservative
... The German chancellor’s disapproval helped end the political careers of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Greek leader George Papandreou.
After burning through whatever goodwill he had with Merkel’s lawmakers and the German public, the current Greek premier could be next....
“We are watching the end of the political career of Alexis Tsipras,” Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Peterson Institute in Washington, said in a Bloomberg Radio interview. “Mr. Tsipras can continue his career on T-shirts for students, replacing Che Guevara.”...
Refusing to play ball with Germany didn’t turn out well for Berlusconi, whose premiership had survived innumerable court cases and a tawdry sex scandal. A senior lawmaker from Merkel’s Christian Democrats spoke for her party when he urged Berlusconi to resign in November 2011 to allow Italy to fix its economy. A few days later he did just that....
Papandreou learned a similar lesson the same year. When he called a bailout referendum, Merkel insisted to him that the question focus on remaining in the euro — as Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble recounted Wednesday in German parliament. The ensuing turmoil in Greece, and within his own socialist party, forced Papandreou to resign and the vote was scrapped...
A “no” vote could propel the country out of the euro, an outcome that opinion polls show most Greeks want to avoid. Tsipras says that result would strengthen his leverage and yield a better bailout deal.
A win for the “yes” camp, backed by Greece’s main opposition parties and the rest of the euro-area leaders, would constitute a public rebuke of Tsipras....
(Excerpt) Read more at business.financialpost.com ...
Don't mess with Mutti!
Tsipras will be forced out and the EMU will agree to a new funding mechanism for Greece. That of course will kick the can again and only delay the inevitable, but Tsipras will be gone and Europe will be satisfied with that for now.
First, in the case of Merkel....you aren’t dealing with the typical average political hack. She’s a scientist by trade, and she calculates the dynamics to a position, and changes as information or evidence presents itself.
Look over nuke power in Germany. The commercial companies felt a decade that they had the upper hand and full-support of Merkel. After the Japan episode...Merkel gracefully changed the whole dynamic and nuke power is coming to an end within the next decade. There’s absolute shock at the skillful handling by the gov’t over the issue.
Go look over financial matters in Germany. You won’t find them in any disorder.
Go look at incompetent ministers within the cabinet. Any hint of a problem...you go. You need to keep your act clean or face termination. Trust is an absolute must within the Merkel government.
Greece has played out a marginal game of poker and never had anything to negotiate with or get a better deal with. Merkel knew that. Greece wasted a fair amount of the last six years.....thinking they could pretend to do the cuts and pretend to renovate the pension program. Well...Greece wasted six whole years. Merkel knows this.
The curious thing is that Merkel isn’t a big speech-maker...nor does she hog TV time or do weekly interviews. What she says in an entire week in terms of being important...could fit on a 3x5 card. If you ask her a big question over some issue....there isn’t some 888-word answer...it’ll be six lines max.
A lot of hubris there as the Chinese or the Russians will be all to willing to step in and establish relations.
Much more will happen over this than kicking Greece to the curb. Legal action, EU style will be brought to bear upon them and the EU leaders will consider some type of pusch.
There’s a whole string of Islands off the Turkish coast that I’m sure Turkey would like to own.
I wonder what immigration is like into Greece and whether the EU will force them to take in more muslims.
The Germans bet big on solar. Epic fail.
I’d say in my village of 1,000 homes...ten-percent have solar hooked up. It really went downward after the gov’t said they wouldn’t grant any more tax credits on the deal. What folks figured in the very beginning was that the tax incentive would create a wave, and there would be a stopping point. Well...yeah, there certainly was a stopping point.
Wind energy is starting to hit a problem point now in Germany too. Lot of folks have put up a fuss over landscape issues and saying it’s not right to put the windmills up on hillsides (the only place where you might get a good wind). So they are fighting off new windmill installation via the courts on this deal. Sadly, if you were going to invest in windmills...you have to find a place where you actually have a wind. The landscape dummies are making a joke out of the whole thing now.
With current technology, solar isn’t really viable in mid-northern European climates. In the Middle East, it is becoming more worthwhile - and most MENA countries are looking at it closely.
Anyway, I don’t mean to rip Merkel... I mean, look what passes for leadership here in the US... yikes...
Margaret Thatcher said that socialist countries eventually collapse because sooner or later they run out of other people’s money, and she wisely kept Britain out of Europe as much as possible.
On the other hand, for most of the past decade Angela Merkel has foolishly forced the taxpaying citizens of Europe to provide the other people’s money to keep the doomed socialist country of Greece from its inevitable collapse.
Did Angela Merkel think she was being kind by ‘’helping’’ Greece stay afloat? Hitler killed Europeans with guns and death camps; Angela Merkel has been killing them with kindness. It’s time for Greece to go its own way.
You got that right. Merkel absolutely loathed Berlusconi...
She’s still Obama’s bitch.
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