Francois Hollande has said that if he wins the election he will renegotiate The Frau’s idiotic financial stability pact which wants to outlaw deficits and make this a golden rule! (Like the gold standard, ehem ahah?) Quite unsurprisingly this prospect has gained a lot of support in the EU because it would mean some sense returning to Europe. Perhaps.
Also unsurprisingly, The Frau stamped her angry little foot down. No! She shrieked. No! You cannot get rid of my baby! No the pact will not be renegotiated! It has already been negotiated and agreed to! 25 member states have already signed it. (The two heroes who thumbed their noses at it, quite rightly, were the Czechs and the British). And two countries, Portugal and Greece, have already ratified it! A third, Ireland, will be ratifying it at the end of next month! (Of course that remains to be seen.)
The Frau has a very good point. Though we mustn’t make too much of Portugal and Greece ratifying it. These two countries are being kicked around and bullied and threatened with instant oblivion if they don’t comply. Not that that excuses their governors from signing their countries death warrants, but still. But why on earth did all these other leaders docilely and subserviently sign a fiscal pact they knew would never work?
Why did they not confront her in the meetings and tell her, you can’t just isolate deficits and decree by law that they should be abolished. You can’t legislate the deficit away without placing restrictions on surpluses too. And above all if you have no provision for growth, the economy will die off. As it is doing in Greece today. It simply is a nonsense pact. Why was there no one there with the stature to lead an effective opposition to The Frau’s authoritarian and uneconomic bent?
They all knew it was a pack (or a pact) of nonsense. All of them. Yet there they were, in a picture that will remain their collective shame till the day they die (and beyond because this is History), smiling and passing round the death trap to sign. One after the other, signing on the dotted line, simply because The Frau had decreed it and her sidekick backed her up all the way. So her fury and intransigence are perfectly understandable now. You bloody well all signed up! Stick to it now!
But though she is quite right about that, it doesn’t work that way. Nothing seems to work the way she’d like it. And nothing can be set in stone. Like the brainwave bit of everyone putting the so called ‘golden rule’ into their constitutions. Just as she seems to be unaware how economies work, so she appears to be equally unaware how power politics works. It isn’t always in your favour. No matter how strong you are. Even the strongest has a weak point.
She is going to have to give, even though I do sympathise with her outrage. But my dear, the lily livered obsequious nonentities you can bully so easily are always the ones to betray you at the first chance. You cannot govern for long or successfully by bullying and threatening. You only build up resentment and hate. Which hits back even more viciously when given half the chance.
And besides, I am really sorry to say, but your baby was stillborn. Didn’t you even realise that, when it was The Netherlands, of all countries, to buckle under?
So for all her justified moral outrage, she will have to renegotiate. It’s not enough being the strongest. Even the little pip squeak could upset the apple cart (by chance perhaps, in a botched election perhaps?) and bring the whole edifice crashing down, and that would not be good for anyone. A true consensus and a workable one has to be reached. Which is why she will have to back down. Otherwise the whole EU project is in danger of collapsing completely. With all that that would entail.
And as the Spanish Minister rightly said. When the Titanic sank, the first class passengers drowned too.