Peak Irony in No-Exit Union: As Grexit Chaos Resurges, Lithuania Joins
On January 1, 2015, the Eurozone quietly welcomed a new member, Lithuania, to its fold. The former Soviet satellite became the 19th EU Member State to have joined the increasingly beleaguered currency union.
According to an opinion poll conducted by Berent Research Baltic on behalf of the Bank of Lithuania, 53% of the Lithuanian population support euro adoption. And who wouldn’t trust a central bank to conduct an honest and fair survey of public approval of something as insignificant as the adoption of a new currency?
One group that clearly didn’t was the eurosceptic Europeans United for Democracy (EUD) party which commissioned a poll of its own via Baltics Survey. The results could not have diverged more from the Bank of Lithuania’s poll, with only 26% of respondents approving of the government’s decision while 49% disapproved of it.
Who’s to say which is right? Or at least righter? In the end the point is moot since, in time-honored EU fashion, no public referendum was held on the matter. Instead the final decision was taken in parliament while the Supreme Administrative Court blocked any attempts to call a referendum. After all, one can never be too careful these days: voters might have voted NO, just as French, Dutch and Irish voters did in their respective referendums on the Nice Accord, to no avail.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
