German Establishment View On Tsipras/Troika Showdown
Der Spiegel has a long analysis today on the fate of Greece and the Tsipras/EU pas de deux. The tone toward Tsipras seemed secretly admiring while outwardly scornful and hostile. He comes off ultimately as the bad guy who is completely and solely to blame for the worsening crisis, with Merkel and EU bureaucrats portrayed as earnest leaders who badly miscalculated the situation and misread Tsipras.
Spigel simplistically summarized the views of the two sides:
From the Greek perspective, the EU, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the euro zone are all synonymous with poverty and exploitation. From the perspective of most European Union leaders, on the other hand, Greece is little more than a failed state governed by clientelism and nepotism, a country whose economy has little to offer aside from olive oil and beach bars.
Then it blamed the current Greek regime for exacerbating an already bad situation.
But relations between the Greek government and its partners in the 18 euro-zone capitals are deeply impaired. The Greek economy’s slide has dangerously accelerated under the new government and Brussels has lost almost all of its trust in Athens.
The Spiegel team went on to heap a litany of blame on the Tsipras regime.
Tsipras’s leftist-nationalist government has not done much for the economy. In the six months since the election, Greek parliament has done little to simplify the tax code as promised or to streamline the country’s bureaucracy. Furthermore, the man in charge of promoting international business relations in the Foreign Ministry is a cousin of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. But instead of boosting exports, he has primarily drawn attention to himself with his rhetoric of class struggle and his chastisements of Europe.
They apparently had little difficulty finding Tsipras critics within Greece.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
