German Party Likes Greek Euro Exit
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A new German anti-euro party says that the currency is to blame for Europe’s unemployment woes and that Spain and Greece should quit the euro as a way to return to economic health, even though Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said he has the country on the road to recovery and that it should stay in the Eurozone.
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A new German anti-euro party says that the currency is to blame for Europe’s unemployment woes and that Spain and Greece should quit the euro as a way to return to economic health, even though Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said he has the country on the road to recovery and that it should stay in the Eurozone.
Southern European countries can’t cope with the competitive pressure exerted by the euro and are suffering because they can’t devalue the 17-nation single currency, Bernd Lucke, the Alternative for Germany party’s leader, said May 16 in a Bloomberg Television interview in Berlin.
“Greece should be the first country to exit the euro along with small countries like Cyprus and Slovenia,” Lucke said. “I would propose that Germany stays in the euro, that a return to a national currency in Germany might at best be the end of the process” of dissolving the currency area.
Four months to the day before German federal elections, Lucke’s unorthodox message risks undermining German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bid for a third term. While polls suggest broad public backing for the euro and for the chancellor’s “step by step” approach to tackling the debt crisis, they also show voter patience has run out with Germany’s role as the biggest contributor to euro-area bailouts since aid for Greece was first agreed three years ago.
The AfD, as the party is known in German, has attracted more than 10,000 members since it was founded a month ago and is polling 2 percent to 3.5 percent support. While that’s below the 5 percent threshold to win seats in parliament, the party may yet sap “vital support” from Merkel’s coalition in the Sept. 22 election, political analyst Jan F. Kallmorgen said in a May 2 Bloomberg View article.
Lucke, 50, an economics professor at Hamburg University who was a member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union for 33 years, rejects that he is putting her coalition at risk. The AfD draws support “from basically everywhere in the population, from people who are more on the conservative side as well as from people from the Social Democratic or the Green parties,” he said.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, in a May 21 interview with Bayerisches Fernsehen television, said an SPD-led coalition with the Greens and supported by the Left party would do the opposite of what AfD voters want and accused the party of “lying” about the prospects of ejecting euro members.
“The German voter can’t decide whether others leave the euro,” Schaeuble said. “These people only want to destroy; they have no answers for ways to make things better.”
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