The German hazard returns | Economy | EUROtoday

The German hazard returns. The one from the thirties? Perhaps one much like that of the Great Recession, the design that the much-missed Ulrich Beck reviled in “A German Europe” (Paidós, Barcelona, ​​2012). Do you remember? He was referring to when “crises invite the accumulation of power”: at that economic-financial moment, although “in certain circumstances they can cause its fall.”

The German danger today is that the locomotive country of the EU activates the attenuated embers of always latent Prussianism. Namely, selfish nationalism in economic policy, instead of Europeanism. Now, combined with a searing Atlanticism of Europeanism in foreign policy and defense, key not only for political geostrategy, but also for geoeconomic one.

A year ago we welcomed the (still future) Chancellor Friedrich Merz with great European hopes. He promised to abandon the austeritarianism of the liberals who poisoned his social democratic predecessor, Olaf Scholz. It would remove the idiotic constitutional “brake” on home debt, which constrained the continental energy to infrastructural distress and macroeconomic stagnation. It would make investments half a billion euros in a decade – a lot of it in inexperienced trade -, launch navy funding and permit the Länder to enter debt.

Bravo. But that was, after all, a correct national sign, rather than a pan-European one; And furthermore, it is going so slowly that it barely raises the dead of the German economy. True: error of those of us who guessed a walkway between both poles. Everything had a narrow focus, vitaminizing the domestic economy. What was already convenient was a minimum “tractor” element of the eurozone.

From that ground he never rose to any roof. The former investment banker, who considered Angela Merkel red, rejected the EU’s budgetary expansion to finance new strategic needs: “there is no basis to increase the multiannual Financial Framework in relation to GDP,” he maintained in a paper official (June 2025).

He additionally swore to finish the banking union with the all the time pending group Deposit Guarantee Fund, for there being “no reason [¿?] to group systems of responsibility that [ya] “They operate at the level of the States” (July 3). And he refused to relaunch the joint debt in Eurobonds as a painless method to finance large long-term projects: the new proposals are launched by the ECB and Spain in the Eurogroup.

Perhaps the most bloody thing is his unbridled Atlanticism—despite specific counterpoints, such as his criticism yesterday of the softening of sanctions on Russia by the United States—, genuflecting in the face of Donald Trump’s tariff aggression, and endorsing his aggressiveness against a solid partner, Spain.

Treason with monetary transaction. They dazzle him and he will buy the F-35s whose use depends, on each journey, on the crazy owner of the Pentagon giving him the ok each time. Strategic autonomy? It cannot agree with France on the momentous investment in the European fighter aircraft, the FCAS, and its technological cloud. He promises to build “the most powerful army in Europe”, oh, oh, oh, it is Prussia. And then he’s not even capable of ship a ship to Cyprus to guard it with toy pellets. European Germany? Ha, however with an accent.