by SAHRA WAGENKNECH
German Chancellor Angela Merkel with US President Barack Obama PHOTO/Spiegel Online International
Syriza’s electoral victory is a historic opportunity for the whole of Europe. The Greek voters voted for an end to the catastrophic policy of cuts dictated to Greece by the Troika composed of the EU Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB). This election is therefore also a defeat for Angela Merkel. No other head of state in Europe is more rightly and strongly connected to the hated reduction of wages, pensions, and social spending on the model of Agenda 2010. Anyone who does not abide by Merkel’s diktats gets no “emergency loans” and thrown to the financial markets to be devoured. The austerity policy was claimed to reduce the national debt. It has miserably failed to do so. Instead, it only produced an army of millions of unemployed, a gigantic economic meltdown, and an unprecedented flood of money from the ECB. Thus Merkel also created a money pit for the taxpayers in Germany. Greece could have defaulted on its debt as early as 2010. Nevertheless, Merkel, with the support of the SPD and the Greens, made sure that the banks, hedge funds, and private creditors got their money back through new public loans. Merkel should resign just for this misappropriation of public funds alone. Yet till now everything was hunky-dory for the Chancellor despite the catastrophic consequences. Only with the change of government in Athens her aura as a power machine developed a crack.
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