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Eurozone crisis sees Franco-German axis crumbling

 

 

Ian Traynor in Brussels 

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 May 2013 

 

Poll results underline the sense of estrangement between Paris and Berlin as the two countries' economic prospects diverge

When it comes to grim reading about the current European condition, it does not rain but it pours.

The latest catalogue of unremitting gloom (unless you're a German) comes in a 49-page survey of public opinion in eight EU countries conducted in March by Pew pollsters.

The results show support for the EU has shrunk from 60 to 45% in a year on average across the eight countries.

The more detailed findings are that public support for EU integration has eroded strongly, with Germans alone in favour of handing more powers to Brussels to tackle the four-year economic and financial crisis that is severely sapping EU confidence and reinforcing the sense of inexorable medium-term decline.

"Positive views of the EU are at or near their low point in most of the countries surveyed, even among the young," said the pollsters, who talked to nearly 8,000 people.

It is striking how the policy responses of EU leaders to the currency crisis are at such odds with public opinion, as centrifugal political action clashes with centripetal national moods.

The crisis management of the past three years has essentially seen Berlin, Brussels, and others resort to technocratic fixes in an incremental process of pooling economic and fiscal policy powers in the eurozone.

Outside of Germany, however, public support for surrendering such powers from the national level to Brussels, as is happening, is declining rapidly, generating an ever widening "democratic deficit" in the EU that the leaders regularly bemoan but have done nothing to address.

In a big speech on Europe last month, the leading German political thinker, Jürgen Habermas, diagnosed the elite policy responses to the crisis and concluded that "postponing democracy is always dangerous."

Pew's findings dovetail with Eurobarometer poll results revealed last month in the Guardian that showed a collapse in public support for the EU in the union's six biggest countries, making up two-thirds of the half-billion population.

The survey results are particularly spectacular for France, reinforcing the sense of drift a year into the term of President Francois Hollande and underlining the estrangement between Paris and Berlin.

"The prolonged economic crisis is separating the French from the Germans – threatening the Franco-German axis that has long driven European integration. And it has separated the Germans from everyone else.

"No European country is becoming more dispirited and disillusioned faster than France. French public opinion has soured on a number of measures in the last year … Even more dramatically, French public opinion on a range of issues is now looking less like that in Germany and more like that in Spain, Italy and Greece ... The French are also beginning to doubt their commitment to the European project, with 77% believing European economic integration has made things worse for France, an increase of 14 points."

Pretty much the only optimism evident in the survey is in Germany, leading the pollsters to conclude that the Germans are living "on a different continent".

This acute divergence in perception on how the crisis has affected Europe, say officials and diplomats closely involved in the crisis management, makes things much more difficult to fix because the cultural and psychological realities in the different countries are so varied.

"Overall, the 2013 survey highlights more starkly than ever the differences between the views of Germans and other Europeans on a range of issues."
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