2013-03-11

German Elite Turn on the Euro

Germany's New Anti-Euro Party
Named Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), the group has a clear goal: "the dissolution of the euro in favor of national currencies or smaller currency unions." The party also demands an end to aid payments and the dismantling of the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund.

"Democracy is eroding," reads a statement on its website (German only). "The will of the people regarding (decisions relating to the euro) is never queried and is not represented in parliament. The government is depriving voters of a voice through disinformation, is pressuring constitutional organs, like parliament and the Constitutional Court, and is making far-reaching decisions in committees that have no democratic legitimacy."

...Alternative for Germany appears to be different, though it has yet to produce a party manifesto. Its impressive list of prominent supporters includes a large number of conservative and economically liberal university professors. The most notable name on the list is Hans-Olaf Henkel, the former president of the Federation of German Industries, but it also includes such economists as Joachim Starbatty and Wilhelm Hankel, who were part of the group that challenged Greek bailout aid at Germany's Constitutional Court.

Main initiator Bernd Lucke, a professor of macro-economics from Hamburg, was a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats for 33 years before leaving the party in 2011 as a result of euro bailout efforts. "The current, so-called rescue policies are exclusively focused on short-term interests, primarily those of the banks," Lucke told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week.

Alternative for Germany has not yet formally become a political party, though it reportedly plans to do so in the middle of April. Even then, however, it is not yet certain that the party will be able to collect the requisite number of signatures in time to be included on the ballot in general elections this autumn -- a minimum of 2,000 in each of Germany's 16 states or 0.1 percent of each state's population, whichever is lower. "We will make that decision based on the support we receive," Lucke told the FAZ. "But we have been overwhelmed by the public's reaction thus far."
Even though they may never win a single seat, it is the list of supporters that makes this an important development. I would be surprised if they were unable to collect the requisite number of signatures, as it is simply a matter of logistics, but incompetence and politics are not strange bedfellows.

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