Merkel position is a real slap in the face

A lot of the political activity around restoring the euro’s sustainability has fallen into the one-step-forwards two-steps-backwards category.

Many eurozone citizens have been left bewildered and disappointed at almost endless indecision and the lack of cohesion. The high-wire hoopla has been so drawn out, so unsatisfactory, that all across the community people now feel that governments might betray them just as bankers and regulators did. It is increasingly hard to argue with that position. The glacial progress towards the kind of unified approach, the only response proportionate to the crisis, becomes more and more unnerving.

That the prevarication continues as tens of thousands of jobs are lost, services are cut, incomes fall faster than taxes and bills rise, as hardship becomes a draining reality for people who never contemplated the prospect, makes it even more difficult to be patient. The endless slide to God know where makes it difficult to keep faith in a system that simply is not working, a system that is unable to deliver on the social contract that has underpinned the western world since 1945.