GERMAN CHANCELLOR Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partner has accused her of having been “bamboozled” by France over reform plans for the euro zone stability pact.
The so-called Deauville deal was dismissed as a “sham” by the German press yesterday and called into question by the Free Democrats (FDP), Dr Merkel’s junior coalition partner.
“The agreement left us gaping,” said FDP general secretary Christian Lindner. “Despite other progress, this compromise may be too soft to guarantee a hard euro.”
Ahead of the Deauville meeting, expectations were high in Germany that Dr Merkel would push through new rules to trigger sanctions automatically following future breaches of a reformed stability pact.
Dr Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a Free Democrat MEP, said Dr Merkel had been “bamboozled” and had misled the German people.
“She said Germany would give Greece billions but the stability pact would be tightened up in exchange,” she told Die Welt newspaper. “Merkel has broken that promise.”
Dr Merkel’s spin machine was working in top gear to sell the Deauville deal yesterday, describing the agreement reached with French president Nicolas Sarkozy as “huge progress” for greater euro zone stability.
“France is supporting us,” insisted a senior government source.
“There are more sanctions that kick in sooner, there are new [budget] observation measures and better rules on statistics. The alternative, the status quo, remains far behind this. Thus we believe an important step was taken.”
Yesterday a senior German finance official conceded that the proposed measures were only “more automatic” but insisted that, in Berlin’s written submissions on the matter in May, “the word ‘automatic’ never appeared”.
The German press was having none of it yesterday, pouring scorn on the deal as a sell-out to the French.
"Compared to the very generous German concessions the French concessions are merely rhetorical," said the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine.
“Until this week the German government wanted . . . to punish deficit sinners with general rules, independent of individual cases, and quasi-automatic,” it said. “Now the chancellor wants to know nothing of it.”
The Süddeutsche Zeitungsaid Germany's ambitions had been "watered down" by French negotiating skill.