The EU Center-Right and Ultra-Right's Continuing War on the People of the EU

The euro is not "the foundation of prosperity and employment." For the periphery of Europe, the euro is the foundation of massive unemployment and the loss of their children through emigration as soon as they graduate from the university. By giving up a sovereign currency the nations of the eurozone have given up an essential requisite of national sovereignty. They have ceded monetary and fiscal policy to Berlin (which is addicted to austerity) and eliminated their ability to devalue their currency to respond to a severe financial crisis. Angela Merkel's monstrous lie -- "there is no alternative" (TINA) to austerity -- is the result of an insane system that systematically removes the normal, highly effective, alternatives to her quack cure that calls for bleeding the patient to make him recover. The IMF agrees that stimulus programs proved even more effective than economists had anticipated. (The great majority of economists in the United States believe that austerity in response to a recession is self-destructive.

The NYT remains blind to the crushing damage that the austerity regime has inflicted. The suffering of the peoples of the eurozone disappears from the NYT narrative.

"The [AfD's] delegation is tiny in an assembly with 751 members. But Mr. Henkel was part of a wave of discontent that delivered unprecedented power to euro-skeptic parties in Brussels, posing a political threat to the currency union even as euro zone leaders were dealing with financial and economic threats that nearly destroyed it."

As self-destructive as the euro and Berlin's austerity provisions have been, Henkel and Lucke's goal is to make things even worse.

"With echoes of the Tea Party in the United States, Mr. Henkel and a small army of other newly elected members want to curtail what they see as the overarching power of the European Union and abolish the euro, or at least expel members like Greece and Italy, which they regard as chronically irresponsible."

I personally think that Greece and Italy would gain in the long run if they left the euro, but leaving the euro would cause great suffering in the short term and being expelled from the euro with no chance for preparation would greatly magnify those harms. But Henkel does not want to help Greece and Italy -- he wants to punish them. Henkel and Lucke do not simply lack sympathy for the people of the periphery, they repeatedly attack them.