PARIS | Le Monde, via Presseurop.eu | In granting extra time to Madrid and Paris to clean up their public accounts, Brussels has shown good sense. This is in contrast to the rigid position it had adopted until now, which dragged the EU executive into a fool’s game with wayward member states.
MADRID | By JP Marín Arrese | Those longing for a growth strategy to invigorate their ailing economies delude themselves in thinking that Ms Merkel might prove to be more tractable once she is re-elected.
MADRID | By Antonio Sánchez-Gijón at CapitalMadrid | On May 9 the European Union will deliver Charlemagne Prize to Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite. The idea is not to reward her as a former EC Commissioner, but as the person who embodies the success of three small countries of Northern Europe out of their deep economic crisis in two years. While the populations of the Mediterranean Europe and France are raised in arms against austerity policies imposed from Brussels and Frankfurt to exit the stagnation and save the euro, two European Baltic nations are looking forward to joining the common currency.
MADRID | The eurozone’s central bank should have acted as a last resort lender years ago, so peripheral economies would not have had to endure the punishment of excessive prices on market credit.
MADRID | The day will come when we’ll need to calculate the costs of having Chancellor Angela Merkel re-elected, and having her making decisions about the European Union as though only Berlin deserved to be heard and obeyed.
The Fair Observer | It is easy to say that Europeans should have more sex. Demography is destiny, after all, or so it has seemed for millennia, and what could be better than sleeping your way to world power? Despite the financial crisis, a diminishing birth rates and seemingly unsustainable welfare states, Glenn Carle believes German leadership might offer a solution for structural reform in Europe.
Despite the continued uncertainty in the Eurozone, total real estate investment volumes grew in 2012 with €118bn invested, up from €112 recorded in 2011.
MADRID | By Antonio Sánchez-Gijón (Capital Madrid) | What is on stake for the new Italian government? The country is living in a contradiction: on one hand it has debt and risk premium under control, but on the other it is struggling with a deep economic crisis. Moody’s has corrected its 2013 GDP forecast set so far at -1%, and has placed it at -1.8%.
MADRID | By Luis Martí | AfD is in a destructive mood. They are not interested in salvaging what Europe has managed to build. Their objective is rather to pull down existing structures while looking to the past for inspiration, namely to national currencies.
SOFIA | By Ivan Krastev | Amnesia, recession, the failure of political elites, divided societies… The free and caring Europe that was the dream of oppressed peoples no longer exists, it is just that European leaders lack the courage to admit it, says a Bulgarian political analyst.