ON AUGUST 19th, hours before jetting off to Brazil for more of the statesmanship the world associates with her, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, sat waiting in the Bundestag. Germany’s parliament had to approve a third bail-out of Greece since 2010. As usual she ostentatiously fiddled with her mobile phone whenever the opposition attacked her, while putting on an inscrutable expression. But she was probably pondering two numbers.
One was the size of the rebellion among MPs in her party. When the Bundestag first approved a rescue of the euro in 2010, only four members of Mrs Merkel’s conservative bloc dissented. But with each successive bail-out the level of resistance has grown in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), collectively known as the Union. Later that day, even after unusually heavy bullying by Mrs Merkel’s whip, Volker Kauder, dissent reached new heights, with 63 naysayers and three abstentions.
The rescue plan still passed comfortably, with support from the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), Mrs Merkel’s coalition partner, and the opposition...
from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1NnMIaK
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