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Tuesday, August 27, 2013

German election update: Lucke hits back

An interesting story caught our eye in today's Welt concerning next month's German elections. Bernd Lucke, the head of the anti-euro Alternative für Deutschland party (seemingly undaunted by a recent attempted assault on his person) has written a letter to German President Joachim Gauck asking for access to documents in which the German government has simulated different scenarios to save the euro, citing Germany's freedom of information laws. The move fits with the party's theme of "having courage for the truth" (Mut zur Wahrheit), which it accuses other German political parties of lacking.

This comes after the same request addressed to the Chancellery, Bundesbank and German banking supervisor Bafin was rejected on the basis that the information is held by the eurozone's network of central banks, and therefore falls outside the scope of German law. Lucke has criticised such "questionable" behaviour on the part of German officials, while noting that the Bundesbank's refusal to reveal the information shows that it is de facto supporting the German government when it should be a politically independent actor.

While we're not expecting the information to become public soon, the documents would certainly make for interesting reading as they would reveal how the German government assessed the costs of a breakup, and therefore whether its subsequent policies for dealing with the crisis have indeed been 'alternativlos' as Merkel has argued, or whether alternative policies were jettisoned due to the short-term political and/or economic implications.

6 comments:

Denis Cooper said...

Oh, so presumably if the German government enters into any kind of secret conspiracy with the governments of other countries then that also "falls outside the scope of German law", and the Germans have no right to know about what their government has done and so it avoids any accountability to the people.

Rik said...

1. He gets much too technical again simply no proper populist in the Wilders mold (which would be much more effective).
Anyway this will not come up before the election.

2. The attack might be a gamechancer Fortuyn (hope I write the name right) gained 20 seats (say 15%) because of the fact he was shot. Not that it was of much use to him. And this is a smaller issue. But nevertheless, ideal towards potential protestvoters who in general are fed up by lefties who tell them what to do.
Better focus on that and Greece, this is way too technical should have started much earlier with that and could have started it with an own calculation. Freedom of Info was unlikely to work from the start. They could easily push it over electiondate and they will.


3. On the amounts involved especially re German risks and Greece bailout 4.0 (or officially 3.0, they probably lost count). Simply shows how technically poor politicians ansd their staff are. How difficult can it get.

Greece via German state bank.
EFSF
ESM
Via EU
Via BIS/EIB
Via Buba directly
Via Buba indirectly (ECB), could be several programms.
Via IMF

And add the thing up. How difficult can it get?

Same with Greece take the last Troika calculations and plug in new figures. Again how difficult is that?

Simply no real opposition. Simply a bunch of clowns that can not even make a simple spreadsheet.

jon livesey said...

Where is Edward Snowden when we need him?

Denis Cooper said...

"Where is Edward Snowden when you need him?"

In Moscow, following the pattern previously set by other traitors such as Philby.

christina speight said...

The offoicial German reaction to this is as nationalistic as its reaction to the EU directive making an official target of 80% of households having "smart meters" by 2020.

Germany just decided that the cost of doing this is far too great with no consumer benefit. So it is not attempting it!

So we - idiots - go ahead and spend £12bn to benefit big government and big business. [Now the let out is that we can refuse to have them but the programme goes ahead ]

Anonymous said...

Except that the freedom of information act does not cover files for ongoing government activity. It only refers to closed cases.