Angela Merkel's legacy: has she saved or destroyed Europe? (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Angela Merkel's legacy: has she saved or destroyed Europe? (2018)

theguardian.com

11 pointsTomte15 comments

> At the peak of the eurozone crisis, when most of northern Europe wanted the Greek prime minister to be told his country had to leave the common currency, Merkel demurred

Implying Greece was not allowed to leave the Eurozone and default on their debt because of some European solidarity vision is naive at best.

Most of Greeks debt was issued by German banks who would have been holding empty bags if Greece was allowed to default on their own terms.

Kinda neither. Her key tactic was waiting out crises until they went away by themselves. She didn't actually do much either way.

She came out of the woodworks recently because everyone was upset with her for the Russian gas issue.

She said something like it was the best deal at the time.

Look, if you think getting rid of your nations energy independence, and handing that to Putin was the best deal at the time... You're delusional.

It was. Nuclear was off the table, CO2 needed to be dramatically reduced and that doesn't leave many options other than gas since Germany doesn't have a lot of hydro. Plus they use a lot of gas for heating and industrial processes so gas isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

No, the best deal would have been to ramp up nukes and lay off the green ideology crackpipe. She doesn't get credit for choosing the path of least resistance and putting Germany on its current disastrous path.

So she would have lost the elections but she still would have ramped up nuclear without being in power?

Using the energy policy to stay elected instead of keeping her people from freezing to death isn't exactly to Merkel's credit.

Nobody is freezing to death, please leave the hyperbolic arguments aside it doens't add anything to the discussion. If she hadn't won the elections then the nuclear plants would definitely have been gone. Her staying in power was the better opportunity to retain nuclear. It still wouldn't have mattered much for heating though, since gas is one of the main uses for heating homes in Germany.

Yep, they had working nuclear reactors.. She gave into the greens who wanted them gone. So to get her government back into power again, she made the deal.

Then chose Russian Gas to try and do a "2 birds 1 stone" kind of thing where if they had to get more energy, might as well try and do some geopolitics out of it...

Just two problems there; 1. Typical Greens, trading green firm power (nuclear) for another firm power.. just of course its not a green one, because the only green firm power IS nuclear! So now you've got fossil fuels .. congrats! 2. You're putting the country's energy in the hands of Putin... gee wonder how that will play out.

If she hadn't stayed in power, the greens would have been in power. What would the difference be exactly?

You're missing the point..

Its not that she caved into the greens to stay in power, closing the nuclear power plants and converting to gas.

Its that she did all that, AND chose Russian gas.

It is cheaper than the other alternatives and Germany didn't have any LNG terminals, so it makes sense to choose this. Hindsight bias is easy.

The issue is the way you talk about this, you make it sound like they had a week to get a solution in place.

They had to build the pipelines, those take time... So doesn't building gas terminals also take time?

You're still failing to see the point... Buying like 30% of your energy from someone like Putin, it's a deal you know could end badly.

I'm saying you're talking from hindsight bias, but that's ok it's impossible not to.

destroyed.

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