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Photo: DPA

Steinbrück tells Merkel: Give Greece a chance

Published: 6 Feb 13 13:48 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20130206-47807.html

Greece must be given time to clean up its troubled finances, Peer Steinbrück, Chancellor Angela Merkel's main challenger in elections later this year, said on Wednesday.

"Measures that would not be imposed on our own people should not be imposed
on another country," Steinbrück told reporters during a visit to Athens.

"This is why Greece needs time to succeed in its stabilization and for people to regain confidence," the former finance minister said, adding: "Austerity alone cannot bring results."

Greece is applying a tough economic overhaul for a fourth year running after appealing for bailout loans from the EU and the IMF in 2010.

Many Greeks feel that Merkel-led Germany – which is proportionately footing a key part of the rescue – is responsible for successive cuts to their salaries and pensions to help meet fiscal goals.

"We must see how social cohesion can be maintained," the centre-left Social Democrat Steinbrück said, noting that Greek salary earners and pensioners had already suffered cuts in their incomes of 30 to 40 percent.

The malaise, coupled with soaring unemployment, has strengthened a radical
leftist party that wants to reject the austerity blueprint, and a neo-Nazi party alleged to be linked to the beating of migrants.

AFP/mry

What do you think? Leave your comment below.


Your comments about this article:

14:34 February 6, 2013 by DavyCrockett
The simplest, and best, solution is for Greece to leave the EU. If we could today wave away with a magic wand all of Greece´s current problems, is there anybody who believes they wouldn´t all be back in ten years? It´s time for the politicians to get real, and see that this EU farce is just a game perpetrated by the bureaucrats in Brussels to promote their own importance and feather their own nests.
18:06 February 6, 2013 by IchBinKönig
Lol @DaveyCrockett

You're on the wrong site with your opinion. This is the home of the Varsity EU Cheerleading squad. Apparently it was very difficult for Europeans to cross into or study in other European countries before the EU was established. Not to mention the big happy family everyone in the EU is a part of now. You probably wont be able to remember this, but people in Europe used to dislike each other before the advent of the EU. Crazy right? But no more! Poverty is a small price to pay, you see; You used to have to show a passport, and countries would go broke without bankrupting the whole continent. Aren't Politicians just the BEST?? Thanks, thelocal.
21:51 February 6, 2013 by DavyCrockett
"Poverty is a small price to pay." Really? You´re not connected to Mitt Romney by any chance? And "countries would go broke without bankrupting the whole continent" - you think that´s bad? Better that everyone bombs out, n´est-ce pas? And to enter Switzerland, you still have to show a passport, and purely by chance Switzerland is the richest and most successful country in Europe. Well, cuties of the "Varsity EU Cheerleading squad", may I suggest to the Funny Farm that it gets a stronger set of locks before you escape the asylum again.
23:05 February 6, 2013 by Icke Ricke
I say give the Greeks concessions on German flag-production factories so they can replace all those German flags they've been "burnt-offering."
01:57 February 7, 2013 by US-TommyBoy
All we are saying, is give Greece a chance!

Thanks to John and Yoko.
13:31 February 7, 2013 by pepsionice
From day one of the Euro arriving....Greece was in the wrong, and lying about their financial status. They've been lying for three decades as a minimum. I hate to blame the people of Greece, but no one ever checked the books and just allowed political dimwits to bankrupt the nation. Someone now has to pay. And yes, the same situation will occur in California within five years, and someone will have to pay there as well.
10:55 February 8, 2013 by Sastry.M
Throughout earlier European history Greeks were the doyens and saviors of European culture and civilization. That Greece has fallen in disfavor and a victim of economic vagaries in modern industrial age as a member nation in the European Union that was created after a deadliest war of destruction and atrocious crimes in Europe, the causal factors for such an economic debacle should be the subject matter of serious introspection to all Europeans who experienced untold human suffering.

The U.S Americans partook in the modern war in Europe what the Greeks did in an earlier age. Is the U.S economy free from worries and her people at peace with themselves at present, more than six decades after? What is the sinister, obnoxious and deleterious psychic influence known as " Kali Prabhav" to Indians, that is distorting and corrupting all humanity on Earth with greed of ephemeral desires, lure of financial loans and misery of usury? To people in the higher echelons of human administration it may appear as their god gifted virtue to fall for these economic vagaries but to the common productive people of labor and middle classes the only sermons of peace and contentment are about the measures of austerity.
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