TIMES ONLINE: Eleni is busy. Beyond the doors of the kitchen you can make out her gentle bullying: agape mia, she seems to be saying, my dear, where are the dolmades for Table 3? And back in the restaurant, with its murals of the blue Aegean, she flits from alcove to alcove listening to the sour jokes from her German customers — “Eleni, don’t expect me to pay the bill for the next three years, you Greeks are already emptying our pockets.” The Germans may be angry with the Greeks but they are not about to go without their ouzo. As the country approaches a critical election tomorrow it is becoming clear that bailing out Greece has become a key issue for Germans. “It’s the dominant topic,” says Klaus-Peter Schöppner, the head of the Emnid polling institute. “People are asking what happens to us if we don’t help the Greeks?”
Other questions are beginning to nag the Germans, too: how much Europe do we really need? Suddenly the European project that was for so long the preserve of the elites — the scrapping of the mark, EU eastward enlargement — has become a matter of public debate. It was instructive to study the faces of German trade unionists on May Day as they made their routine pledges of proletarian support to Greek workers; the cameras captured the bemusement of the listening crowds. Solidarity with the Greeks? Paying them money from our taxes so that they could retire in their late fifties while we slog on until 67? Precisely what European idea makes that possible?
The vote that is bringing these doubts to the surface is being held in North Rhine-Westphalia, a region that encompasses the once heavily industrialised Ruhr Valley. There are big cities such as Cologne and Dortmund struggling with the economic downturn and the crumbling of multicultural communities, great swaths of farmland and also pockets of neglect, as impoverished as anything that can be seen in the heavily subsidised eastern Germany. Eighteen million people live in the region compared with only eleven million in the whole of Greece. It is ruled by a coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats, just like the country as a whole.
The election has become a tight contest. If the Government collapses there, Angela Merkel will lose her majority in the Upper House of parliament — and the plans for a radical overhaul of the tax and health systems will be blocked by the Social Democrats. Popular frustration about Greece, and about Europe, has therefore become a critical factor in Ms Merkel’s future. >>> Roger Boyes | Saturday, May 08, 2010
