The lawyer Peter Gauweiler he is 69 years old. He is Lutheran, is married and has four children. In 1992 he defined the Maastricht Treaty a totalitarian dream. In 1999 you compared the euro to Esperanto. In 2005 you appealed to the German Constitutional Court against the draft European constitution (later aborted) and in 2008 against the Treaty of Lisbon. The Karlsruhe court did not consider the two appeals, but Gauweiler, a tenacious man, tried again in 2011 against the rescue of Greece and the establishment of the EFSF. The judges, this time, listened to him, but rejected the appeal. In 2012 Gauweiler appealed against theomt di Draghi and many judges would have even agreed with him but, for considerations of political prudence, they referred the case to the European Court of Justice, which essentially said that the OMT is perfectly fine.
Now Gauweiler already has the appeal against the Quantitative easing and he is counting on the fact that the court of Karlsruhe, offended by that of Luxembourg, will once again take his arguments into serious consideration.
Gauweiler is not an eccentric and does not seek publicity. He does not belong to Alternative für Deutschland, the new anti-euro party, and has been a member of the Bavarian CSU since 1968. Since 1972 the citizens of Munich have regularly elected him to the highest offices of the city and the Land. For three legislatures, Gauweiler has represented the district of Munich South in the Bundestag, one of the richest and most industrious areas of Germany and of the whole of Europe. His party, the CSU, is in government.
La Merkel e Schauble, both nearing the end of their political season, are moving on another wavelength. Schauble, in his own way, is a sincere pro-European. Merkel, for her part, is too much a daughter of the Cold War to want to go down in history as the woman who blew up Europe. That said, Merkel's political flair advises her not to ignore the growing malaise rising to her right from political society (the Berlin Circle, Alternative für Deutschland, growing parts of the CSU) and from civil society (see the impressive movement Pegida). Nor can Merkel ignore the growing reluctance with which the Bundesbank and the Constitutional Court accept the tears from legal and monetary orthodoxy inflicted on Germany by a Europe in which, numerically, the northern front is in the minority.
And on the other hand, in addition to domestic political considerations, Merkel does not escape the fact that the undisciplined Europe, the Mediterranean one, systematically tends to cling to any life preserver in order not to do the thing that would serve it most, i.e. reforms structural. Conceding a Qe without conditions, from the German point of view, would be equivalent to depriving oneself of a powerful instrument of pressure against France and Italy.
We must also consider the influence that the Swiss decision to abandon the euro and revalue the franc is already having in German public opinion. If the Swiss economy manages to withstand the impact in the coming months, the voices of those who argue that Germany must prepare to do the same will be more authoritative. At that point, with the economic rationale gone, only a political consideration will remain in favor of the permanence of the euro.
For this reason, despite being in favor of QE (as it was of WTO in 2012), the German political mainstream has given a mandate to its representatives in the ECB to set two insurmountable barriers to the programme.
The first is the ex ante definition of quantities. The German psyche abhors the footer and the 1949 constitution gives it a hand on this point. Because of this Draghi had to accept a closed amount, about one trillion. In return, the decided amount is higher than the most optimistic forecasts. A small clause is then inserted in the press release which makes it possible to prolong Qe until the inflation targets have been achieved.
The second is the co-responsibility to 80 per cent of the national central banks with respect to the possibility of default on debt by sovereign issuers in the Eurozone. The German political mainstream knows very well that in this way there is a dangerous incentive for any insolvent country to leave the euro, but to do otherwise (mutualize the losses) would have meant giving the anti-euro party a valuable argument.
For the rest there is nothing but to celebrate. The Qe has arrived and it's big too. Of course, after the crash of Lehman, the Fed took two months to launch Qe1, the ECB took 63. It is true that there was the theologically correct version of the Ltro, but precisely because it was correct (money lent and not printed forever) the maneuver proved to be ineffective when the money lent to the banks was returned by them.
