No ties, no shirt sleeves, Mr. Cameron with his arms in the air as Chelsea defeat Bayern Munich in the Champions League final. Among the friendly images given away by the powerful of the earth at Camp David, the last G8 realigned the pawns on the chessboard of international relations. The real news is the decline of Angela Merkel, now isolated after the oblivion of his lifelong ally, Nicolas Sarkozy. The Franco-German axis, which for years held the helm of European economic policy, no longer exists. to replace it, a new thread linking Washington, Paris and Rome.
Very careful not to mortify the German chancellor, the American president Barack Obama managed to leverage the newly elected French president François Hollande and the Italian premier Mario Monti to remind Europe of the duty of growth.
The word "austerity" is now a taboo even for politicians in Berlin: the "consolidation" of public accounts remains a fundamental stake, but it is now established the need to overcome the blindly rigorous philosophy professed by the former Merkozy duopoly.
The certification of the new balance of power in Europe will come Wednesday at the informal summit in Brussels. Hollande will officially relaunch the crusade for Eurobonds, by far the most disliked solution for the Germans, who have always been frightened of the idea of partially guaranteeing the public debt of the other Eurozone countries.
The measure would inevitably have a greater specific weight for the continent's leading economy and up to now Merkel has always rejected any proposal in this sense, arguing that community bonds would not be an "effective response" to the crisis.
But in the new scenario, the chancellor will have to move with caution and will probably be forced to make some concessions, also pressed on the internal front by thesocial democratic oppositiona, ready to use the new encirclement of the country in Europe as a very powerful electoral weapon.
