MONTI'S OWN GOAL THAT CRITICIZES GRUNDGESETZ'S DEMOCRACY
The reactions of the German political class to the interview of the Italian Prime Minister, Mario Monti, with the weekly Der Spiegel were not long in coming. Between Sunday and Monday, prominent representatives of the government majority as well as of the opposition, so far always full of compliments for the former European Commissioner for Competition, harshly criticized his statements.
Under accusation is in particular a passage from Monti's interview, which allegedly warned European states against excessive recourse to the vote of parliaments for the approval of measures to combat the sovereign debt crisis. "If governments allowed themselves to be completely bound by the decisions of their own parliaments, without maintaining their own margin for manoeuvre, the split of Europe would be far more probable than its closer integration", the Prime Minister allegedly said, perhaps alluding to the the all-German practice of leaving it to always be the Bundestag, the federal Parliament, to express itself from time to time on each measure to be approved at European level.
From the deputy group leader of the SPD in the Bundestag, Joachim Poß, came the sharpest answer: "The parliamentary culture of Italy during Berlusconi's unhappy years must have suffered a lot," he said speaking to the Rheinische Post newspaper. From the pages of Welt, the secretary general of the Bavarian CSU, Alexander Dobrindt, spoke of an "attack on democracy" and then added: "The desire to have our money leads Mr. Monti to make undemocratic proposals". The response of one of the new faces of Mrs. Merkel's CDU, Michael Grosse Bröhmer, is similar, according to whom «Monti perhaps needs a clear declaration from Germany, that we have no intention of abolishing our democracy to finance the public debt Italian". Nerves on edge also for many liberals, who reacted indignantly to the warning, which to some almost sounded like blackmail, from the Italian prime minister.
The Prime Minister, normally very cautious when it comes to criticizing Berlin's choices, has perhaps not realized that he has touched a very delicate side of otherwise weak German patriotism. The pride in the maturity achieved by one's democracy in the last sixty years, including the limits placed by the Constitutional Court of Karlsruhe on the discretion of the Government in European matters, are not exactly a topic of conversation like any other. The Germans have a profound respect for the Constitutional Court and do not like jokes aimed at reducing its role and importance. The risk contained in such jokes is to fuel new tensions, precisely at a time when the Germans had already begun to perceive Mario Monti's attempt to position himself as an uncomfortable interlocutor for Chancellor Merkel in a not very reassuring way.
An indirect response to Monti also came yesterday from the president of the SPD, Sigmar Gabriel, who would have in mind to include in the electoral program of his party the proposal of two economists - one of whom, Peter Bofinger, sits on the board of economic experts of the executive – according to which a common responsibility for the public debts of the member states would be permissible, provided that the German constitution is amended accordingly and the German people have their say in a referendum. Going back to the pure intergovernmental method, in which only European governments decide and Parliaments ratify obediently, is not in the Germans' hearts either.
