Greece’s new government should stop asking for more help and instead move quickly to enact reform measures agreed to in return for previous bailouts from its European partners, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Sunday, June 24.
“The ball is now in Greece’s court,” Schaeuble said. “It’s in their hands to win back the confidence of the people of Europe. They’re only going to accomplish that with concrete actions and deeds.”
In a separate interview on Sunday published in Der Spiegel news magazine, Schaeuble again ruled out against any form of collectivized debt such as euro bonds and defended the German government’s hard line on this decision.
“It’s because you cannot separate the responsibility for decision-making from the liability,” he said when asked why Germany was so adamantly opposed. “That’s true for almost everything but especially when it comes to money.”
“Anyone who has the chance to spend someone else’s money will do that,” he added, before telling the reporter, “You’d do that and so would I. The markets know that. And so from that point of view they wouldn’t be convinced by euro bonds.”
On the other hand, CSU party leader and Bavaria state premier Horst Seehofer stated that, “I am very much in favor of the fiscal pact, but we are going to have a difficult situation if they stay stubborn in Berlin” in his interview with Bild am Sonntag. The German Parliament’s upper house wants financial concessions worth billions of euros to the country’s 16 federal states before backing the permanent bailout scheme for the euro zone and the fiscal pact next week, Seehofer said.
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