By Tony Czuczka and Leon Mangasarian
Angela Merkel is having a Margaret Thatcher moment.
Having spent six years in office defying comparison with Britain’s first woman prime minister, Merkel is being likened to Thatcher as she steers Europe’s response to the financial crisis with demands for debt reduction and tighter economic controls. Media including theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the newspaper of record in Germany’s financial hub, dub her “Europe’s Iron Lady.”
Strengthened by record-low joblessness at home, Merkel has rejected calls to either cut Greece loose from the euro area or ease her conditions for aid. By bucking the German street and steering the middle course, she is gambling that policy makers will continue to prevent a euro meltdown, helping her win re- election next year and match Thatcher’s third term.
“If Merkel were to go into elections with a collapsed euro zone she’d have a lot of difficulty winning,” Giles Merritt, head of Friends of Europe, a Brussels-based research group that promotes debate on the European Union, said in an interview. “Finally her statesman side is kicking in.”
Merkel may be homing in on her platform for the election next fall: enforcing the budget discipline that Germans want, while fending off the breakup of the euro area as too risky to contemplate for a country that has staked its post-World War II role in Europe on promoting consensus. She has quashed an anti- euro groundswell in her coalition, saying the solution is “more, not less, Europe.”
‘Doesn’t Arise’
“I don’t want Greece to leave the euro, and therefore the question doesn’t arise,” Merkel, 57, told a student audience in Berlin on Feb. 7. The costs of a crack in the euro region are “incalculable,” she said... read more.
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