Financial Times
October 21, 2011
As if the affairs of the 27-nation European Union were not complicated enough, a big new player emerged on the crowded battlefield of the eurozone this week: the 620-member Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament.
The insistence of the parliamentarians in Berlin on having full details of negotiations in Brussels before they would give a green light for Angela Merkel, the chancellor, to agree to a comprehensive package of crisis measures was the main cause of the EU having to call a second summit next week to finalise any “political agreement” on Sunday.
“We are living in a new world now,” said one senior government official in Berlin. “We are still finding out how it works, but it will not make life any easier.”
For an institution that has traditionally been reserved and usually ready to endorse all its government’s decisions in Brussels after they have been taken, the sudden assertiveness of the German parliament – across the whole political spectrum from left to right – marks a big change.
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