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| Europe |
| Not so fast: German court delays eurozone's €500bn bail-out fund |
| 2012-06-22 |
| Germany's constitutional court has delayed the creation of a new €500bn eurozone bail-out fund as Angela Merkel faces a series of legal challenges to measures seen as critical for saving the EU's single currency. The legal block is embarrassing for the German Chancellor who expended large amounts of political capital in concessions to get the Social Democrat and Greene opposition to support the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) so it could enter into force on 1 July. The ESM is urgently needed to fight European debt contagion over the summer and is Germany's preferred option for a bailout of Spanish banks because it is more secure for lenders than the existing, smaller eurozone fund, the EFSF. Germany's parliament will ratify the ESM and the fiscal pact on 29 June after Chancellor Merkel was forced to offer the opposition new spending on growth and her full backing for a eurozone financial transaction tax in return for its support. But in a humiliating setback on Thursday, judges in the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the country's constitutional court ruled that they would need "at least three weeks" to consider the "complex" ESM's legality after the vote and before it was signed Joachim Gauck, the German President. "We assume that the president will, as he has done before, comply with this request, and that the court will therefore have enough time to conduct an examination," said a spokesman for the court, which is based in Karlsruhe. |
| Posted by: |
| #1 It's "embarassing" and "humiliating" when the supreme court of a sovereign federal republic bitterly clings to the rule of law, in defiance of the inevitable forward march of history? Nope, move along, no ideological bias here. |
| Posted by: RandomJD 2012-06-22 15:24 |