Germany's Wolfgang Schäuble is entering into ever more dangerous waters.
His apparent demand that Greece postpone elections scheduled for April, and impose a technocrat junta (a l’Italiana) for another year without PASOK and New Democracy, takes your breath away. Is this really the position of the German government? Greek democracy be damned?
I presume he has seen pictures of the blackened buildings below the Acropolis – and yes, the evidence is everywhere: a neo-classical house near my hotel at Monastiraki metro station was completely gutted, as was a building across the road. (There were four homeless sleeping in the cold alley next door, being comforted by a young volunteer.)
I presume too that Mr. Schäuble has been well-briefed on the explosive political mood in Greece, so one can only view such a demarche as deliberate provocation – like the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in 1914 (a miscalculation, as it later turned out, since "contagion" from Serbia could not be contained).
Hell hath no fury like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard when he's up on his soap box. This story from yesterday's edition of The Telegraph is Roy Stephens first offering of the day...and the link is here.
