Author: Almut Möller

  • What is EU Membership all About?

    This is my last entry in the Eurozone 2013 blog. I want to conclude with some general remarks tackling what sounds like a rather innocent question and is the subject of a paper I am working on: What is EU membership all about? The question was put to me for a talk at a summer…

  • Taking a Close Look at the Grand Coalition Talks: not so Grand on Europe?

    Berlin is heading towards a grand coalition between Chancellor Merkel’s CDU, her Bavarian sister party, the CSU, and the Social Democrats (SPD). After an election campaign in which European issues were strangely absent, surely the delegations that sat down a month after the elections had to get their teeth into Europe. By putting Europe on…

  • Do the German elections matter?

    As journalists from across Europe flock to Germany to report on the federal elections this coming Sunday, the question that is asked by many is “Does their outcome matter for Europe?” There is no simple answer to this. Indeed the visions of the major parties on the future of the eurozone and the union as…

  • German Government Embraces Multi-Speed Europe

    It almost slipped off my radar in the summer break, which Berlin dived into at the end of June: the German government seems to change course on its stance towards a multi-speed Europe or, as analysts like to put it, differentiated integration. If this is really the case then here is some revolutionary news that…

  • German Federal Constitutional Court Chews on Role of European Central Bank

    Verdicts from Karlsruhe usually serve as pacifiers for the German public and, more recently, for the eurozone as a whole. Remember the ruling on the ESM and the Fiscal Compact, which the German Federal Constitutional Court concluded was reconcilable with the country’s basic law, or Grundgesetz, in September 2012. What a relief this announcement was…

  • Frau Merkel and the ‘C-Word’

    Both the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have just published findings about the performance of the German economy and the state of structural reforms. While there is plenty of discussions in Berlin about what ‘the others’ (in particular France) are not getting right, there is not much of a debate on what…

  • Help the Bruised French out of the Corner!

    There has been a lot of bad news last week: the Eurozone is further contracting, France is moving into recession and the EU has been dramatically losing support all across Europe according to figures published in a Pew poll. Watching President Hollande’s Élysée address one year into his presidency one saw a cornered head of…

  • On Axes and Party Politics: the End of Europe’s Predictability

    In a commentary last year on the eve of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty I wondered to what extent the notion of ‘the Franco-German axis’ was still a useful framework to analyse politics in Europe. I argued that in the course of the euro crisis, economic and monetary policies in…

  • Getting Cyprus Wrong – and Germany Too?

    The agreement on Cyprus concluded this week will turn out as a burden to policy-makers in Europe for both next steps related to Cyprus and the Eurozone rescue as a whole. The best take I have read so far is by Bruegel’s Nicolas Véron, who in his latest commentary addresses the manifold arenas in which…

  • Is there an Alternative for Europe in Germany?

    In my last blog I made the point that despite Germany being a major player in the reform of the eurozone and despite federal elections taking place in the fall of 2013, Germans at the moment seem rather indifferent about the eurozone’s future direction. I found this to be rather baffling, since the decisions taken…