Powerful business leader calls for euro rescue

“Germans must make sacrifices for the euro,” sums up the German daily Berliner Zeitung. In an interview with the paper, Hans-Peter Keitel, president of the Federation of German Industries, calls on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to save the single currency “even if it hurts”. “We want to advance and invest in the euro. We need a stable union,” he explains. “If we want greater integration, all the member states must respect the rules or relinquish national purview,” he adds.

Four weeks ahead of parliamentary debate on the European bailout packages and the implementation of the beginnings of a European economic government, Angela Merkel is confronting a rise in increasingly free criticism. The CSU, the Bavarian branch of the Chancellor’s Christian Democrat Party, for example, recently declared that it is “decidedly against an economic government and a European Finance Minister.”