by Davide Covelli
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| Picture from http://www.cgw.gr/ |
On 26 January 2015 Alexis Tsipras, leader of the major
anti-austerity party coalition in Greece, assumed the lead of the Greek
government. With his manifesto he sought to refuse explicitly and totally the
general principles on which the entire political economy of the EU has been
based until now. Tsipras’s victory speech, stating “the verdict of the Greek
people annuls today in an indisputable fashion the bailout agreements of
austerity and disaster”, provoked the German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble
to immediately reply, highlighting that “there's no question of a debt
haircut”. What clearly looms from this exchange of words is that there is an
internal struggle within the EU, exposing both ideological and national
interests.
The European institutions are designed on the principle of
balancing the different member states. The struggle for power in the EU has
always been based on a concerted form of agenda setting and on a definition of
the role of member states within a common institutional and normative
framework. This framework is an achievement that was reached through the
endorsement of multilateral treaties.
