Both Germany and France are exposed to the Greece/Southern Europe fiasco. The eurozone problems (and the eurozone system itself) won’t go away easily. Of course there are conflicts between national interests and the common EU’s.
From The Guardian:
Share prices have dropped across Europe and the euro has slid to an 18-month low against the dollar on fears that the eurozone bailout of Greece will fail and reports that French president Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to pull his country out of the single currency altogether to force Germany to agree to the rescue plan.
The markets were initially unsettled by news that the French president had threatened to pull France out of the eurozone. The startling threat was made at a Brussels summit of EU leaders last Friday, at which the deal to bail out Greece was agreed. according to a report in El País newspaper quoting Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
Zapatero revealed details of the French threat at a closed-doors meeting of leaders from his Spanish socialist party on Wednesday.
Sarkozy demanded "a compromise from everyone to support Greece ... or France would reconsider its position in the euro," according to one source cited by El País.
“Sarkozy went as far as banging his fist on the table and threatening to leave the euro," said one unnamed Socialist leader who was at the meeting with Zapatero. "That obliged Angela Merkel to bend and reach an agreement."
El País also quotes Sarkozy as having said, according to another of those who met Zapatero, that "if at time like this, with all that is happening, Europe is not capable of a united response, then the euro makes no sense".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/14/nicolas-sarkozy-threatened-euro-withdrawal
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