Comment by epolanski
4 hours ago
As an European, trust me, Trump has little to do with it.
We've been doing fine championing our nationalism instead of creating a strong internal market.
Because Hungarians decide in Hungary and Spaniards in Spain doing business across Europe is still very tough.
So to transport anything from Austria to Hungary you need to fill all the kind of paperwork and find the appropriate codes. And to sell it, even more complicated. And taxation? Don't get me started.
And it doesn't help most of our economies are all export economies, which is a broken economic model where you just keep hemorraging stuff and your people stays relatively poor.
> And it doesn't help most of our economies are all export economies,
The worst part of all this is that becoming more export focused was pushed heavily by Germany during the euro crisis, and now its causing more problems.
Honestly, I'm coming round to the notion that Angela Merkel was literally wrong on everything she ever touched.
Mind you, German political culture consistently makes the wrong decisions (basically in hock to the ICE car industry, which has aged badly).
> Honestly, I'm coming round to the notion that Angela Merkel was literally wrong on everything she ever touched.
In a world where the Russo-Ukrainian conflict doesn't happen she was fine.
In a world where it does, suddenly an export economy hungry for materials and energy suffers the lack of Russia.
> In a world where the Russo-Ukrainian conflict doesn't happen she was fine.
The German (so not just her) position on the post financial crisis reforms were wildly misguided, and her taking in of Syrian immigrants also didn't end well.
I think that shutting down the nuclear plants would also have been recognised as a bad idea, even without the war.