IL GIORNALE (Italy), WALL STREET JOURNAL (USA)
Italian daily newspaper Il Giornale chose a deeply provocative headline for Friday's front page: "Quarto Reich" - Fourth Reich, to comment on Germany's refusal to give the European Central Bank more leeway.
Il Giornale is a right-wing newspaper owned by Silvio Berlusconi"s brother Paolo. "Since yesterday, Italy is no longer in Europe, it is in the Fourth Reich," writes the newspaper's editor-in-chief, Alessandro Sallusti, who writes that Germany has won, but Italy, Europe and the euro have lost after European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi .
Sallusti also says Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti has been defeated, after being "led around for months by the Germans and their false promises." Meanwhile, Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank has lost, had to "bow to the will of Angela Merkel."
In the First Reich, writes Sallusti, "the German head of state also had the title of Emperor of Rome," while two world wars and millions of deaths were not enough to appease the German hegemonic ambitions in the next two Reichs. History repeats itself, "not with cannons, but with the euro." The Germans want Italians and other Europeans to give up and hand over power to the "new Kaiser, Angela Merkel."
"The problem," Sallusti concludes, is that nobody is reacting.
A somewhat more neutral commentator, Allen Mattich of the Wall Street Journal, instead sees Draghi's reaction Thursday as the best option in a tricky situation, "to buy the single currency two or three years; enough time for Europe's politicians to hammer out the fiscal union."
