For a measure of the political divide in Europe, consider the revolts that Angela Merkel and Alexis Tsipras are facing from within their own governing coalitions. To move the latest Greek bailout proposal forward, both leaders – polar opposites in style and substance – have had to turn their backs on their own parties in the name of preventing a bad situation from getting worse.
Prime Minister Tsipras must rely on votes from outside his radical Syriza government to push through economic reforms that he says he agreed to only with "a knife at my neck." Those reforms are a condition for talks on a third bailout package for Greece that many of the German Chancellor's own Christian Democrats consider more wasting of German taxpayers' money on a deadbeat.
The votes may be all be for naught, anyway, since the International Monetary Fund, a member of the troika of Greek creditors with the European Commission and European Central Bank, says the country's existing debt "can now only be made sustainable through debt-relief measures that go far beyond what Europe has been willing to consider so far." Placing debt relief squarely on the agenda for negotiations on another Greek bailout will only widen Europe's divide.
How did the divide get this big in the first place? How did a project – economic union – that was conceived to supersede the Europe of recurring wars, parochialism and historic rivalries end up creating resentments so deep and bitter that the continent is once again a breeding ground for extremist politics?
You can point to design flaws in the single currency, the euro, that established a monetary union without a fiscal union. The latter is an essential feature of common currency areas, such as Canada, providing for transfers from richer regions to poorer ones. Such transfers are the price that rich regions agree to pay to compensate poorer ones for giving up their own currencies and the ability to resort to devaluation when the going gets tough. It's usually a good deal for all.
More recently, you can point the finger at Mr. Tsipras, who ratcheted up the anti-German rhetoric so as to divert attention from an inept Greek government, corrupt bureaucracy and artery-clogged economy that was propped up by being able to borrow at German-level interest rates, as Greece did for years without a second thought for the eventual consequences.
A true leader would have given the Greek people the straight goods, instead of placing before them an impossible choice in a snap referendum, whose baffling 74-word question belied the fact that what Greeks feared most was not austerity but being forced out of the euro zone and watching their already ravaged economy descend into the chaos of hyperinflation.
Mr. Tsipras's brinkmanship forced Ms. Merkel to call his bluff. By allowing German officials to circulate a proposal last week on Greece's "temporary" exit from the euro zone, an outcome Ms. Merkel had until then been unwilling to consider, she forced Mr. Tsipras to put up or shut up.
The German Chancellor has been vilified as a cruel taskmaster for insisting that Greece follow through with austerity measures it has repeatedly dragged its feet on (including pension reforms and tax increases) in exchange for avoiding a so-called Grexit.
Her tough terms are castigated as anti-democratic (witness the ThisIsACoup hashtag on Twitter), as if past and present democratically elected Greek governments, and hence Greek voters, bear no responsibility for arriving at this outcome.
If Ms. Merkel deserves criticism, however, it is not for standing tough in the face of Mr. Tsipras's bluster. Giving in now would have triggered "concessions contagion" in other bailed-out European countries and further encouraged Syriza's dangerous brand of left-wing populism across the continent.
Still, Ms. Merkel is hardly blameless. Her trademark style – an unreadability and unwillingness to be pinned down – may be an asset in German politics. But it meant that she allowed the Greek crisis to fester as she wavered between being beholden to domestic politics and her broader responsibilities as Europe's de facto leader.
"She could have … offered Greece a debt haircut. Had she done so at the right moment, she could at least have prevented the radicalization of Greek politics," journalists Peter Mueller and Rene Pfister wrote this month in Der Spiegel. "Tsipras is, to a certain extent, a product of Merkel's vacillating leadership style."
Now, the divisions that the Chancellor's dithering helped to create threaten the entire European project.
Konrad Yakabuski