I could care less is Die Linke has lost so many elections...small wonder, West Germans have as much phobia about the ex-communists from the east as they have about inflation, misreading in both cases their history. What I do know is that they SPD's best friends here were in the Chirac government, good old centre-right French who are of course somewhat similar to the good old centre-right SPD, neither of which are neo-liberal, just old fashioned continental conservatives. Sarkozy is of course another matter altogether, which is why we call him Sarko l'américain, and why he is so pathetically unpopular here.

Fact is, of course, the Greeks are malgoverned, and they have a history of US-backed military dictatorship which occasioned compromises which, among other things, led their political elite of both strips to turn a blind eye to the corruption of their political system and the wealthy who have never paid their fair share. Of course the country needs to be reformed, but it won't be at the behest of German or French bankers that those reforms happen, and it probably won't happen without expropriations and jail terms which probably would have best happened in the 1970's instead of forty years later. But another fact is that German actions viz. Greece these past few years (and Spain, and Ireland) have been singularly wrong-headed and counterproductive.

Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant