Germans’ support for the European Union rose to a record along with satisfaction about the economy, contrasting with anti-EU groundswells in neighboring countries.
EU membership was cited as a net benefit by 40 percent of Germans in an Infratest poll for broadcaster ARD, the highest level in the poll’s 15-year history.
That compares with 25 percent in April 2010, the month before Greece agreed to a sovereign bailout at the start of the euro-area debt crisis, Infratest said on its website.
Even as members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition stoke debate about welfare benefits for migrants, 68 percent of respondents said Europe’s biggest economy needs skilled workers from abroad, according to the poll released late yesterday.
“Rock-solid German support for Europe is not a bad start to the year that will bring the EU parliamentary elections in May,” Holger Schmieding, London-based chief economist for Berenberg Bank, said in a note today.
Concern in the U.S. and the U.K. that Germans could turn their back on Europe and the euro has proved “completely irrational.”
Anti-euro sentiment outside Germany “is probably at or very close to its peak” as unemployment declines in Ireland, Portugal and Spain, and economic data in the Netherlands suggest Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom will not gain much further support, Schmieding said.
At the first cabinet meeting of Merkel’s third term on Jan. 10, her Christian Democratic bloc and Social Democratic junior partner agreed to set up a panel to investigate possible welfare fraud by citizens of other EU countries in Germany.
The group of government officials will hold its first meeting on Jan. 13, Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, said today.
Suggestions in German media that the European Commission is pushing Germany to pay welfare benefits for all jobless EU citizens in the country are “completely wrong,” Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde-Hansen said in Brussels today.
She was asked about a report in German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that said the European Commission argues in a court brief that German restrictions on welfare benefits for immigrants are illegal.
bloomberg.com
EU membership was cited as a net benefit by 40 percent of Germans in an Infratest poll for broadcaster ARD, the highest level in the poll’s 15-year history.
That compares with 25 percent in April 2010, the month before Greece agreed to a sovereign bailout at the start of the euro-area debt crisis, Infratest said on its website.
Even as members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition stoke debate about welfare benefits for migrants, 68 percent of respondents said Europe’s biggest economy needs skilled workers from abroad, according to the poll released late yesterday.
“Rock-solid German support for Europe is not a bad start to the year that will bring the EU parliamentary elections in May,” Holger Schmieding, London-based chief economist for Berenberg Bank, said in a note today.
Concern in the U.S. and the U.K. that Germans could turn their back on Europe and the euro has proved “completely irrational.”
Anti-euro sentiment outside Germany “is probably at or very close to its peak” as unemployment declines in Ireland, Portugal and Spain, and economic data in the Netherlands suggest Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom will not gain much further support, Schmieding said.
At the first cabinet meeting of Merkel’s third term on Jan. 10, her Christian Democratic bloc and Social Democratic junior partner agreed to set up a panel to investigate possible welfare fraud by citizens of other EU countries in Germany.
The group of government officials will hold its first meeting on Jan. 13, Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, said today.
Suggestions in German media that the European Commission is pushing Germany to pay welfare benefits for all jobless EU citizens in the country are “completely wrong,” Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde-Hansen said in Brussels today.
She was asked about a report in German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that said the European Commission argues in a court brief that German restrictions on welfare benefits for immigrants are illegal.
bloomberg.com
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