Es ist ja nicht immer nur unzusammenhängendes, dummes Geschwätz, was alte Männer von sich geben. Aber leider haben unsere sogenannten „Leitmedien” gar nichts von einem Interview berichtet, das der 86-jährige Jürgen Habermas dem Guardian zu den Verhandlungen mit Griechenland gegeben hat. Seine Einschätzungen und Beurteilungen lassen es an Deutlichkeit nicht fehlen. Fünf davon möchte ich abschließend zitieren.

• „The Greek debt deal announced on Monday morning is damaging both in its result and the way in which it was reached. First, the outcome of the talks is ill-advised. Even if one were to consider the strangulating terms of the deal the right course of action, one cannot expect these reforms to be enacted by a government which by its own admission does not believe in the terms of the agreement.”
• „Secondly, the outcome does not make sense in economic terms because of the toxic mixture of necessary structural reforms of state and economy with further neoliberal impositions that will completely discourage an exhausted Greek population”.
• „Thirdly, the outcome means that a helpless European Council is effectively declaring itself politically bankrupt: the de facto relegation of a member state to the status of a protectorate openly contradicts the democratic principles of the European Union.”
• „Finally, the outcome is disgraceful because forcing the Greek government to agree to an economically questionable, predominantly symbolic privatisation fund cannot be understood as anything other than an act of punishment against a left-wing government. It’s hard to see how more damage could be done.”
• „And yet the German government did just this when finance minister Schaeuble threatened Greek exit from the euro, thus unashamedly revealing itself as Europe’s chief disciplinarian. The German government thereby made for the first time a manifest claim for German hegemony in Europe – this, at any rate, is how things are perceived in the rest of Europe, and this perception defines the reality that counts. I fear that the German government, including its social democratic faction, have gambled away in one night all the political capital that a better Germany had accumulated in half a century”.
• „Key decisions [in the EU] are being taken by the council, the commission and ECB – in other words, the very institutions that are either insufficiently legitimated to take such decisions or lack any democratic basis [...] this technocratic hollowing out of democracy is the result of a neoliberal pattern of market-deregulation policies.”