I doubt that Angela Merkel is looking forward to the G8 summit very much. It will mostly consist of the other world leaders telling her to give ground on austerity. But I suspect that Merkel won’t budge much, if at all. She clearly believes that the Greeks can be whipped into line by telling them that the election is really a referendum on euro membership. Hence both her suggestion of a simultaneous referendum on election-day and her backing for the European Central Bank cutting off support to Greek banks which shows that while there’s no formal mechanism for ejecting a country from the single currency there are ways of doing it.
The German government, intriguingly, seems more accepting of the idea of the Greeks leaving the Euro than others do. Merkel eevn floated the possibility in front of an audience of school children this week.
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