Fra Guardian:
Meanwhile, tabloid Bild has polled readers in its own Greece referendum. “Should we support Greece with further taxpayer billions?” was the loaded question it asked readers.
Referring to the Greek referendum on Sunday, Bild said:
We Germans should be asked whether we want to go on paying!
Europe has been paying for bankrupt Greece for the last five years. Athens has received about €325bn in total. Germany’s share is about €88bn.
Bild has asked Germans in Berlin how they would vote. Some would continue to support Greece to show solidarity, because ‘the country cannot help itself’. The majority, however, in the poll voted ‘no!’.
Staying with the German press for now… the liberal weekly Die Zeit has made an emotional appeal to Greece: “Stay with us!”
In an editorial available in German, Greek and English, Marc Brost writes:
Dear Greece, you’re deciding about your country’s future. But it goes far beyond that.
None of us has to make such a decision and we can be happy about that, because if Greeks are now voting, it is not only their own future that will be decided. You, dear Greeks, also will be making a decision about the fate of 500 million people in Europe. You will decide how things will be for all of us.
It is only fitting for this insidious and confusing crisis that everything now comes down to a seemingly simple yes or no by the Greek people, even though so many very painful decisions are involved. It is not yet clear whether there will even be a referendum at all. But, one way or another you, dear Greeks, must turn against the policies you voted for just five months ago. You must take the side of the creditor nations, even though you voted down their crisis policies in the parliamentary elections. You must come to terms with your creditors, even though many of you have the impression you have been betrayed in the past couple of years. That is a lot to ask. And yet, that is where our hope lies.
No one can tell you how you should vote; not a minister from abroad and certainly not a foreign newspaper. But a lot of people in Europe now have grown very concerned.
Schäuble: Bundestag must vote on new bailout
Here are more comments from Wolfgang Schäuble, courtesy ofGerman news agency dpa/The local. The German finance minister said there will be no quick release of bailout funds to Greece after the referendum on whether to accept its creditors’ terms on Sunday. Any new bailout would have to be negotiated “on a completely new basis and under toughened economic preconditions.”
He added that he would not be able to join other eurozone finance ministers in negotiations for a new bailout for Greece without the agreement of the Bundestag, the German parliament.
