Expect a surge in support for anti-establishment and anti-EU(ro) parties in the EU elections

There is no real evidence that the crisis is fading, merely that it is entering a different phase. The next 12 months will throw up political, social and financial market challenges that will once again test Europe’s willingness to get screwed by mass unemployment in southern Europe and plundering the lifetime savings in northern Europe.

Many of us are passionate Europeans, we just don’t accept that the Euro is either sustainable or desirable. The creation of the Euro was not driven by economic logic or by political necessity, but by the ambition, arrogance and naiveté of those involved.

The systemic error of the Euro zone will stay. Italian, Portuguese and Spanish companies, starved of affordable finance, are at a persistent disadvantage to rivals in Austria and Germany. This makes a mockery of the intended benefits of a single currency and renders it impossible for the private sector to slash .

The conceptual framework of Europe’s crisis-fighting – tax payers money for sinners in exchange they pretended to reform, pretending them to help – will remain unaltered. In this regard it is not that important whether a centre-right, centre-left or grand coalition government emerges from Germany’s September 22 national election.No block party shows an appetite to rethink to offset southern Europe’s economic slump and Germany’s decline.

The ideal of unity will come under pressure in European parliament elections in May, which will pave the way for the selection of replacements for José Manuel Barroso as European Commission president and Herman Van Rompuy as president of the European Council, the club of national leaders. Expect a surge in support for anti-establishment and anti-EU(ro) parties in the EU elections

This will be a chilly political climate for those who favour ambitious integration initiatives, such as pooling debt or a banking union including common deposit insurance (for roughly 1 tn Euro of bad loans a doomed attempt anyway). This was underlined last month in a Dutch statement declaring the era of “ever closer union” in every policy area finished. The fragile sense of common purpose surfaces, too, in the language with which the French government and Brussels have attacked each other in past weeks.