Germany’s Constitutional Court yesterday said a last-minute legal challenge by a leading euroskeptic politician would not delay its hotly awaited verdict on key euro crisis tools.
“The date fixed for the ruling” on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) rescue fund and EU fiscal pact today “will go ahead as planned,” the court said in a statement.
That means that at 10am today, the eight scarlet-robed judges of the Verfassungsgericht will decide whether German President Joachim Gauck can sign into law the ESM and the European fiscal pact.
Photo: EPA
The German parliament already voted in favor of both with a two-thirds majority at the end of June.
However, Gauck held off from completing the ratification process in the face of legal challenges filed by the far-left Die Linke party, a citizens’ initiative group called “More Democracy” and a well-known euroskeptic from German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CSU Bavarian sister party, Peter Gauweiler.
In an attempt to delay today’s ruling, Gauweiler filed a new complaint at the weekend, arguing that the European Central Bank’s decision to launch a new bond-buying program had moved the goalposts and that the court must now first decide whether the bond purchase program is legal before it can rule on the constitutionality of the ESM rescue fund.
The Constitutional Court held an emergency session on Monday to decide whether to delay its planned ruling today in the face of Gauweiler’s latest challenge.
Gauweiler and the other groups argue that the ESM — the EU’s permanent 500 billion euro (US$630-billion) rescue fund — and the fiscal pact are incompatible with Germany’s Grundgesetz, or Basic Law, because they are effectively forcing Germany to surrender its budgetary sovereignty without the necessary democratic backing.
Meanwhile, billionaire financier George Soros said on Monday that the eurozone was edging ever closer to a solution to its debt crisis.
Speaking in Berlin at an event organized by the Institute for Media and Communications Policy, Soros said: “I am happy to note that the political debate in Germany has shifted in favor of saving the euro.”
He was referring to the EU summit in June, where leaders agreed to allow the eurozone bailout fund to help stricken banks, and the European Central Bank’s decision last week to buy the bonds of debt-wracked countries.
“Both were made possible by the support of Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Soros said.
In an essay appearing in several publications over the weekend, the 82-year-old suggested that Germany should either accept its role as de facto leader of the eurozone or leave the bloc altogether.
If Germany left the euro, the value of the currency shared by the rest of the bloc would depreciate sharply, Soros said, making their exports more attractive and slowly becoming more competitive.
“Europe would escape from the looming depression,” he said.
Soros added that today’s decision by Germany’s Constitutional Court on the legality of the ESM bailout fund and the EU’s fiscal pact for greater budget discipline might prevent the German leadership role he recommends.
“In that case, Germany would have to hold a referendum to decide whether to lead or leave,” he said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
RSS