Jean Quatremer
For 20 years Jean Quatremer (b. 1957) has been covering the EU for the French daily Libération, where he started out in 1984. Trained in laws, Quatremer has won several press awards, including the Louise Weiss European journalism prize in 2006 for his blog Coulisses de Bruxelles.
Updated: 2 July 2010
Everyone has forgotten that the European executive prepared the budget which is currently being negotiated by European leaders. And there is a simple reason for this: Commission President José Manuel Barroso has become invisible. Libération’s Brussels correspondent deplores what he describes as a political “suicide”. 
Angela Merkel’s 9 October visit to Athens gave rise to demonstrations in the course of which the chancellor was caricatured as Hitler. Excesses bordering on stupidity that prevent the Greeks from facing up to their responsibilities, argues a French journalist. 
A majority of the Greek population considers that the eurozone and the IMF are too demanding, and is likely to vote in favour of anti-austerity parties to cast in the upcoming June 17 elections. But, if the Greeks do not want to fail yet again, they will not be able to avoid reforms that have been put off for too long. 
Greek debt is now out of control. This disturbing conclusion, issued by a parliamentary committee, comes from Athens itself. Asphyxiated by a recession severer than expected and undermined by the black economy, the country looks unlikely to meet its repayment deadlines. 
Considering that they failed to see the previous crises coming, Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch are suspected of wanting to destabilise the euro zone, and now they are threatening the strongest countries. 
For several weeks, erroneous information about the Greek economy has been circulated to destabilise Athens. The latest hoax to date was Spiegel Online’s 6 May publication of a report about a secret Eurogroup meeting to discuss Greece’s exit from the euro. The question is: who stood to gain from the crime? 
Worn out by repeated austerity packages, the Greeks have reached a point where they no longer believe in their government. While populism attracts more and more votes in the country, euro-enthusiasm has entered into free fall. Libération’s special correspondent reports from Athens. 
Confronted with thousands of North African migrants arriving on its shores, Italy has gone begging for a show of solidarity from its EU partners. On April 11, however, the Ministers of Interior and Justice of the Twenty-Seven reminded Rome that when it comes to migration, each country enforces its own rules. 
The German Chancellor strikes again, quips Brussels pundit Jean Quatremer. Having sowed panic in the Eurozone last year, Angela Merkel has now succeeded in transforming the Japanese nuclear tragedy in Fukushima into a global nuclear energy crisis. 
On 16 February, Catherine Ashton announced an aid package that will deliver a total of €258 million to Tunisia by 2013. Libération points out that the EU only gave its support for the Tunisian revolution when huge numbers of Tunisian boat people arrived on the coast of Lampedusa. 
Threatened with legal action by the Commission, with precious little backing from her neighbours, France is suffering the fallout from her president’s bellicose anti-Roma rhetoric. But the other Roma-deporting countries could conceivably help her out of this fix. 
The publication of stress test results in European banks on July 23 gives a clearer picture of the capacities of key institutions to cope with any future crisis. But as a result of satisfaction with the austerity plans put in place in most countries, financial markets have already begun to re-invest in the EU. 
The European Union aims to regulate international finance. But for want of independent experts, it turns to the banks for advice – which, with no-one there to contradict them, pull all the stops to ram their interests through. Some Eurodeputies have now come out against this smooth-running entryist attack.