“An ultimately fatal rescue,” headlines Handelsblatt, which takes issue with political leaders who cling to pointless and dangerous policies that force them to flood the world with largely valueless money. “The decision to allow Lehmann Brothers to collapse was the last good decision in the management of the crisis. Since then, no one has bothered holding those responsible to account,“ writes the editor in chief of the business daily. Now we have to contend with a new kind of state-sponsored market economy where the ‘those who pollute must pay” principle no longer applies. Never has the world of finance been gifted with such enormous quantities of taxpayers’ money. In Germany alone, a staggering €545 billion – an amount equivalent to the sum of all the country’s private savings since the war – has been handed over.
Worse still, continues the daily, “we are now seeing the emergence of a new breed of political leader who suffers from the hitherto unknown syndrome of “rescue mania.” This type of politician will stop at nothing to rescue banks, the euro and the Greeks. As it stands, every fresh European summit will likely make us poorer,” because, as Handelsblatt points out, our leaders are forcing central banks to bear the brunt of the crisis, while private banks are swimming in money.
Since 2009, the markets have gone crazy: sugar is up 180 %, copper has risen by 225%. And anyone who has the temerity to suggest that all of this fresh money has resulted in an unreal world is labeled a fuddy-duddy. “But that said, we cannot argue that nothing has changed since the crisis: before it began, the banks had a corner on stupidity. […] Now this monopoly has been taken over by the state,” concludes the newspaper.
The leader of Greece’s leftist alliance SYRIZA is the new bright hope of Greek politics. Steering a course between pragmatism and the rhetoric of class warfare, he has unsettled Berlin, and not just those who back Angela Merkel's austerity policies. 
Europe’s economic woes have forced us to try to understand the secret Olympian world of global finance. But now that we pay more attention to bond yields and stability mechanisms, isn’t it clear that the experts up on their lofty peaks don’t know what’s going on either? 
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is hosted by Azerbaijan, a country that is far from being a model democracy. An Estonian journalist takes a critical look at the deferential treatment enjoyed by the regime in Baku.