The former German Finance Minister, who shepherded the implementation of Euro, has now declared that has declared that it is a truly bad idea:

“The economic situation is worsening from month to month, and unemployment has reached a level that puts democratic structures ever more in doubt,” he said.

“The Germans have not yet realised that southern Europe, including France, will be forced by their current misery to fight back against German hegemony sooner or later,” he said, blaming much of the crisis on Germany’s wage squeeze to gain export share.

Mr Lafontaine said on the parliamentary website of Germany’s Left Party that Chancellor Angela Merkel will “awake from her self-righteous slumber” once the countries in trouble unite to force a change in crisis policy at Germany’s expense.

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Mr Lafontaine said he backed EMU but no longer believes it is sustainable. “Hopes that the creation of the euro would force rational economic behaviour on all sides were in vain,” he said, adding that the policy of forcing Spain, Portugal, and Greece to carry out internal devaluations was a “catastrophe”.

Mr Lafontaine was labelled “Europe’s Most Dangerous Man” by The Sun after he called for a “united Europe” and the “end of the nation state” in 1998. The euro was launched on January 1 1999, with bank notes following three years later. He later left the Social Democrats to found the Left Party.

You will note that his critique is not the standard political wisdom in Germany, which turns economics into a nativist morality play about the respective national virtues of different nations.

Seriously, we know what happens Germans base their policies on a vision of their own superior national virtue, there are still people who remember the last time, and it is not pretty.