The German supreme judge’s no to bond purchases by the European Central Bank will have negative long-term consequences for the EU.
The shock was followed by appeasement: The European Central Bank acted “in accordance with our Basic Law”, assured German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz a few hours after the ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe that the purchases of government bonds by the ECB were partly unconstitutional and a corresponding saying annulled by the European Court of Justice. At the same time, Markus Ferber, the spokesman for economic policy for the European People’s Party, fell into the same horn: the independence of the ECB was by no means up for grabs. And in Brussels, the Commission pointed out that nothing had changed in the least about the principle that EU law was superior to national law.
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