Manuel Ochsenreiter: Decline in Germany’s economy to affect EU

Press TV has interviewed Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor-in-chief of Zuerst in Berlin, about official data showing that German industrial orders have declined in December 2015.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: This data is coming at a time when Germany is under increased pressure specifically when you look at the migrant crisis or the refugee crisis there. So what trajectory this is going to take?

Ochsenreiter: Despite the fact that in all mainstream media and of course also politics debating the migrant crisis nonstop, we have still the not-solved economical problems of the past. They are simply now not in the headlines because of the migration crisis.

But for example we have still the problem of our sanction regime against the Russian Federation but also for example against Syria. So this has of course a negative effect on German economy, a very negative effect on German economy, when it comes to the sanctions against Russia and if they are increased or they are sharpened, this is a plan of course of Washington, we might risk in Germany 300,000 jobs which are all connected to the business with Russia.

We should not underestimate as well the psychological effects simply of talks about sanctions. It is very easy to explain if we discuss today sanctions of tomorrow, companies which are in business with the Russian Federation will decrease their production, that means they will also have to decrease the jobs and the employment rate in these companies, and other effect which is right now a little bit outside the mainstream media is of course the euro crisis, which is now a crisis since years but which is not even close to be solved.

Press TV: All these problems that you are pointing at, it is not a Germany problem, it is an EU-wide problem. So are we going to see, if these things are not tackled in time, are we going to see disintegration of this union?

Ochsenreiter: That is very true what you say but we should not forget that Germany is the powerhouse of the European Union, the economic powerhouse. There can be no European Union as we know it today without the German backbone, without the German industrial backbone. Germany is one of the last industrialized countries in the European Union. That means if the German economy is weakened, if the German economy is going down, if it decreases its power, its production, it will have [automatic] effects [on] all European Union countries.

The problem, the basic problem, is the euro currency, which is one currency for an area for a continent with very different economic nations or economic entities. This is a thing which cannot work out. You can only have a currency for one united economic space. As long as this problem is not solved, the crisis will go on and the end could be disintegration, but disintegration in this context does not mean automatically something negative. It could be something like healing thunderstorm because that would mean that we get from a wrong economical financial system into a correct one.

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