Merkel was not playacting. She knew how narrow her coalition’s majority was. If she had returned to Berlin with the Franco-American proposal, she might well have faced a major mutiny on the Right and the need for early elections. Given the opinion polls at the time, that was not an attractive option for Merkel. With support for her FDP coalition partners collapsing, a German election at the end of 2011 might well have yielded a majority for Red-Green.56 That was not the outcome to the eurozone crisis that Sarkozy wanted. Given the pressure that France was coming under, Paris was in no mood to
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