Timothy Garton Ash: Merkel's Europe policy hurts Germans

The Germany chancellor must change her strategy if she wants to prevent the collapse of the Eurozone, writes Timothy Garton Ash in the left-liberal daily El País: "For more than a year now Merkel has attempted to find the narrow - perhaps nonexistent - line where the minimum that can be done to save the embattled Eurozone periphery meets the maximum she thinks German public opinion will bear. She has then tried to win her Eurozone partners to that course. So far it has not worked. Now she needs to start from the other end: work out, with the ECB and other Eurozone governments, what is the best, most credible deal available, and then put all her authority on the line to persuade a reluctant German public that this will be in the long-term, enlightened national self-interest of Germany. Which it will be. For no one has more to lose from the disintegration of the Eurozone than the continent's central economic power. It may soon be too late."

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