Germans desire for European reforms might come back to haunt it

Be careful what you wish for is the expression that springs to mind when you hear the German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and his economics minister Sigmar Gabriel suggest the European Commission should adopt troika methods to name and shame EU governments into meeting their reform obligations.

The German economy is not exactly firing on all four cylinders at the moment and perhaps some reforms are needed close to home? The notion of European Commission officials taking the Germans to task for not doing enough to stimulate demand in their own economy is an intriguing one.

But it is clearly not what Mr Schäuble or Mr Gabriel have in mind. When they talk of reform, they mean one thing and one thing only: fiscal consolidation. They want to see some sort of troika-like process put in place in Paris and Rome, which have shown rather less enthusiasm for austerity than Ireland did.

What is revealing – and worrying – about all this is what it seems to say about the inflexibility of German thinking, which does not seem to have taken any notice of the fact that the second and third largest economies in the euro zone no longer buy into the economic arguments that underpin fiscal consolidation.

The reasons are complex, but the main one is that it does not work. The euro zone is heading back into recession, while the United States and Britain – two countries that adopted an expansionary response to the crisis – are growing strongly.

But rather than confront the possibility that the plan might be wrong, Mr Schäuble and Mr Gabriel are cleaving to the notion that it just has to be implemented more rigorously.