French Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg, speaking to a meeting in eastern France on Sunday said that the time has come for France to resist Germany’s “obsession” with austerity and promote alternative policies across the euro zone that support household consumption:
- “France is the euro zone’s second-biggest economy, the world’s fifth-greatest power, and it does not intend to align itself, ladies and gentlemen, with the excessive obsessions of Germany’s conservatives”
- “That is why the time has come for France and its government, in the name of the European Union’s survival, to put up a just and sane resistance [to these policies].”
