The “no” vote from the Cypriot Parliament to the Eurogroup bailout plan has been the dominating issue in headlines of the international press, which cite that processes highlighted the European failure concerning the strategy to facing the debt crisis in the Eurozone, causing severe tremors in European integration.
The British newspaper The Guardian said that that the alternative scenario is for Cypriot banks to surrender in bankruptcy.
Reports in the German press have a common line saying that the most European inadequacies over the political strategy to confront the debt crisis are now shown clearly.
“There is the threat of Cyprus becoming a guinea pig of a policy which needs one political loan after another,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung cited. “Cyprus is going over the cliff,” the newspaper Handelsblatt said.
Süddeutsche Zeitung referred to “a flee into the arms of Russia” noting that if Cyprus leaves the Eurozone and only Russia rescues it, “the island will become a Moscow’s protectorate.”
“Uncertain is the future of Cyprus,” Deutsche Welle reported, arguing that the Eurogroup is still willing to offer support even as Cyprus turned to Russia as a savior.
The London newspaper The Telegraph wrote that, the “confusion could provide Moscow with a great opportunity to gain a major commercial foothold in the Eurozone by exploiting the 5-8 trillion cubic feet of gas estimated to be lying off the coast of Cyprus,” while the New York Times headline was Protecting Their Own, Russians Offer an Alternative to the Cypriot Bank Tax.
The Belgian newspaper De Standaard stated Cyprus and the Eurozone Ultimately Protect Savers, and the French Le Soir’s headline was Thrift: A Taboo Has Broken In Europe. On its front page, Libre Belgique said, Cyprus Has To Be Saved At Any Cost.” On its website, the French journal Liberation wrote Cyprus, The Island Seeking 5.8 Billion Euros.
“Indeed, the imbroglio should serve as a lesson in how not to deal with financial and sovereign debt problems,” Martin Wolf from The Financial Times put it.
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