Germany

The German press saw little cause for rejoicing in the Greek deal that saw Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble push through their key demands in Brussels overnight. For many, the lasting damage to Europe has already been done.

“It’s shameful how chancellor Angela Merkel and finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble have affronted their traditional partners,” said the left-leaning Taz newspaper. In France and Italy, it remarked, “they’re outraged by the authoritarian and egotistical behaviour of the Germans”.

“Grexit would have been a catastrophe for both Europe and Greece,” said Der Spiegel. “But a lot of damage has been done. Merkel and Schäuble have, with their staunch rhetoric of austerity, managed to turn half of Europe against Germany. Even the key partnership between Paris and Berlin seemed close to breaking point this weekend. A pure horror scenario for unified Europe.”

The self-flagellation did not stop there. “There were no winners in today’s deal, only losers,” thundered Bild. “Alexis Tsipras has lost, but so did those trying to save the euro. For the past five years they’ve been given the runaround by Greece. And now they’re throwing good money after the bad billions.”



The FAZ broadsheet was even more pessimistic: “Not even European unity was saved last night. Northern Europeans will moan about the loans and Greece about the undemocratic reforms. Europe has not chosen the end of the horror, it’s chosen horror without end.”

The business daily Handelsblatt, meanwhile, had this warning for Merkel: “The agreement will only work if both sides can save face. Tsipras can’t look to those in Athens like he’s suffered a crushing defeat. Merkel can’t afford to look like the chancellor of concessions when she stands before parliament in Berlin begging for votes for this next bailout package.”

Josie Le Blond in Berlin

France

The reaction in France reflected the political diversity of the country’s media and mixed feelings about the deal. Some commentators hailed François Hollande as a hero for apparently refereeing the negotiations in the face of Greek and German intransigence. Others, meanwhile, hammered the president for being Merkel’s poodle and supposedly orchestrating the humiliation of Greece.

The coverage contained some vocal Berlin-bashing, with Libération asking on Monday, before the deal was announced, “what is Germany playing at?”, and a hint of Britain-baiting – where was David Cameron, French TV wanted to know. Of the two, Germany came off worse.

Under the heading “The Greek people’s rights”, Le Monde ran a cartoon showing Merkel and Tsipras in a police station, with Hollande taking notes of the interview. “You have the right to remain silent,” the chancellor is telling the Greek leader. “Anything you say can be used against you”.

The criticism of Berlin did not stop there. The generally conservative news magazine Le Point said Germany’s image had been “seriously damaged” and that its victory could leave a “bad taste”, while the Communist newspaper L’Humanité described Merkel’s approach as that of a “cold dictatorship”, adding the Germans were in the process of erecting a new wall: “Nobody will get past the checkpoints, certainly not the poor, the rebellious, the democrats,” it wrote, accusing the German government of “cynically revealing its contempt for democracy … and intention to impose the hegemony of the financial markets.”

For once, Hollande, deeply unpopular in his own country, emerged broadly unhurt from the coverage, with the general verdict being that he had acquitted himself well and raised France’s international profile. Le Monde summed up the mood: “It’s 9am on a cloudy morning in Brussels. Europe is getting up. Greece is still in the eurozone, but everyone has a bit of a hangover.”

Kim Willsher in Paris

The actions of Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Alexis Tsipras kept writers and commentators in Europe busy. Photograph: John Macdougall/AFP/Getty Images

Spain

In late January, as the Greek election campaign was coming to an end, Pablo Iglesias, leader of the leftwing Podemos party, climbed up on stage at an Athens rally with Alexis Tsipras. Enthusiastically punching the air to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s First We Take Manhattan, the two anti-austerity politicians vowed that 2015 would be the year that change would sweep across Europe.

The scene lasted mere minutes, but has become the prism through which the Greek crisis is seen in Spain. Few here can untangle Syriza’s showdown with its creditors from the electoral battle playing out in Madrid, where the governing People’s party is seeking to convince Spaniards that austerity was the only response to the economic crisis while Podemos insists another Europe is possible. The two radically different versions of Spain and Europe will go head to head in a general election expected at the end of the year.

“An agreement that tastes of defeat for Greece: Harsh reforms in exchange for staying in the euro,” read the headline in left-leaning news site El Diario on Monday, which has prominently covered Podemos since the party was founded in 2014.

Pointing to the crisis of confidence between Greece and the EU and the idea of placing €50bn (£35bn) worth of Greek assets in a public trust, El País writer Xavier Vidal-Folch asked if the agreement was an act of revenge carried out by northern European countries over the south.

His colleague Lluís Bassets noted that Tsipras was paying dearly for having humiliated the troika. With Podemos likely not far from mind, he added: “Now we need to avoid Europe being seen as the cruel stepmother who only demands punishments ... this can only be done with more Europe and more economic growth, meaning policies that are focused more on Europe and less on austerity.”

Ashifa Kassam in Madrid

Italy

Italians responded to the bailout with a sense of relief. A commentary in business daily Il Sole 24 Ore remarked that the “aGreekment” had justifiably induced feelings of joy after years of doubt about whether a political solution to the slow-rolling Greek crisis was indeed feasible. “In a few hours we have moved from a fear of global contagion from several crises to a national collective euphoria,” it said.

In Corriere della Sera, columnist Antonio Polito said it was unquestionably in Italy’s national interests for a deal to have been done. “If Athens had come out, Italy would have not had the second-highest public debt in Europe, but the first, and not with one anti-European party, but two running for election,” he wrote, referring to the xenophobic Northern League and populist Five Star Movement founded by the former comedian Beppe Grillo.

While prime minister Matteo Renzi’s government has sought throughout the crisis to assure both Italians and investors that the eurozone’s third-largest economy was not heading down the same road as Greece, the deal will finally remove any lingering doubt – for the time being at least – that the country could succumb to contagion.

“With a deal being reached, it’s like an insurance policy. The worst case has been avoided,” said Wolfango Piccoli, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence in London. But it also opened the door for Renzi’s political opponents to portray the EU as a club ruled by one country – Germany – to the detriment of Italy, and to portray Renzi as too compliant.

Europe needed to heed the lesson it learned after the second world war to save itself from an internal crisis, warned Mariana Mazzucato in a column in La Repubblica. “Hopefully this week we will see less mediocrity and more capacity to think big, as happened after the war,” Mazzucato wrote, pointing a finger of blame at Germany for being too shortsighted.

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome

Lithuania

In one of the EU’s poorest countries, where pensioners receive less than half of their counterparts in Greece and lack of trust towards Athens is the dominant emotion, there was caution about the agreement.

“Greece will have to follow a long and painful path. It is going to be costly not only to Greece, but to all of us,” the Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė said at a press conference on Monday.

“The Greek government did a lot of damage in the recent five to six months to the financial state of the country. The country was pushed to the brink of economic collapse,” she added.

Lithuania was last week reported to be among the eurozone countries prepared to see a temporary Grexit – something which finance minister Rimantas Šadžius said was “absurd”. But following the deal, Šadžius warned that Greece now had to stick to its new obligations, and expressed concerns about the decision-making process in the Greek parliament.

“If the Greek institutions express a clear political will, I think it will help in achieving support in the parliaments or governments of the other eurozone countries,” he told the BNS news agency on Monday.



Šadžius believes that trust towards Greece was down to zero due to recent events and, especially, the referendum. Now, he reckons, it is up to the Greek government to get it back.

Šarūnas Černiauskas in Vilnius

Latvia

In Latvia, no more sympathetic to the Greek cause, officials also spoke of a lack of confidence in Athens’ political process to deliver its end of the bargain.

“We recognise the proposals submitted by Greece, but it is not sufficient to only give promises; we need to see actual moves and without any hesitation,” said Latvian prime minister Laimdota Straujuma.

According to Straujuma, Europe has lost any trust in Greece’s promises, and therefore the only opportunity for the country to restore confidence is immediate implementation of the reforms of the pension system, employment and privatisation.

“We expect concrete decisions from the Greek parliament in the coming days,” he said. “The first decisions should cover a profound reform of the pension system and rearrangement of the taxation system. Otherwise, Latvian society, which faced structural reforms and is still recovering from the social consequences of the recent crisis, would be unable to understand the acts and choices made by Greece.”

Speaking to Latvian radio, Andris Sprūds, director of the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, said: “Let’s not be naive – we will continue to muddle through. It’s a classic European decision – nobody is satisfied.”

Andris Strazds, an economist at the Bank of Latvia, added: “If Greece wasn’t able to implement much easier plans, it’s difficult to believe that they will be able to bring this plan to a successful conclusion.” According to Strazds, the eurozone needs to create a mechanism to expel countries “for flagrant violations of the rule over a longer period of time”.

Pauls Raudseps in Riga