There can be no solution to Greece’s woes without a policy change on the EU level, Germany’s leading contemporary intellectual Jurgen Habermas has said.

In an interview Saturday with the Efimerida ton Syntakton ahead of his visit to Athens for an international philosophy congress next month, Habermas said that deeper political integration in Europe is the only defense against the perils of unfettered capitalism.

Habermas, who has in the past criticized the system established by Berlin and Paris during the crisis as a “post-democracy,” expressed concern about the social and political turmoil in Greece.

“It reminds me of conditions in the late Weimar Republic that brought the fascists to power,” the 84-year-old thinker said