Matteo Renzi picks fight with Angela Merkel at the EU summit

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has built a reputation as a mischief-maker on the European scene, but at a Brussels summit Friday he took it to the next level: He went after Germany.

Renzi’s clash with German Chancellor Angela Merkel during the meeting of EU leaders Friday spiced up what turned out to be a somewhat lackluster set of accomplishments from the two-day summit.

“It was very impressive how tough he was” in confronting Merkel on several key EU issues, said a minister who was in the room.

Renzi also accused Germany of profiting from the euro crisis, pointing to moves by the German airport operator Fraport to buy airports in Greece after Merkel urged Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to privatize them.“You cannot say that you are giving your blood to Europe,” Renzi told Merkel after the German chancellor spoke of Berlin’s push for European growth, according to an official.

The clash with Merkel highlights Renzi’s increasingly confrontational posture towards EU officials. In the last six months, he’s quarreled with European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, and other leaders and diplomats often gripe about him as pushy and full of himself. 

Among Renzi’s issues with Merkel was a deposit guarantee system in the eurozone. Germany is reluctant to go ahead with the proposal as German savers could be exposed to risks from polices implemented in other countries.

The Italian premier, who has been pushing for the proposal, accused Merkel of reneging on an earlier pledge to support it. In his remarks on the deposit guarantee system, Renzi had the backing of two left-wing governments, Portugal and Greece, according to the source.

“Merkel was on the defensive,” said the minister, who added that the German chancellor denied she had changed her view on the proposal, saying it had never been a priority for Berlin.

A top Italian official before the meeting expressed the view of his government when asked about the fight with Germany, telling POLITICO: “genug ist genug” which in German means “enough is enough.”

Read the whole article on Politico