How the Euro Was Saved

‘I have chosen for Europe and the euro’

Two years on, it is clear the frantic, improvised actions of the final year of the crisis saved the euro. Yet the eurozone is far from full health. Debt levels in Europe’s south are extreme. Unemployment remains near historic highs, a side effect of the bitter medicine imposed by the crisis-fighters. Anti-EU parties were the beneficiary of the fallout in the European Parliament elections of May 2014.

But the 15-year-old currency union passed its most important test: in its darkest hour, its leaders did whatever it took to hold it together. And no one mattered more than Angela Merkel, raised in east Germany, chancellor of a united Germany and, thanks in part to the crisis, Europe’s most powerful leader. ...