Is there a Finnish deal or isn’t there? Mps were clamouring to know. According to the Financieele Dagblad and the other Dutch newspapers finance minister Jan Kees de Jager’s explanatory letter to parliament on Monday has calmed things down a bit. Mps have zoomed back to their French campsites to enjoy what is left of their holidays.

What happened was that the Fins would support a Greek aid packet but only if they were given cash collateral from the Greek crisis kitty to be put in an escrow account. The Fins were allowed to negotiate with the Greeks about the deal while, apparently, all the other European leaders were busy doing something else.
The Netherlands has now woken up to the deal and put a spoke in the Finnish wheel by saying that what is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. In other words, this particular deal would only be given the go ahead if all the other member states could be in on it too. That would put Greece in an even tighter spot, the FD writes, and de Jager declared it ‘unworkable’.
The minister may have reassured Mps but Trouw is looking at the wider implications. It is shaking its head at the ‘sheer stupidity’ of the European leaders who have made ‘a complete mess’ of the governance of the euro zone. It slates the Fins for wanting to put a ‘private insurance’ with Greece into place: The financial markets will not be happy with such goings on, the paper writes, and assuring us that such a deal is invalid without the other European countries’ consent is ‘too little too late’.
As for Rutte saying he thought the collateral would be a Greek island rather than €1bn, that is ‘nothing short of farcical’, the paper splutters.
Trouw warns that the European leaders don’t seem to learn from their mistakes: ‘Europe has a wide experience with financial market upheaval. It has felt the power of the speculators and the damage of mutual distrust and putting the national interest first. (..) The old monetary system collapsed and the Euro opened the way to a stable monetary union.
The way the Euopean leaders are behaving shows they have learnt nothing from their past experiences. They have allowed Greece to become part of the monetary union and now they are allowing another small country to endanger it yet again. That is unacceptable. The Finnish deal has to go. None of the Euro countries should be allowed to negotiate individually. It is time the leaders show that there is only one interest that should be served: the Euro.’