As for "ruling Europe," Germany's influence is a direct result of the fact that it's the most populous EU state with the largest GDP. It's going to have influence, especially when every other EU member comes begging for bailouts. The impression I've gotten is that, as a culture of limited spending and high saving is the norm in Germany, and as it's financially strong, the German government tends to assume that such policies would work well to help get the indebted states in Europe the ability to pull themselves out of their rut. But austerity is generally unpopular, especially in countries like Greece where it's rather unusual, so Germany gets a lot of resentment for attaching strings to loans.
They're not trying to rule Europe, but they would like their loans paid back someday.
Yeah....... no.
Germany can run government surpluses without negative consequences for its domestic private sector because it can run a huge trade surplus with the rest of the EU.
The idea that this strategy can work for every country is, frankly, idiotic. For some countries to maintain large trade surpluses, other countries must maintain trade deficits. That's just accounting.
This, incidentally, is exactly what I was talking about when I said the Germans trade in racist stereotypes. You didn't do this in this post, but of course there are shades here of "virtuous Germans, lazy Greeks" which was the attitude taken by the German media and most of the political system to the Greek debt crisis.
Germany has not bailed out any other country, the bailouts have gone straight to debt servicing, which means they end up being paid to the (mostly German) elite banks that hold most of the debt of the periphery governments e.g. Greece.
They want their loans paid back someday? I guess they shouldn't have conspired to allow Greece into the EU (in violation of EU rules; special thanks to Goldman Sachs for helping the Greek government massage its numbers) so that their financial elites could rob the Greeks blind.
And by the way, the "structural reforms" they have pushed on southern Europe have resulted in literally entire generations' worth of lost economic output, youth unemployment rates that are actually higher than the worst parts of the literal Great Depression,with fairly predictable political consequences. The 'austerity' that you note is 'unpopular' (though of course the way you phrase it makes it sound like children don't like to take their medicine) is essentially the Republican agenda for the United States: pretend to be afraid of deficits so you can destroy the ability of the people to act in concert through the government, sell off every public good for private profit, cut social services and transfer payments so that you can cut taxes for rich people to "spur investment."
You rightly despise this agenda and the undemocratic means with which it is being carried out in the United States, so why do you evidently support it when it is carried out in Europe?
