The main point of the article appears to be that peripheral EU countries did not benefit as much from the internal open market as Germany due to weak ‘civil ser

The main point of the article appears to be that peripheral EU countries did not benefit as much from the internal open market as Germany due to weak ‘civil service’ and oligarchic structures which predated the EU and caused a misappropriation of EU funds intended to improve competitiveness. It then somehow seems to conclude that this was all Germany’s fault instead of being the fault of the people in those peripheral countries with ‘economic implosion, rising inequality and widespread corruption’. The article does mention wage suppression in the beginning but does not give a good argument why the wage suppression as observed in Germany since the early 2000's is a bad thing -- if wages are inflated and you need to compete with China for manufacturing, then you can either scrap your manufacturing or suppress wages, there’s not that much of an alternative there. My sibling comment arguing that the largest low-wage sector in the EU is somehow inherently bad is also misguided: if the alternative is much higher unemployment, low-wage jobs are still preferable to no jobs, especially if they come with the usual social security mechanism, as is increasingly the case again.