As he spoke, Schäuble directed a piercing look at Sapin. ‘Elections cannot be
allowed to change economic policy,’ he began. Greece had obligations that
could not be reconsidered until the Greek programme had been completed, as
per the agreements between my predecessors and the troika. The fact that the
Greek programme could not be completed was apparently of no concern to
him.

What startled me more than Wolfgang Schäuble’s belief that elections are
irrelevant was his total lack of compunction in admitting to this view. His
reasoning was simple: if every time one of the nineteen member states changed
government the Eurogroup was forced to go back to the drawing board, then
its overall economic policies would be derailed. Of course he had a point:
democracy had indeed died the moment the Eurogroup acquired the authority
to dictate economic policy to member states without anything resembling
federal democratic sovereignty.