Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday hosts EU talks on felling sky-high youth unemployment less than three months before German elections after coming under fire for championing austere spending cuts and helping to create a “lost generation”.
Days after EU leaders okayed up to eight billion euros (HK$80.7 billion) for initiatives to help get the region’s 5.6 million jobless under 25-year-olds into work, Merkel will gather leaders and labour ministers in Berlin to thrash out the ways and means.
Merkel, whose conservatives have been cruising high in the polls, has shifted tone on fighting Europe’s financial woes in recent months, tempering her earlier insistence on budgetary rigour with an emphasis on growth.
And while she began co-opting major social policies from the main opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) years ago, she has hardly missed a chance of late to warn that if Europe fails to foster more growth, it faces losing a whole generation.
Hard on the heels of a warning by US President Barack Obama on his Berlin visit this month that a change of tack was needed to avoid just that, Merkel said last week that Europe’s young people were “owed” chances for the future.
“And we particularly owe them it because they, the youth, are in no way to blame for the failures which have arisen in recent years,” she said in the Bundestag lower house of parliament.