Sueddeutsche Zeitung: Nabucco fiasco dashes EU’s illusions

Blackmail, deception, hate. These days the leaders and investors in Nabucco gas pipeline should ponder whether Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Nabucco is not an omen for the project. The plot of the opera has had much in common with the project worth billions of euros for quite a long time now, much more in common than its establishers would wish. The intrigues around the gas pipeline, which should be built in a several years from Asia to Europe, start looking like a drama in the last act. The Nabucco project faces a failure, comments the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily.

The officials responsible for the energy policy in Brussels and some capitals of Europe have long been dreaming of an own pipeline in the EU which would transport gas from Central Asia to the West, bypassing Russia. Nabucco is designed to reduce Europe’s growing dependence on the most significant gas provider – Russian state concern Gazprom – as well as on the willful President Vladimir Putin.

And now the curtain over Nabucco can be pulled forever. Germany’s RWE plans to quit the project.

Top politicians in Western Europe will have to helplessly look Nabucco sinking to the bottom. And this fiasco shows how little Europe can oppose to Russia’s dominating position on the market of raw materials.  

(Translated from German)