Merkel Stands Firm on Crisis Austerity, CDU Ally Altmaier Says

German Chancellor Angela Merkel won’t budge from her insistence on budget austerity in Europe as unavoidable to resolving the debt crisis, a senior lawmaker in her party said.

“The chancellor is pretty resistant to pressure,” Peter Altmaier, the chief whip of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said in an interview today in Berlin. France’s presidential vote and the Dutch government’s fall don’t change the fact “there’s no money in Europe, only deficits everywhere you look.”