Politics and Governments in Europe

Eurozone Crisis
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Introduction
The year 2009 is one of the darkest years in the history of the European countries, or it can also besaid the year that marks the start of a dark era. Starting from the year 2009, a good majority of the European orient have been faced with steep debts that crippled the European economy. What’s worse is that most of the countries that experienced the economic crisis that came in the year 2008, have since recovers and quite a number of emerging markets are also looking promising such as India and china. A good majority of the European nations, however, never recovered from the reception and thus have been struggling since; as such, this crisis has been labeled the Eurozone crisis, seeing that these are countries that use Euros a currency that and been introduced earlier to these nation (Forbes, 2015). The European nations have run into so much debt that they are not in a position to bail out their governments and what it owes the banks.It is with the help of the European commission,European central bank and the international monetary funds that some of the nations have been able to at leastto rise above the tides. Even with the Maastricht treaty, most of the countries still went into debts and spending deficits as they were using substandard and sometimes complex financial systems to mask their debt(Theodoropoulou, 2014). Different countries in the European Union were affected differently by the crisis; however most of them are still struggling with the crisis years later. Between Greece and Portugal, the latter seems to have handled the situation with a lot more consideration without a rush to revive the economy without compromising n the welfare of the citizens.
Thesis statement: Portugal handled the economic crisis better that Greece in light of the welfare policies during the Eurozone crisis and their debt problems
The Eurozone crisis explained
By the year 2007 most of the European nations seemed on the surface to be doing fine economically apart from Greece that was well canvased. The rest were showing signs high public debt despite the fact that they still held on.Most of the nations had devised tactics which they used to mask their scrupulous dealing while negating the public eye and evading international scrutiny. The global credit crunch however changed the status of most countries and exposed the vile underneath creating panic and disillusionment. A good majority of the European commercial banks were exposed to the bad debts and thus lost millions in the crisis. For example there were the subprime mortgage debt bundles that saw the property bubble crush the economy further (BBC News, 2015). The recession that took place in the year 2008 and 2009 also saw the banks experience a fall in the ability to lend and invest, which further caused a plummet of the economy.
As the recession grew, the house pricing in most of the countries came down, this further hurt the banks that had heavily invested prior to the real estate bubble. Banks lost billions of euros through this shift. As a result of the recession, the governments suffered immensely froma declining economy. Less people were working as companies laid down some of their staff to grapple with the ...