A HEAVY cloud of irony hung over Potsdam on Thursday night.

With his bond-buying bazooka still smoking and German editorial knives being audibly sharpened, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi was presented with a prize for European achievement. Giving the laudatio speech with a pained smile was German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble.

“I’d probably have decided differently had I known that this honour would fall on this day,” joked Mr Schäuble. He spoke in general, if pointed, terms. The Frankfurt bank was created as an independent institution, he said, arising from the painful historical experience that “democracies tend to take the easy path”.

Financial problems could never be solved by monetary policy, he insisted, though Berlin has effectively given its blessing for the ECB’s bond-buying programme, which the Bundesbank views as “tantamount to financing governments by printing banknotes”.

This was also the line of argument of angry German politicians who took to the airwaves yesterday. “I’m convinced the ECB has overstepped its mandate – we should initiate legal checks to establish this,” said Klaus-Peter Willsch, a eurosceptic member of the ruling CDU.

Frank Schaeffler, a bailout sceptic in the junior Free Democrats (FDP) coalition parter, said the ECB was on its way to becoming a “bad bank for all of Europe’s junk debt”.

But a spokesman for chancellor Angela Merkel described the negative German reaction as overblown. Berlin’s reasoning, which cannot be repeated into a microphone, is that the ECB’s promise of unlimited bond-buying will, in practice, never amount to anything of the sort. Admitting that in public, however, would defeat the purpose for financial markets.

Among the more moderate negative reactions, the centre-left Süddeutsche Zeitung daily, asked whether anyone would take seriously the ECB’s promises to end bond-buying if the conditions of reform were not met.

The reaction was most vicious among the conservative press. The Bild tabloid attacked what it called Mr Draghi’s “blank cheque” for crisis countries. Bemoaning the end of the no-bailout clause in the Maastricht treaty, the Frankfurter Allgemeine – house journal of German fiscal hawks – asked rhetorically if, in a crisis-hit euro zone, “necessity knows no laws?”

The ECB was now a “political hostage”, it said: southern Europe can refinance itself on the cheap without reforming while Berlin can “hide behind the ECB” to allow this happen.

In Potsdam on Thursday night the ECB president, anticipating today’s outrage in the German press, said it would be a good idea for media outlets to ask how colleagues in other countries perceived matters. A “European public sphere” was as urgently needed, he said, as “democratic participation” of citizens.