Second, by accepting that bail-out funds can go straight to banks, Mrs Merkel has made a big shift from her insistence that help could go only to governments, with tough conditions attached.
Mr. Dadey and other government transparency advocates said they worry that a pair of Supreme Court decisions in 2010 that paved the way for increased outside spending on the federal level in the form of so-called super PACs made donors more comfortable with doing so on the city level, portending a possible shift this year.