Tag Archives: political

Oh for those peaceful days of the ’50s and ’60s

Posted on by

There’s a letter in today’s (UK-based) Daily Telegraph by that famous KGB-defector and media-darling, Oleg Gordiesvsky:

Sir – France always had a cult of revolution. The French public fully supported extremist political parties, Communists and Trotskyists, which had political violence as an integral part of their programmes.

Now they are reaping the fruits of it.

Oleg Gordievsky, London WC1

It’s not so much that this letter is wrong on its facts that I take issue with, it’s the “now they are reaping the fruits of it”, as if until now politics in France had been like a Scandinavian country run by clones of Sir Geoffrey Howe permanently drugged to the eyeballs on Mogadon.
Continue reading →

Of Demons and Details.

Posted on by

Tonight, a French friend sent sent me an email expressing his disappointment about the fact that a Eurodistrict comprising the French (Euro-)city Strasbourg and the German regional authority Kehl, which will be officially created by officials from both parties at a signing ceremony tomorrow afternoon, is falling far short of the enthusiasm it was conceived with (some details by Reuters (in French)).

During the heyday of the latest Franco-German governmental rapprochement in early 2003, Chancellor Schröder and President Chirac signed a declaration calling for new forms of European institutional cooperation. But lacking consistent ideational support from the two governments, the regional authorities were unable to overcome different administrative practices, legal concerns, and – problems to fund a bridge. Thus, they will not establish a new form of supranational institution but rather “just another” council for regional cross-border cooperation. And they won’t get a new bridge.
Continue reading →

Feldstein: A Eurosceptic at the Fed?

Posted on by

Bloomberg this morning has a review of the pros and cons of Marty Feldstein as Alan Greenspan’s successor. One thing they don’t touch on is what the implications might be of having someone at the head of the US Federal Reserve who is pretty much convinced the Euro can’t work.

“Marty has something of a tin ear for politics, and that would be a problem in the Fed chairman’s job,” says William Niskanen, who followed Feldstein as head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1984 and is now chairman of the Cato Institute, a free-market research group in Washington.

Feldstein finished second only to Ben Bernanke, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, when 104 financial professionals were asked last month to name Greenspan’s most likely successor. Bernanke got 38 percent of the vote and Feldstein 31 percent in the survey, which was conducted by Stone & McCarthy Research Associates, a Princeton, New Jersey, consulting company. No other candidate received more than 10 percent.
Continue reading →

The Italian Government Has A New Crisis

Posted on by

Germany isn’t the only EU country where serious ongoing economic problems are leading to political gridlock. Italy’s situation is no better, and arguably worse. This ‘worse’ aspect was pushed into the headlines yesterday by the resignation of Economy Minister Domenico Siniscalco. This is sending shock waves throughout the entire Italian political system. It still isn’t clear at the time of writing whether the Berlusconi government can survive, especially given the gravity of the underlying problem which is the need to make severe budget cuts when Italy is in a prolonged recession and elections loom sometime next spring.

Essentially Siniscalco quit because of continuing government infighting over the 2006 budget and over the administration�s failure to force the resignation of Bank of Italy Governor Antonio Fazio following the scandal produced by accusations that he showed bias against Dutch bank ABN AMRO during a takeover battle for the Italian Banca Antonveneta SpA.
Continue reading →

The Coalition Inside the Party

Posted on by

The Jamaican solution is now rapidly hurtling towards the plausibility horizon, as perhaps the most serious objection against it becomes blindingly clear. After all, the CDU-CSU is in itself a coalition of two parties. It’s usually in British politics that one speaks of a party being in itself a coalition, assuming as one does that proportional representation countries tend to make their coalitions explicit. But it remains true that political parties are rarely monolithic.

Down-blog, there’s been a discussion going about whether the CDU-CSU is really a single entity, a pair of political parties who share a parliamentary fraction, two political parties in coalition, or something else. Whatever it formally is, there are indubitably both CDU and CSU MPs. And that’s all you need for a potential inner-party politics. The CSU’s leader, Edmund Stoiber, is seriously not happy with the Jamaican option. Here, he tells the CSU faction in the Bavarian parliament (what, there are others? Who knew?) that “the contradictions between the interested parties are so great that such an alliance is not in sight”, and that the Greens “would have to reinvent themselves completely”. The Bavarian interior minister remarked that the CSU would have to swallow not just a frog but a giant toad to join such a coalition, and the minister of the economy pointed out all the policy disputes listed in my last post, and then some more. Not just the kerazy Bavarians said so – the Federal CDU’s deputy leader Christoph Böhr said that he could not imagine “throwing the heart of our manifesto into the wastepaper basket”. Damn, the metaphors are getting a hammering.

On the other hand, although Claudia Roth, one of the Greens’ multiple leaders, repeated that the FDP would have to do what Stoiber said the Greens would have to (she used exactly the same words) before they could join a traffic light coalition, her colleague and fellow-leader Reinhard Bütikofer signalled that the Greens were available for talks with both the CDU and the FDP. He also said that “his fantasy did not reach far enough” to visualise Angela Merkel becoming chancellor.

Meanwhile, on the Ampelkoalition front….

Losing the CSU would outweigh gaining the Greens, so that’s as good as a veto of the idea.
Continue reading →

Germany’s American Campaign

Posted on by

Well, it seems my guest stint is going to be along the lines of “All German Election, All The Time”, but some more things have come up! In last night’s TV debate between Schröder and Merkel, it seems, the CDU leader used some words that weren’t entirely her own. According to Der Standard (or should that be “the Austrian newspaper whose website could be better organised”?), her peroration was very similar to another peroration delivered in the same sort of circumstances. Not Bismarck this time…but Ronald Reagan, in his debate with Jimmy Carter on the 28th of October 1980. (You can compare the texts at the link above.) Now, that is of minor interest in itself, but it does point up a curious feature of modern German politics.

It’s all so American.

As I pointed out in my last AFOE contribution, Germany has a curious combination of a parliamentary constitution and a presidential political culture, which gives rise to the notion of a Spitzenkandidat separate from the party leader. Not only that, but yesterday saw all national TV networks cleared for a one-to-one debate between the top two candidates…something that doesn’t happen even in supposedly presidential Britain. Slogans have something oddly transatlantic about them, too – Edmund Stoiber ran last time under the line “Kantig. Echt. Erfolgreich.”, which reminded me at least far more of “A Reformer With Results” than anything European.

It’s always said that TV is crucial in Britain, but there is so little political coverage that I’ve always doubted its importance relative to the press, which covers elections exhaustively and addresses a readership more likely than the average to vote. But German elections seem far more televisual…

Just as in last year’s US presidential election, the whole debate was accompanied by a spin storm whipped up by both sides’ pet bloggers (the CDU cunningly grabbed the domain name wahlfakten.de for theirs whilst the SPD had to content themselves with roteblogs). However, wahlblog05.de seems to be channelling the spirit of our dear departed generalelection05, scrupulously balanced and perhaps even a tad too serious.

WB05 informs us that another US political tradition has even taken hold, too – destroying your opponents’ campaign materials. What on earth is going on?

Survey: Germany’s (likely) upcoming election

Posted on by

While the more important part of Germany’s electorate seems to be treating the ongoing campaign as some kind of diversion from a rather rainy summer, there is also, according to a poll published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine today, a common understanding that the upcoming federal election – the one that will take place on September 18 if the constitutional court confirms President Koehler’s decision to dissolve the Bundestag – is a particularly important one.

Given this sentiment and the most unusual way the elections were called, it is not entirely surprising that, in addition to the usual pollsters, political scientists concerned with electoral research are having a busy summer. One of them is my friend Thorsten Faas at the University Duisburg-Essen, who is currently asking Germans to spend a couple of minutes filling out an online survey at www.wahlumfrage2005.de (in German).

So if you’re entitled to vote in Germany, are interested in the kind of questions political scientists might ask to make you reveal all your self-contradicting political opinions, and have a couple of minutes to spare for the progress of science, why not take the survey. I already did, and it didn’t hurt…

Heeding Henry.

Posted on by

Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, may be coming out of the dog house – if only conceptually.

After even the left leaning German daily taz recently began publishing political obituaries for the man who more than anyone represents the political maturing (or not) of the generation of ’68 (following the affair about problematic political guidelines leading to criminal exploitation of German visa policies in Eastern Europe and in light of the looming federal election that will likely lead to a government without a Green party participation), Mr Fischer may have decided that it might be worthwhile to spend his remaining time in office not just by campaigning for a permanent German seat in the UN security council but by heeding Henry Farrell’s advice about the opportunities of a dieing European constitution and going back to his own foreign policy ‘roots’: In May 2000, he used a speech at Berlin’s Humboldt University to sketch out his ideas for ever closer union, “From Confederacy to Federation” (pdf available).
Continue reading →