Category Archives: A Fistful Of Euros

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The Danish Job

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This is really a hybrid post, although perhaps the unifying theme – for reasons which should be clear by the end – is Denmark.

In the first place Danish journalist Kjeld Hansen has a hard-hitting article in EU Observer about just what does actually happen to all that money paid-out in the form of agricultural subsidies (hat tip New Economist), whilst in the second one there is news today that the Commission is preparing a position paper on the EU’s social model for discussion at the October 27/28 summit.
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The Horse-Trading Model

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Earlier in the week Doug Muir posted on the generally negative attitude most Austrians seem to have towards EU enlargement. Others in comments have been suggesting that it is important not to go soft on human rights issues in the case of Turkey’s application. Well……

According to the French newspaper Le Figaro (as reported in EUPolitix) “Croatia forms part of the total bargaining on Turkey.” (that’s a quote from an anonymous diplomat btw).
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German Election: Beck Again

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Before anything else, the Federal Constitutional Court in fabulous Karlsruhe has ruled that publishing the election results from everywhere else before the delayed Dresden poll is indeed legal.

Minister-President of Rheinland-Pfalz, Kurt Beck, has done it again. This time he burst into the headlines by attacking the Greens. He told the Rheinische Merkur that the continuation of Red-Green was not the highest priority compared to making the SPD the biggest single party, and went on to say that in the event that a Red-Green government was impossible, he would prefer a grand coalition coloured red and black like a 1980s teenage boy’s bedroom. He further expressed pleasure that the SPD, apparently, was campaigning on an independent platform to the Greens.

For this he got a bollocking from Gerhard Schröder..
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CDU: Screwing up on purpose?

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Ok, now that Edward has already mentioned it, I might as well explain in a little more detail what I meant by saying that “on some level, the CDU might be afraid to win.”

Last Saturday evening, strolling through Stockholm’s Gamla Stan, Edward asked me about my gut feeling concerning the outcome of the German election next week. I told him that, while it was rather entertaining, this campaign has also been confusing – and confused – in many ways, particularly when looking at the CDU. And I believe the confused and confusing campaign the CDU is conducting is even more an expression of the way the German establishment is puzzled about the way ahead than the fact that Schröder “called” the elections a year too early, too early for any of his reforms to have any perceptible impact on the economy, not even in the West.
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Once In Another Lifetime

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Former UK prime minister Harold Wilson coined the phrase ‘a week is a long time in politics’. Well I don’t know about a week, but two months certainly is. Back on July 12 Doug Merrill was wryly posting about “Things You Can Do When You’re 20 Points Up in the Polls“. Maybe he’d now like to do another one about things you can’t do when you’ve just lost your overall majority. I think Merkel’s face tells it all, we’re now back with Fassbinder and deeply ensconced in ‘fear eats the soul’ territory. Whatever the outcome on Sunday, this will surely have to go down as one of the worst run political campaigns in recent history. As Tobias was suggesting to me at the weekend, maybe somewhere deep down inside they just don’t want to win.

A Little Levity

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at the expense of the airlines. (Don’t miss the more serious Europe-stuff in the posts below.)

Mark A.R. Kleiman summarizes a recent experience flying the friendly skies:

In general, the performance of every United employee I dealt with today convinced me that the airline has identified its basic strategic problem as an excess of customers; I plan to do what I can to help solve that problem. (This after ten years of using United as my primary airline; I’m a “Premier Executive” frequent flyer, which means >50,000 actual air miles per year.)

Lufthansa treated me similarly on July 26. In fact, that experience was every Internet-enabled traveler’s nightmare: online e-ticket, check-in, boarding pass in hand, denied boarding at the gate for lack of a paper ticket. WTF does not begin to cover my reaction. I reached the same conclusion as Mark did about United, and I have been working to help Lufthansa solve their problem.

Department of Wow

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Aside from revealing the extent to which internecine warfare seems to have broken out in the CDU camp, I was pretty much stopped in my tracks by this statement in Heinrich von Pierer’s interview with the FT:

“The important problems, such as the ageing of the population or what kind of immigration policy we need, are not being discussed at all”

Note: Heinrich von Pierer is Angela Merkel’s chief economic adviser and was formerly chief executive at Siemens.

A Good First Step

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The Financial Times reports this morning that EU Commission President José Barroso is about to launch a major ‘deregulation campaign’. He is reported as saying that he was determined to get the Commission to embrace better regulation, to carry out more systematic impact assessments and to make more frequent use of the option of not legislating at all. “The important thing is to change the culture of the organisation”. Maybe all this won’t turn out to be the last word in sliced bread, but it is moving in the right direction. According to the FT:

Mr Barroso wants to axe a wide variety of laws designed to impose EU-wide standards, claiming that some legislation was “absurd” and brought Europe into disrepute….
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German Election: Pollwatch

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Today’s Handelsblatt reports that a poll carried out for N24 TV shows the CDU stabilising in the polls after last week’s Schröder Surge. The CDU was on 42%, up 1.5%, with the FDP on 6%, down 0.5%, putting the Festival of Sternness Coalition on 48.5%. The SPD sank back one percentage point to 33.5%, with the Greens unchanged on 7% and the Left on 8%, also unchanged – putting the two camps exactly level and the Ampelkoalition on 46.5%. (Regarding the “traffic light option”, it’s worth remembering that the Left and the CDU-CSU are not exactly the material of a stable opposition, and a minority government could theoretically survive by playing them off against each other.)

Interestingly, an opportunity to test the validity of electoral spread betting has come up – the betting market Wahlstreet (ouch) has the SPD on 34% and the CDU just under 40%, with Greens on 8.5%, Left on 7.5% and FDP on 7.5%. This would put the Red-Red-Green buggered imagination option in the box seat with exactly 50%, the CDU/FDP on 47.5%…and the Ampelkoalition over the finishing line with an impressive 50%. (Amusingly, given that the margin of error for the polls is 2.5%, Wahlstreet quotes to the nearest two decimal places.) Over time, it seems that votes are drifting very gradually from the smaller to the bigger parties.

You might think this is of limited interest, seeing as Guido “He’s Not Dull – He’s a Statesman” Westerwelle told the nation in last night’s TV debate that the FDP would be in opposition if the CDU/FDP ticket didn’t make it (Link to the Austrian newspaper whose website uses frames). But, not so fast!
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Austria Would Prefer Not To

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Earlier this year, Eurobarometer started asking members what they thought about future EU expansion. The results (which can be found here, as a pdf) were pretty interesting.

52% of Europeans support membership for Croatia, while only 34% oppose it. (War criminals? What war criminals?) And 50% support membership for Bulgaria. But only 45% support Romania coming in. Which is a bit embarrassing, given that the EU has already firmly committed to Romanian membership, even if it might be delayed for a year.

Still, the Romanians can take comfort; they’re well ahead of Serbia (40%), Albania (36%) and Turkey (dead last, with 35% of Europeans supporting Turkish membership and 52% against).

Where this gets interesting — in a Eurovision-y sort of way — is when you start to break it down by country.
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