Category Archives: A Fistful Of Euros

All AFOE Blog Posts

Red light or green?

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You already know, because Alex has been doing such a good job of making sure you do, that the impending German elections will be as close-run as the related campaign has been shambolic. According to the polls, the Union and FDP will outpoll the currently governing SPD-Green coalition; but not by enough for a majority. What’s more, the Union has been slipping (slightly) of late whilst the SPD are (slightly) gaining. Black/Yellow (48%) are still doing better than Red/Green (42%), but not as well as Red/Green/Even Redder1 (49%).

What’s interesting about all this, though, is the number that’s not being loudly pointed at: Red/Green/Yellow, which is currently the same as Black/Yellow. This is the so-called Ampelkoalition (‘traffic-light coalition’, based on party colours). Down in the comments to one of Alex’s earlier posts there’s been some talk about this as an increasingly likely outcome of the vote, though one commenter begs to differ.

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Flattened By The Flat Tax?

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Following Alex, more opinion polls seem to be showing that Merkel will struggle to get a majority in partnerhip with the FDP. At the same time voices are being raised within the CDU suggesting that the principal responsibility for this debacle lies with the Professor from Heidelberg.

Some indication of why flat tax ideas might impact so negatively on German voters is offered by the Financial Times this morning in a leader commenting on similar proposals from within the UK Conservative Party:
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Parliament Live on Blogs

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One of our lurkers turns out to be from the Media section of the European Parliament. Today and tomorrow the EP is webcasting a conference on technology and democracy, with a prominent role for blogs.

Mystery in European Parliament…!
just like you, the European Parliament is well aware of the increasing power and importance of blogging, which hasn’t only started to blur the lines between the private and the public, between journalism and opinion, between citizen and politician, but has also opened up new questions in the field of democracy and democratic control. As part of the activities that will accompany the launch of its new website, the European Parliament has decided to hold several debates dealing with the fast-moving developments in digital society on the 12th and 13th of September, the first of which is entitled Web logs: competition, challenge or chance? Who’s afraid to open Pandora’s Blogs? Participants in the debate will include several well-known journalists, bloggers and experts in the field, who will no doubt ensure a lively debate that should be of special interest to bloggers, as well as anyone interested in the relationship between digital technology and democracy. We would therefore like to invite you to join us on the Europarl website (http://www.europarl.eu.int/eplive/public/default_en.htm), where the event will be broadcast live on the 12th of September starting at 3PM via web streaming.

Wishing you all the best in your blogging endeavours,
Yours Sincerely,
José Manuel Nunes LIBERATO
Directeur, DIRECTION A – MEDIA

If you go to the site, click on “Round Tables on the Information Society” and then scroll down to “watch”. As I read the schedule, there’s only half an hour left today, but several hours tomorrow.

And yet again, Albania

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Back in July, I posted about the Parliamentary elections in Albania. Dedicated readers may recall that the Socialist government of PM Fatos Nano lost, and the opposition Democrats (under former PM Sali Berisha) won… but that Nano was refusing to concede defeat.

Well, he finally did. It took nearly two months, and three special runoff elections, but Nano at last conceded the election on Tuesday. Sali Berisha is now Prime Minister.
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A modest proposal for CAP reform

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I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large – Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 – so it takes a while if you go to see my family. Ours is a large, disorganised, occasionally frightening clan who, depending on pure whim, identifies itself as either German-Canadian, Dutch-Canadian, Russian-Canadian or Ukrainian-Canadian. Our tribal language is an obscure dialect of Low Saxon (Platt for the actual Germans out there) spoken primarily in Paraguay, Mexico, Central America and Saskatchewan, and whose most famous speaker is, arguably, Homer Simpson. It’s a long story, don’t ask. It not being much of a literary language, we all just say our ancestors spoke German – the liturgical language of my clan’s particular sect.

In contrast to Europe and the US, Canadians are a lot less disturbed about asking people about their ethnic identities or expressing some loyalty to them. I guess the main reason is that Canada has never really pretended to be a nation built atop an identity, but rather a place where an identity of sorts has slowly built up from the existence of a nation. There is no Canadian myth of the melting pot, and as our soon-to-be new Governor General has demonstrated, no serious demand for nativism in public office. Michaëlle Jean, who is slated to be the powerless and unelected Canadian head-of-state when the Queen is out of the country – e.g., practically always – when she is sworn in on the 27th, is no doubt the most attractive candidate we’ve ever had for the office. And, like her predecessor, she is a former CBC/SRC reporter and talking head.

Ms Jean and I share an endemically Canadian charateristic: We both can and do identify ourselves shamelessly as several different kinds of hyphenated Canadians. She is French Canadian, but that’s hardly strange. She is also Franco-Canadian – Ms Jean has dual citizenship with France, making her the first EU citizen to be Governor General of Canada and the first French citizen to be acting head of state of Canada since 1763. But more unprecedentedly, she is Haitian-Canadian and – as logically follows – African-Canadian.

Yes, Ms Jean is black, and furthermore in an interracial marriage. Well, that’s Canada for you. America puts black folk in squalid emergency shelters, we put ours in Rideau Hall.
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The Imagination Attempts to..Relax

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Another set of polls, this time taken for ARD TV and reported here, seem to bear out the surprising recovery of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the imagination-buggering prospect of a Red-Red-Green coalition. The CDU was down 2% at 41% and the SPD up 2% at 34%, with the Greens solid at 7%, the Linkspartei down 0.5% at 8.5%, and (curiously) the Homeopathic Parachute Club FDP up 0.5% at 6.5%.

Surely the 0.5% can’t be the same people? Anyway, that would put the Coalition of the Desperate at 49.5% against 47.5% for the Festival of Stern..if, of course, the imagination can be persuaded to “take it”. In these increasingly odd political waters, the first signs of people positioning themselves for post-election coalition talks are now visible. Coalition negotiations are the hard-core porn of politics, and this looks like it’s going to be absolutely filthy, especially if the death of the NPD candidate in Dresden prolongs things.

Schröder has publicly refused to talk coalitions, saying it would be wrong (ha! he wants it really!), and that his aim is to make the SPD the largest party and continue the coalition with the Greens. Angela Merkel has called him out and accused him of, ah, flirting with the Linkspartei, whilst Joschka Fischer has claimed that he will never, no, nay, never no more deal with Oskar Lafontaine. Nuh. Lafontaine further claims he has “not the slightest fear” of a grand coalition, although it would be worse than a rightwing government..and he is also busy rowing back on his remarks about foreign workers.

And for their sad little part, the neo-Nazis have selected their replacement candidate for Dresden. In an astonishingly original move, it’s Franz Schönhuber, the ancient founder, leader, general secretary and dogcatcher of the outlawed Republican Party, an octogenarian fascist who I thought was dead. Yawn!

So – What Did Happen to Iraq?

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A few weeks ago, if you can cast your mind back that far, the big story was apparently something to do with a country called Iraq that was trying to agree among itself on its future constitution. After multiple deadlines were breached, two of the factions in the country decided to impose the constitution on the other by their majority. But then, they hesitated. The text was amended, but not by the drafting committee..

And then there was a hurricane. Not that it was one anywhere near Iraq, where they don’t have hurricanes, but it still knocked the whole thing off the agenda. And the Iraqis had a particularly horrible disaster of their own. So – what did happen to that constitution?

Well, it seems nothing happened to it. They have done absolutely nothing about it since then – it still hasn’t gone before Parliament, and even its opponents haven’t held the meeting to draft a counter-constitution they promised. What has been going on is that the killing has kept up at a rate of about thirty a day. August saw the deaths of 85 US servicemen. And, worryingly, there are signs that after a period of quiet, what I call the New-Old Iraqi Army has entered the lists again.
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Nazi sabotage from beyond the grave

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Far be it from me to poach on Alex’s turf, but here is a bit of German election madness that you won’t want to miss.

As you all know by now, the Left Party — which is basically the eastern PDS, the mutated ruling party of ancien régime East Germany, plus some hard-left western renegades from the SPD — has emerged as a strong potential spoiler. Now an easterner from the other extreme of the spectrum is doing her best to throw sand in the electoral gears.

She had to die to do this, so full marks for effort if nothing else.

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Ukraine Government Dismissed

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Crickey, this is news:

“Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said on Thursday he was sacking the government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.”

That didn’t last long, did it? The background is clearly this.

Yesterday EU Observer was reporting MEPs as saying that the Orange Revolution needed a ‘shot in the arm‘, it looks like what it may have received was something nearer to a lethal dose.

Eurozone More Exposed?

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Chief OECD economist Jean Philippe Cotis wasn’t only proferring recommendations to the Federal reserve yesterday. He was also not backward in coming forward with his opinions about future growth in the eurozone. Even if Cotis isn’t exactly my favourite economist I feel here he may be a little nearer the truth.

The occasion for M. Cotis’ observations was the official press briefing for an interim OECD assessment of the economic situation in Europe, the United States and Japan.
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