There has been some discussion going on in recent days about Angela Merkel’s proposal for a special partnership between the EU and Turkey. In the Turkish case I don’t agree with this (I favour full membership), but India, well that would be as they say ‘another country’.
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Category Archives: A Fistful Of Euros
Swings Back For Schr�der/Fischer
It seems that in the aftermath of the debate, Gerhard Schröder’s possible coalition partners have unexpectedly regained some inner poise as the German election campaign goes pirouetting into its last ten days of not-quite-frenzied democracy. The CDU and FDP both lost one point in polls taken for Stern and RTL, with the SPD three points up, the Left one point down and the Greens unchanged. Even though the SPD is still six points down on the CDU, this may be a key moment – as the potential rightwing coalition is now no longer a majority.
It was a good day for the Chancellor, as he put on 4 percentage points of personal approval – which takes him to 17 points up on Angela Merkel, at 48 to 31. This may perhaps explain why, as Jörg Lau blogs here, Germany is being covered in SPD posters featuring little else than big pictures of yer man. As a further reminder never to write off lumbering and traditionalistic German institutions, the FAZ reports today that German industry beat everybody’s production forecasts for July. For the two-month period June-July, output in manufacturing, construction and energy was up as much as 2% over the preceding two months.
Mind you, though, the Schröder recovery story does contain one socking great if – the suggestion that, if the election was today, he could form a government relies entirely on forming a coalition between the SPD, Greens and the Linkspartei. The idea of a Schröder-Lafontaine reconciliation buggers the imagination, gentle reader – although desperation is always a great motivator. And, were the LP to go back into government, you can assume that much of the Schröder agenda would go out of the window.
Close Call
The reference here isn’t to the actual hurricane (which was far from that if you were black, poor, and lived in downtown New Orleans) but to the economic ‘near miss’ I think we are watching, and to the difficult decision Alan Greenspan and his team will now have to take on 20 September next.
The blogs are of course rife with speculation.
Update: Dave at MacroBlog just came up with one more reason the Fed might steadfastly remain on course: poor productivity readings.
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Turkey Fails To Delight
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but there seems to have been a deafening silence on outcomes following last weeks ‘informal’ EU foreign ministers gathering in Newport. The only thing I have been able to find was a piece from Radio Free Europe which informed me that ‘No News Is Good News‘. Possibly, but this doesn’t explain the reasons for the blackout.
Meantime all the headlines are stolen today by the results of a survey of EU opinion on the accession question conducted for the German Marshall Fund.
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On Un-Common Ground
Now just remember, you read about it first on Afoe. Bertrand Benoit and David Pilling have an excellent article in the FT today:
Question: Which of the world’s biggest economies is holding an early election this month dominated by debate over radical economic reforms?
Two clues: The economy, long in the doldrums, is showing signs of life, thanks to improving exports and a restructured private sector. An ageing population is making structural reform an urgent priority.
The answer: Not one, but two countries – Japan and Germany.
Just my point in my earlier post, and the more this connection is recognised the sooner we’ll enter the zone of framing meaningful solutions. As the FT writers suggest, there are many intriguing parallels between next Sunday’s Japanese election and the German ballot one week later.
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China Watching
The Economist has a timely, and very sobre assessment, of the state of the Chinese company (or should that be the Chinese state company, in any event Howard French has posted the entire piece, just in case we get link-rot), Brad Setser has a very well argued post on how China effectively seems to be continuing to operate a dollar peg (“Rather than pegging at 8.28, China is now seems to peg at 8.095-8.11”), and Asia Pundit Myrick has an excellent round-up of the general state of the argument in the ongoing ‘China Soft or Hard Landing’ debate.
Troubled Waters And No Bridge
Global Voices has a story (Hat Tip Financial Times and Simon World) about how China dissident Shi Tao has more than a little cause to be angry with Yahoo. Reporters Sans Frontiers, on analysing the text of the verdict in Shi Tao’s case (he was sentenced to 10 years in April for “divulging state secrets abroad”) , found that details supplied by Yahoo Holdings (Hong King) Ltd helped identify and convict him.
As Global Voices indicates Yahoo “provided the Chinese investigating organs with detailed information that apparently enabled them to link Shi’s personal e-mail account (on the Chinese Yahoo! service at yahoo.com.cn) and the specific message containing information treated as a “state secret” to the IP address of his computer”.
Now this raises a number of interesting issues.
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The Nuclear Option
Don’t blame me, blame Alex for this, since he’s the one who started me thinking about all those other issues associated with the German elections – apart that is from the economic ones. Like this in today’s FT:
“It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. ….Last week, she (Angela Merkel) named Heinrich von Pierer, a former Siemens chief executive, her chief economic advisor. The fresh faces, it was thought, would add energy and credibility to her bid for the top job….(but)…Mr von Pierer sparked his own media firestorm when he called for an extension of the life of nuclear power stations by 60 years.”
I may be slow, but the implications of this didn’t really sink-in till I read in the EU observer that:
“Brussels predicts that oil prices will stay high in the foreseeable future and that the EU will need to build more nuclear reactors..”I expect investments in the nuclear sector in Europe, and in the rest of the world, will grow”, the commissioner (Andris Piebalgs) said.
Well, no wonder the greens are fuming.
Vlad Says That’s Bad, Lads!
The Guardian today carries yet another article by Jonathan Steele on how badly the Ukrainians have hurt Vladimir Putin’s feelings, here. Putin, at a “two-and-a-half hour meeting with academics and journalists in the Kremlin” apparently had this to say:
” One of the parties cannot be cornered by means of unconstitutional activities. Otherwise other people in the region can say ‘Why don’t we act against the constitution?'”
Indeed. But can someone please remind the man that there is nothing at all constitutional in rigging the elections, poisoning the opposition and murdering annoying journalists? It also stretches credibility that he seems to think he’s responsible for upholding the constitutions of states in “the region” (which is presumably a rebranded variant of “the near abroad”), or rather, upholding their governments against their constitutions. If that wasn’t enough, though, what about his next line?
“He said corruption was blooming there and people around the next president have started to enrich themselves. We said this before and no-one wanted to listen to us.”
Ye gods, Russia as the stalwart defender of probity in public office. I think that probably qualifies him for this week’s Orwell nomination back on my own blog. But can anyone make sense of this paragraph?
He spoke with repeated anger about what has been happening in the former Soviet republics. “We cannot go back to the Russian empire. Only an idiot can imagine we’re striving for that.”
Well, those two lines are entirely mutually incompatible, no? The point of all this is, of course, that first of all he doesn’t care at all about anybody’s constitution, and secondly he still sees himself as being in a position to lecture his ex-colonies, although he has learned to deny it. After all, what does all this stuff about other countries’ constitutions mean practically? What does he think would have happened if “we” had listened to him?
Either that “we” would have pressed the OFF switch and all the people on the Kiev Maidan would have gone away, or, I suppose, that we would have supported a Tiananmen solution. Fantastic, and more evidence that the EU’s Nachbarschaftspolitik needs very great care. (Don’t forget, either, that Steele has previous for being feted at the Kremlin.)
…And The German Election Posts Just Keep Coming
Naturally enough, following the US model, the really important thing in the (quasi-)presidential debate isn’t what happens during the debate, but the post-debate exploitation of whatever happens then. So no surprise to find that the SPD and the Greens are jumping all over a claim that Angela Merkel, as well as quoting Reagan, was being a little economical with the truth regarding her own past position on childcare and abortion.
The story is thin, but the meat seems to be that Merkel allegedly claimed that as Minister for Women she introduced a right to childcare from the age of three onwards – in fact she abstained when the legislation went through the Bundestag, because the provision was included in the same bill that established a unified law on abortion for united Germany. It’s not much, but you’ve got to try…
(In the light of the post below, isn’t it strange that squeezing completely unconnected provisions into bills is itself a rather Capitol Hill practice?)