Tag Archives: Germany

Merkel is in?

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FT says a deal will be reached shortly, and Merkel will be chancellor. Schröder is out.

Ms Merkel’s expected victory in the battle for the chancellorship is likely to be announced on Monday, following a meeting on Sunday evening in Berlin between Mr Schröder and Ms Merkel, according to the SPD politicians, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The two leaders met on Thursday evening for four hours to agree the framework of a SPD-CDU grand coalition, but refused on Friday to disclose details. The talks also include SPD leader Franz Müntefering, and Bavarian premier Edmund Stoiber.

Officials close to Mr Schröder said the chancellor would not become vice chancellor and foreign minister in the coalition, despite pressure from within the SPD for him do so.

The SPD may be given an equal number of cabinet posts as the CDU and be offered first choice of ministries to control, the MP said. SPD officials said these could include the foreign, economics and family ministries.

In addition, the CDU is almost certain to give the SPD assurances – even ahead of lengthy coalition talks expected to start next week – that it will drop key elements of its more radical economic reform agenda, such as changes to job protection and collective bargaining rules.

Problems. And Games.

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Unfortunately, following our recent move to a different hosting provider, some Euros in the Fistful are still experiencing technical difficulties when trying to post. We’re trying to solve the problem as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, other people are experiencing problems as well. The “K-question”, the question who will become the next Chancellor, and presumably the amjor stumbling block on the way to true coalition negotiations between the CDU and the SPD, is still as close to a solution as it was when the polls closed on September 18. Both parties are still hoping the other one will blink first.
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Dresden.

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The other half of Dresden has voted today. Early reports (based on 60 out of 190 precincts) by Forschungsgruppe Wahlen for ZDF television indicate that voters learnt a lot about the intricacies of the German personalised proportional representation electoral system, by giving the local CDU candidate, Andreas Lämmel, sufficient “first votes” to win a direct mandate but not using their “second vote” to increase the CDU’s share of vote in Saxony to the point where the party would lose a mandate in the state of Northrhine-Westfalia. Instead many seem to have voted for the Liberals – the party apparently received about 17% of the votes.

The current projection would lead to the following Bundestag: CDU/CSU – 226 mandates, SPD – 222, FDP – 61, Linkspartei.PDS – 54, The Greens – 51.

This result would likely weaken Chancellor Schroeder in his struggle to remain Chancellor even in a grand coalition of CDU and SPD. But as nothing fundamental has changed, it is too early to say what will happen after Germany’s national holiday tomorrow. Still, given that Schröder was able to interpret the a-little-better-than-expected result of his party and the much-worse-than-expected result of the CDU and their Chancellor candidate Angela Merkel as some kind of plebiscite in his favor, voters in Dresden have certainly weakened this argument.

And speaking of Eurovision

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Just a quick update on Croatia’s EU candidacy.

Eight countries have signed a letter to British PM Tony Blair supporting Croatia’s membership. The letter was presented to Blair — who currently holds the rotating EU Presidency, and will until January 1 — in the recent confence at Newport, in Wales.

The signing countries were Austria, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
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Germany Not An Immigrant Country?

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This is the opinion of Hamburg State Interior Minister Udo Nagel, as interview for an article which appears in the English version of Der Spiegel today. The context for the quote is the implementation of a decision taken at a conference of German state interior ministers last November which determined that Afghanistan was now sufficiently stable for the 58,000 Afghan refugees currently living in Germany to start returning home. 10 months later, that decision is finally being acted upon and as Der Spiegel reports Hamburg is taking the lead. Hamburg is home to some 15,000 Afghan refugees — the largest such population in Germany — and the city state plans to deport 5,000 of them over the next two years.

Nagel, for his part, makes no apologies for the deportations. He insists that Germany has fulfilled its duty to Afghan refugees and is proud of his nation’s asylum policy. The bottom line, he insists, is that Afghanistan is now safe. He even paid a short visit to the country before the ban on repatriation was lifted in May this year. “When a crisis has passed, and emergency assistance is no longer required, then refugees should return, because their country needs them to help the reconstruction,” he says.

Nagel also notes that the twice weekly flight to Kabul from Frankfurt was booked solid with holidaymakers throughout August. His point is clear: Afghans who have been granted permanent residency in Germany are happy to return to their homeland. The others are just trying to exchange their refugee status for immigrant status. Then, puffing on his trademark pipe, he repeats a line cited often by German conservatives: “Germany is not a country of immigration

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Looking at this in the context of the recent debate in Germany about Turkey and the EU, and in the context of Germany’s inability to avail itself of the recent wave of migration from the new EU accession countries, I cannot but feel – looking at the age pyramid of the German population – that a mistake of historic proportions is being made right before our eyes.

Switzerland Says Yes

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Swiss voters said yes in a referendum this weekend to extending an agreement with the EU on the free movement of workers to include the EU-10 ‘new accession’ members (and here). Well sort-of. They voted by 56% to 44% to gradually ease restrictions on the working rights of citizens from these countries so that by 2011 (the same year as France and Germany) they will enjoy equality of access with those from other EU countries. (The only EU states to have opened their labour markets to the new members to date are the UK, Sweden and Ireland).
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Another Grand Coaltion: The Sun of Jamaica.

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Over on Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell – I think somewhat accidently, because I get the impression he believes Germans do *NOT* want to change their distorted labour incentive and tax systems – writes about the fundamental reason for the result of last Sunday’s election.
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Germany To Exceed Deficit Limit Till 2010

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The IMF has just published Chapter One of the autumn 2005 edition of the World Economic Outlook. The key section on the eurozone economies can be found between pages 25 and 29 (including the interesting Box 1.3). The Table where you can find the information on German debt projections is on page 15, and there you will see that the government deficit is projected to remain over 3% at least until 2010. In addition the level of indebtedness is projected to rise from just under 60% of GDP in 2002 to nearly 75% in 2010. (Italy incidentally is seen as quietly suffering from melt-up at 115% of GDP come 2010).

The reasons for this trend:

Unsustainable medium-term fiscal positions remain a key risk. Among the major industrial countries, fiscal deficits are expected to decline only modestly over the medium term (outside Canada, which remains in surplus), with rising
public debt ratios in Japan, Italy, and Germany of particular concern. In most countries, despite past reforms, fiscal pressures from aging populations remain a serious concern, especially for health care.
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The Coalition Inside the Party

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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.
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