Some time ago I wrote about Metin Kaplan, the ‘Caliph of Cologne’, and the attempts of the Keystone Kommisare to pack him off to his Turkish homeland. As I learned from Abiola Lapite this morning, they have finally succeeded. Kaplan has been flown to Istanbul and today stands before a Turkish court. (See here and hier.)
It will prove scant comfort to Kaplan, I suspect, that Turkey now has an ‘Islamist’ government.
This post might not pass any seriousness test, yet when a friend sent me the photo below I could not help but feel that this clearly unindented design is a subconscious consequence of the embryonic German desire to actually look into the future and reap the benefits of the socio-economic changes (“Hartz IV”) as well as of the periodically reappearing shadows of the pasts (Bernd Eichinger’s movie “Der Untergang“) and as such rather well describes the current German state of mind, for the minute assuming that there is such a thing… (for the non-Germanophones, the text on the additional red Stern cover-layer reads: “how to become your own boss”).
The European Commission won’t release its report on the possibility of opening accesion talks with Turkey until 6 October. But after expansion commissioner G?nter Verheugen’s comments yesterday, the report will not be much of a surprise. ‘There are’, said Verheugen, ‘no further barriers‘ to beginning talks.
(All the links to outside sources in this post, incidentally, are to German-language sites. At the moment there’s nothing about this on the FAZ English-language site, but you might check there later in the day if you can’t read German.)
In the comments to my recent post on the NPD’s electoral gains in Brandenburg, Otto suggests that the German CDU step up its resistance to a possible Turkish entry. Apparently the Union is paying attention to Otto, for party chief Angela Merkel was prompt to announce that she will seek allies elsewhere in Europe to keep the Turks draussen vor der T?r. And taking up most of the front page of the print edition of today’s Die Welt — the reliably right-wing sister paper to the Bild-Zeitung, but unlike Bild intended for those who can read words of more than one syllable — are ‘Ten Reasons Why Turkey Should Not Be Allowed to Join’.
Strangely enough my first reaction to this all-out onslaught by the Union was one of compassion and concern. ‘Bloss keine Panik, Leute!’, I wanted to say, giving their well-coiffed heads a reassuring pat. For you see, Turkey is not about to join the EU after all. All that the Commission has done (and indeed, officially it hasn’t even done that yet) is to say it’s all right to start talking with the Turks about the possibility of an eventual accession. In those talks Europe will, among other things, negotiate with the Turks the conditions and timeline for a possible entry. There is no guarantee that Turkey will accept (or fulfil) the EU’s conditions. And accession, if it comes at all, will not be for many years.
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The Frankfurter Allgemeine, whose web site could generally be better organized, gets it right in their main comments on the election of extreme right candidates to state legislatures in Saarland, Brandenburg and Saxony:
We hope the debate that the two big parties were at each other’s throats about after the election in Saarland will not be revived: Who strengthened the extreme right? The SPD, with its program of socio-political insecurity, or the Union [CDU-CSU], which withdrew when things got serious? This debate leads nowhere, because the truth is that voters strengthened the NPD – primarily notorious usual non-voters – and voters will make them weak again, when the profiteers of popular anger have made sufficient fools of themselves
(Rough and ready translation, original is below the fold.)
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Some nazis won elections yesterday, and nobody in Germany is quite sure what to do about it. Should one adopt a tone of moral outrage? Or would it be better to make reassuring noises? (‘Germany is not moving towards extemism. This was merely a protest vote’. Repeat till you feel better.)
In the elections to the Landtage (state parliaments) of Brandenburg and Saxony, two eastern German states, the established parties took a bad beating1. The SPD in Brandenburg and the conservative CDU in Saxony remain the largest single parties in the parliaments of their respective L?nder, but saw an exodus of voters. The Saxon CDU was particularly hard-hit, losing 20 seats and their absolute majority.
Looking distinctly happy, by contrast, was the PDS, the successor party to the gang that ran East Germany in the old days. They’re now the second-largest party in both states, and in Brandenburg have only four seats fewer than the SPD.
But of course it’s the nazis who get the headlines. The NPD (‘National Democrats’) took 9.2% of the vote in Saxony, easily leaping the 5% hurdle that the Greens and Free Democrats barely managed to get past. In all, the NPD got only 0.5% less of the vote than did the SPD. In Brandenburg the browns’ success wasn’t quite so dramatic; the DVU (‘German People’s Union’), one of the NPD’s rival outfits, reentered the Landtag with 6.1%.
How could this happen? Well, if you’ve been following reports out of Germany at all, you’ll have heard that many Germans are scared and angered that the government, through the so-called Hartz IV reforms, is going to make it less attractive to be unemployed. The unemployed are not amused. On Friday Chancellor Schr?der called them ‘parasites’.2 On Sunday the parasites struck back. In Saxony, 18% of the jobless voted nazi (as compared with 13% of blue-collar workers and 6% of white-collar workers and civil servants).
So what is to be done? The very first thing, I should think, is for Wessis to carefully avoid congratulating themselves for being different to those awful nazi-electing Ossis. The prosperous burghers of Baden-W?rttemberg, for example, have put nazis in their state parliament more than once.
Guido Westerwelle, chief of the Free Democrats, put on his earnest frown and said the mainstream parties should deal with the extremists of both right and left in a constructive, rational manner. He’s wrong, I think, at least with regard to the nazis.3
So long as today’s nazi parties are careful not to cross the line that would allow them to be banned, those voters who wish to vote for them must be allowed to do so. That’s all they should be allowed, though. As after every election, spokespeople from all the parties were in the television studios last night for a round of questions. When an NPD man started to speak in Dresden, the representatives of all the other parties left the room. And they did the same thing when the DVU’s top candidate began to speak in Potsdam. Here, I think is the proper response to the presence of nazis in a democracy’s parliament. Let no one speak to them; let no one acknowledge them. Somebody will have to register their votes or abstentions, I suppose, but nobody need otherwise interact with them. Democrats of every stripe should make it plain to nazi voters that they have effectively spoilt their ballots.
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There’s a fair amount of talk again this week about the various government deficits and what to do with them. Earlier in the week the FT had a piece about the current state of play with the US deficit whilst the Economist is busy musing one more time over the ongoing saga of the EU growth and stability pact.
These two situations appear, on the surface, to be somewhat similar, but in reality it may be more interesting to consider how they differ.
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Jumping in feet first ahead of AFOE’s more knowledgeable German-based members (of course fools always rush in where…..), I can’t help but be concerned by reading this about the annual “Pressefest” of the National Democratic Party of Germany:
what struck the German intelligence officers who observed last month’s gathering in M?ckay, Saxony, was less the diversity than the scale of the attendance: 4,000 sympathisers had come from all over Germany and Austria, more than twice the expected number.
It had been assumed the neo-Nazi party was going through a rough patch. The 40-year-old party’s finances are depleted, it barely survived the government’s attempts to outlaw it last year, and its membership has been falling continuously since the mid-1990s.
Having altered its tactics and polished its image, however, the NPD, which has been active in east Germany since reunification, is attempting a rebirth on the back of mounting discontent and political cynicism in the economically deprived and unemployment-ridden region.
Source: Financial Times
In a state election (Landtagswahl) in the Saarland that was widely considered another benchmark for the approval of the German federal government’s reform efforts, particularly of the labour market deregulation programme known as “Hartz IV” – these elections are, often to a significant extent, second order national contests – the Social Democrats have been dealt the predicted crushing defeat, gaining likely just under 30% of the vote, losing about 15% compared to their 1999 result, according to early, but usually very reliable exit poll data from Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, broadcast by ZDF television (German labelled graphics here).
Well, well, this was hardly unexpected. In fact the reality may well be that this time there is plenty of smoke but no fire, since Siemens has announced it has no concrete plans to move 10,000 jobs abroad. Indeed much of the noise at present may emanate from a threat to move as a negotiating posture in order to try and force changes. But behind this the underlying reality is that the problem is coming. Not only is Germany having a ‘job-loss’ recovery there is good reason to doubt whether it is having a recovery at all. And of course the main course may well be yet to be served since many of the jobs threatening to relocate seem to be in the industrial sector, whilst just round the corner the high-end services issue is surely coming. Still there is one difference with the US: the headlines are not being made by an opposition candidate talking about Benedict Arnold CEO’s, but by a Chamber of Commerce head who seems to be saying he’s Benedict Arnold and proud of it.
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Germany’s center-right and liberal parties have finally agreed on a candidate for the country’s largely, but not completely, symbolic presidency. Because these parties have been winning elections at the state level over the last few years, they have a working majority in the body that elects the president, even though they are actually in opposition.
(The selection itself has been a bit of an opera bouffe. Bild‘s lead yesterday showed various Muppets and cartoon characters over the headline, “Even more candidates!” The serious press had similar, if less colorful, opinions.)
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