Tag Archives: Governments and parties

Macedonian Crash

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Throughout the recent Balkan wars, Macedonia was the shoe that stubbornly refused to fall. Wars in Bosnia, in Kosovo did not spread to Macedonia. The blockade imposed by Greece in the early years of independence did not rise to open conflict. Latent Bulgarian claims were amicable resolved. Chaos in Albania did not become contagion. Many reasons account for Macedonia’s relative good fortune, and capable leadership is certainly one of them. Now the country’s president has crashed into a hillside in Bosnia.

At present, Macedonia is doing something that no state in Western Europe has managed: running a state while accommodating a minority population that is (estimates vary) between one quarter and one third of the total. Good luck to them, and I hope that Trajkovski’s successor can stay the course.

Interestingly, the fallen president was a convert to Methodism and a former theology student. It’s an interesting twist on questions of church, state and laicism.

Eta And The Spanish Elections

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As someone who lives and works in Barcelona (capital of Catalonia, and formal definition in the eyes of the local nationalists of being Catalan), it is really rather frustrating to find that about the only time we make it to the European headlines (apart, of course, from when Bar?a wants to buy some world famous footballer like Beckham) is when one of the players in the greater-Spanish political arena – in this case Eta – wants to exploit some situation or other here to its own advantage. Outside of this context (and with, of course, the honourable exception of George Orwell) Catalonia is little heard of, and even less understood.
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A change in Parliament

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After 25 years in the European Parliament, Iain Paisley has announced that he will not be standing for re-election as an MEP this year.

This means, of course, that the Parliament will be losing one of it’s more colurful characters whose explits included (as Anthony Wells reminded me) being forcefully removed from the chamber by Otto Von Hapsburg after proclaiming the Pope was the Antichrist.

Detente with Czech Communists?

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I’m mighty flattered that I’ve been promoted to “guest blogger extraordinaire” even though I’ve been silent the whole of this year so far (due mainly to illness). Sorry about that!

Well, here goes.

Take a look at this Czech press review from today, in which Prague daily Lidove Noviny reports that Miroslav Grebenicek, the Communist Party for over a decade, narrowly missed getting ousted from his position. (He was apparently told he could run for European Parliament if he stepped down.) This might sound like small beans to outsiders, and truth be told, viewed by itself, it is. But it’s one small piece of a much largers story…
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Klaus: Grumpy Old Man

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Jiri Pehe — once an advisor to Vaclav Havel, now an academic and a go-to man for international journalists seeking smart quotes about Czech politics — once pointed out to me that Czech president Vaclav Klaus is more anti-integration than just about every mainstream politician in Europe with the exception of one branch of the British Conservative Party. The only other guy who might approach him is Hungary’s nationalist noisemaker Viktor Orban, whose star was fading last I checked.

Yesterday’s Czech papers were awash with Klaus’s comment that he’d prefer to have no European constitution at all. He’s thus the first European head of state (but oddly, not an EU head of state) that has rejected the constitution. EuroSavant hits the nail on the head with this sentence: “I get the picture here of old grandpa over there sounding off in the corner, right when the rest of the family has gotten together to try to make a decision – he’s got some mighty strange views, and he’s sure to express them in his cranky way, but as long as you are polite and say ‘Yes, grandpa’ you can otherwise pretty much ignore him.” (Pragueblog expressed similar sentiments recently: The Czechs are dealing with Klaus the same way they dealt with the Communists. That is, let him have his special title and then ignore him.) But…
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Interesting Take on Yukos

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A very interesting take on the Yukos situation from the Moscow Times. And one which relates directly to some of the privatisation issues we were debating recently. Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalization Studies, argues basically that given that the Russian economy is dominated by an oligarchic structure of raw materials quasi-monopolies, and given that a majority of the population seem to want these monopolies returning to state ownership, the only ‘democratic’ solution is an authoritarian one. Khodorkovsky had another idea, and hence off he went to prison. Any comparisons with or lessons for Iraq here? Can democracy be introduced like this? Off you go.
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