Blonde on blonde: State elections in Bavaria

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So we have state elections here in Bavaria this week.

Yeah, I know. Bear with me, I’m going somewhere with this.

There are political signs here and there around our small town, but not as many as you’d expect. A surprisingly high number are for the nationalist, anti-immigration Republican Party. I say “surprisingly” because the Republicans only got between 2% and 3% of the vote in the last election. On the other hand, that’s compared to less than 1% nationwide, so I guess they’re focussing their efforts in a state where they have some small chance.

I suppose I should talk about how the Landtag is dominated by the CSU, and has been forever, and about the internal power struggles there, and what it’s like living in a de facto one party state. But, eh, don’t feel like it. So instead I’m going to talk about blonde children in campaign ads. Continue reading →

The lame left?

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Newsweek has a longish (for Newsweek) article this week about how the center-left is in trouble in pretty much all the large European countries:

No matter what they call themselves—Social Democrats, Socialists or Labour—rarely have they simultaneously appeared so troubled. In Britain, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s popularity has hit rock bottom. Germany’s Social Democrats are a dwindling party, squeezed between conservatives in the center and populist extremists on the left. In France and Italy, telegenic new-style rightists have managed to reduce the left-wing opposition to tatters. Even Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the last unchallenged mainstream-left ruler of a major European power, looks increasingly besieged as the Spanish economic miracle crashes all around him…

Last week Germany’s Social Democrats dumped their fourth chairman in as many years and nominated a charisma-free career bureaucrat, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to face off against the popular Chancellor Angela Merkel in the September 2009 national election. Only days earlier the annual late-summer confab of the French Socialists in La Rochelle erupted in discord and intrigue over the party’s direction.

So far, reasonable enough. Unfortunately, the article then tries to explain just why the left is in trouble: Continue reading →

Georgia: next?

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So the Russians are saying they’ll withdraw from Georgia Real Soon Now. Meanwhile Moscow has signed treaties of mutual defense with the, you know, totally independent and sovereign nations of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. If Georgia makes a move — or something that Moscow thinks is a move, or wants to think is a move — Russia will intervene again, with as much force as it thinks appropriate.

Meanwhile Georgia, of course, has renewed its national commitment to recovering the lost territories. This includes building up its military, continued pursuit of NATO membership, and sucking up massive amounts of foreign aid from anyone who will give it, most notably the US.

Apropos of which, here’s a recent article in EurasiaNet that lays out some options: continued occupation a la Turkish Cyprus (most likely), formal partition, and internationalization (currently very unlikely, but who knows). Continue reading →

It’s All About Me

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One of the consequences of Montenegro’s split from Serbia was the country’s need for its own top level domain, following its departure from .yu and .cs. In September 2007, ICANN settled for .me, potentially setting up another odd, little-country bonanza like .tv and .to.

Miquel Hudin Balsa relates his experience playing around to get a tasty .me name. The process looks like it’s set up as much to monetize the connection to the English-speaking world as to actually get people in Montenegro registered. As for the assignment itself, 21 of a possible 26 dot-m-whatever combinations were already taken; Macau, Malta and Mongolia had already claimed some of the likelier candidates.

There’s a second-level academic domain like the UK has. I sure hope that some wag will name servers on it after Warner Brothers cartoon characters.

For the misanthropes out there, bad news. (Is there any other kind for misanthropes?) The registrar says that the domain bite.me “is a premium domain and has not yet been scheduled for release.”

Understatement

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“It should be noted that AIG wrote its derivative contracts in London.” – Commenter Thomas, at Crooked Timber

And indeed, we see a report on Bloomberg, the wire service the financial folks use to communicate with each other, that Allianz was involved in a bid for AIG two days before the crisis that led to its nationalization. Financial markets are tightly linked, and we are just starting to hear the chains rattle.

As with Russia’s neighbors, the question in the markets now has to be, “Who’s next?”

Trying to Rhyme with Orange

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It isn’t working, and Ukraine’s parliament has 30 days to form a new ruling coalition. Good luck with that, too. If not, elections in December.

The long-simmering feud between Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko has, again, reached its breaking point. Tymoshenko, the current premier, has a month to engineer a new coalition, which would have to be with parties from outside the Orange bloc. So she would have to team up with Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, or other, less mainstream parties. I’ll bet on new elections.

Russia has a lot of levers to pull, especially on a winter-time election, and I can’t see Medvedev or Putin having too much need for restraint. Prices on natural gas, export and import restrictions, pipeline transit fees, and much more will probably all be on the menu of blandishments. The Georgian example will also be very much on everyone’s mind.

Eastern policy has not been one of France’s priorities within the EU, so it is ironic that the country’s once-every-two-decades tenure in the EU presidency will likely be bracketed by eastern questions: Georgia at the start and Ukraine at the end. Without strong friends in Europe’s west, Ukraine’s medium-term future looks less like candidacy and more like Finlandization. Maybe Yulia just figured this out faster than the rest of us.

(On the other hand, if the Russian consulate in the Crimea starts handing out passports willy-nilly, something other than Finlandization could be in the cards.)

Francly

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Flight to quality is about the only thing I can say for sure about the ongoing Wall Street crisis that swallowed up a 158-year-old investment bank and forced Merrill (no-relation) Lynch to be sold to some outfit in North Carolina. (The $613+ billion that Lehman lists as debt is between the 2007 GDP of Belgium, $448 billion, and Turkey, $657 billion, the 17th and 18th largest economies in the world.)

Stock up on Swiss francs and hope that your European institution didn’t load up on specialty vehicles backed by US property bonds. The Washington Post calls it the beginning of a new financial architecture, and it’s getting built on the fly, without blueprints, at a speed that the builders hope will be faster than the collapse of the old one. Good luck with that.

A new job description for EU Commissioners?

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That’s what Paul Adamson argues for in today’s Financial Times.  The basis of the argument is that we should acknowledge that the commissioners are not a dispassionate executive branch of the European Union, but people who bring their country interests to their respective portfolios — so why not make this explicit and let the commissioners be the interlocutors of their countries with the EU policy apparatus?  Example: Charlie McCreevy

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Kosovo 46, South Ossetia 2?

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I wanted to write a post comparing Kosovo and South Ossetia, but Dan Drezner has already written it. It’s a week old now, but still good:

It’s been more than a week since Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. The number of other countries that have followed Russia’s lead is…. well, maybe one (Nicaragua), as near as I can tell. Belarus keeps promising that they’ll get around to it, and Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has defended Russia’s recognition decision; since that initial promise, however, Belarus appears to have decided to sit on their hands. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has expressed similar support of Russia’s recognition decision – but I haven’t seen any actual recognition from Caracas either… Vedomosti reports that, “It appears that the Russian government has reconciled itself to the fact that no other country has recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said yesterday the reluctance of other states to recognize the independence of the breakaway Georgian territories was not critical.”

As they say, read the whole thing — there are lots of interesting links and some thoughtful discussion of whether recognition was really such a good idea for Russia.

You want to bring along a grain of salt, because Drezner — like a lot of American conservatives — is a mild Russophobe. I note that he thinks the war was a serious economic setback for Russia, a position that Harvard B-School professor Noel Maurer sharply disagrees with. (Key quote: “Markets do not punish successful aggressors.”) Read ’em both and decide for yourself.
Continue reading →