Saturday over at European Tribune says:
In the past few days, everyone talked about Franz Müntefering’s resignation as SPD chairman. I did, too. That is why I nearly missed one of the most important news in German politics for months (or maybe even years):
SPD and CDU/CSU have agreed on the most contentious points of federal reform. Federal reform will be the first big reform project of the coming grand coalition.
Can an Iron Fist Put Power in Bosnia’s Hands? – New York Times
“There is a growing consensus that Paddy Ashdown, Bosnia’s high representative, may be doing as much harm as good by holding back the development of democracy.”
This line of criticism has been put forward by some at least since Bildt was succeeded by the spaniard in 97, but naturally become more widespread and vocal over time. It hitting the NYT online frontpage may be a sign of some kind of turning point.
As for the the substance, the criticism souds sensible, but I don’t have any strong opinion. Curious what the Dougs and Brussels Gonzo think.
In late October, Ukraine re-privatized its Kryvorizhstal steel works in a live auction watched, apparently, by millions on television. The action was a reversal of the privatization that had taken place under the previous government. The old sale would have brought in $800 million. The new sale, to Mittal Steel Germany GmbH, will net $4.8 billion. Broadcasting the auction was a clear sign of transparency, a way of bringing crucial deals out of the back rooms and away from suspicion.
As the Wall Street Journal Europe noted on October 26, that sum is 20 percent of Ukraine’s annual budget. The sale increased total foreign investment in Ukraine since independence in 1991 by 50 percent.
Ukraine still has a long way to go to live up to the ideals of the Orange Revolution, and old structures are hard to root out. But this sale is one of a number of positive signs. Here’s hoping for more, as the first anniversary of the revolution approaches.
Andrew Brown points us to an illuminating article by Bernard Nežmah on swearing in Serbian. Though the article is five years old, I daresay its theme is timeless.
According to Nežmah’s piece — published in Central Europe Review or, as we must now call it, Transitions Online — the Serbian language is blessed with a dazzling, perhaps unsurpassed richness of vulgarisms. Even English, no slouch at that sort of thing, pales in comparison: such are the subtleties of the Serbian variants on the F-word that Serbian-English dictionaries (the more comprehensive editions, one imagines) are reduced to explaining in an aside whether a given word for ‘fuck’ is jocularly offensive, just plain offensive, really really offensive, so offensive it should be used only in the event of war, etc.
A tip of the jaunty afoe fedora to Andrew (who surprises us by revealing he used to speak Serbo-Croat in addition to English, Swedish, Caenorhabditic and whatever else he has up his sleeve).
Parts of Paris are burning. Have been for seven nights in a row. This would seem to indicate a problem, and not a small one.
If you had long suspected that under the Bush administration the CIA was running secret prisons around the world, now you know. It wasn’t just the one in Thailand, which was closed in 2003, and the annex at the tip of Cuba, closed last year.
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
Which Eastern European countries, you may ask?
UPDATE: FT Deutschland does indeed say more, as does the FT in English.
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Brandenburg’s Matthias Platzeck has been tapped to become new leader of the SPD. This means that Germany’s two major parties will both be led by people from the ‘new states’, the former GRD. Franz Müntefering will, however, enter the new cabinet as planned.
The CSU’s Ede Stoiber won’t be going to Prussia, though. He has decided to remain in Munich as Bavarian prime minister. Michael Glos will get Stoiber’s designated CSU place at the table instead.
Stoiber’s decision can only mean he thinks that the grand coalition will fail and that it would therefore be better to stay unconnected with it. Whether he is right about this is, of course, another matter.
(No links, sorry. This is all from the ARD teletext. I’ll try to stick in links to fuller treatments later in the day.)
Update (2/11/05, 01:30 CET) – Maybe Angie 2.0 is actually a guy: two East German are now heading Germany’s biggest parties. The SPD crisis management team agreed late Tuesday evening to offer Brandenburg’s state premier Matthias Platzeck (German biography) the party’s chairmanship. Absent any surprises, this nomination will probably be confirmed by the upcoming party conference.
Update (1/11/05, 16:19) below the fold.
Does everybody really get a second chance? Or will it just be Angela Merkel? Not too surprisingly, Edmund Stoiber was the first to realise that the SPD’s power reshuffle after Franz Müntefering’s sort-of instant resignation, even in case a successor will be named quickly (currently, the only two candidates allegedly under consideration are the state premiers Kurt Beck and Mathias Platzeck), is leading to a situation in which the arithmetics of a grand coalition don’t really add up anymore, not simply because coalition talks with a SPD delegation headed by a combination of acting and designated leaders will suffer from a relative affluence in cooks dealing with the broth.
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To keep track of the of the legislative process (or not) regarding the controversial EU mandatory data rentention directive(s), Statewatch.org has prepared a heavilly “annotated guide to the issues and documentation.”
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After starting off this year’s early election campaign with a debate about the dangers of the sometimes problematic short term investment horizons of private equity firms, it was the SPD’s very own loony left’s locusts in the party’s board that forced their chairman, Franz Müntefering, to declare that he would not seek re-election at the party conference next month and that he was no longer certain whether he could then serve as the minister in a grand coalition. Certainly, given that surprises seem to have become the rule in German politics by now, things might look different by then.
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