In one of his many excellent pieces in the run-up to the German election, Alex mentioned the phenomenon of ‘overhang mandates’. These are extra parliamentary seats that a party gains by winning more seats via one of German’s two electoral methods than by the other. This might seem odd enough. What’s even odder is that [...]

Poland is having elections Next Sunday. They are getting rather less press coverage than the German ones, but one issue does now seem to have hit the news:
Poland could be heading for a referendum on the adoption of the euro in late 2009…. Centre-right group Civic Platform (PO) and the eurosceptic Law and [...]

NTC research is reporting that investor confidence declined sharply in Germany in September. The research - by think tank ZEW - was carried out between September 5 and Monday at 1500 GMT. So the reading is weighted to pre-election (but post Merkel slump) answers:
German investor confidence fell in September due in major [...]

In an early comment on Sunday evening I ventured the view that at least “One thing at least seems clear: negotiations with Turkey for full membership are now very likely to start on October 3″.
Well Lo and Behold, and just as theory predicted, the EU Obsever announce this morning:

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Via Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen I happened upon this ZDF poll (pop-up, right of screen with header Blitzumfrage nach der Wahl) which would indicate that a large majority of German voters, about 70%, are unhappy with the election results.

Read more… or Read [...]

This Slate dispatch about the Milosevic trial is very well written.

I saw a link to this german election blog a couple of months ago, but forgot to bookmark it, and have been trying to find it since then.
Almost the most interesting thing about it is how shockingly bad the interface is. Apparently someone at this institute built a primitive blog of his own rather tahn [...]

Despite appearances, and for all the stalemate it produced, yesterday’s German election has certainly confirmed that Germans are neither too afraid of change, nor too scared of instability. In fact, they chose both.

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Taking a break from the German elections, I ran across this recent article over at Radio Free Europe. Short version: EU accession for the Western Balkans (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Albania) is stalling.
All of these five states would like to be part of the EU, but — with the partial exception of Croatia [...]

Crickey, this really does seem to fall under the definition of what you could call a scandal. According to the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn one billion dollars was plundered from Iraq’s defence Ministry between June 2004 and February 2005 (during the government of interim prime minister Iyad Allawi):
“It is possibly one of the largest thefts [...]