Another set of polls, this time taken for ARD TV and reported here, seem to bear out the surprising recovery of Chancellor Gerhard Schr�der and the imagination-buggering prospect of a Red-Red-Green coalition. The CDU was down 2% at 41% and the SPD up 2% at 34%, with the Greens solid at 7%, the Linkspartei down [...]

A few weeks ago, if you can cast your mind back that far, the big story was apparently something to do with a country called Iraq that was trying to agree among itself on its future constitution. After multiple deadlines were breached, two of the factions in the country decided to impose the constitution on [...]

Far be it from me to poach on Alex’s turf, but here is a bit of German election madness that you won’t want to miss.
As you all know by now, the Left Party — which is basically the eastern PDS, the mutated ruling party of ancien r�gime East Germany, plus some hard-left western renegades from [...]

Crickey, this is news:
“Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said on Thursday he was sacking the government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.”
That didn’t last long, did it? The background is clearly this.
Yesterday EU Observer was reporting MEPs as saying that the Orange Revolution needed a ‘shot in the arm‘, it looks like what it may have received [...]

Chief OECD economist Jean Philippe Cotis wasn’t only proferring recommendations to the Federal reserve yesterday. He was also not backward in coming forward with his opinions about future growth in the eurozone. Even if Cotis isn’t exactly my favourite economist I feel here he may be a little nearer the truth.
The occasion for M. [...]

There has been some discussion going on in recent days about Angela Merkel’s proposal for a special partnership between the EU and Turkey. In the Turkish case I don’t agree with this (I favour full membership), but India, well that would be as they say ‘another country’.

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It seems that in the aftermath of the debate, Gerhard Schr�der’s possible coalition partners have unexpectedly regained some inner poise as the German election campaign goes pirouetting into its last ten days of not-quite-frenzied democracy. The CDU and FDP both lost one point in polls taken for Stern and RTL, with the SPD three points [...]

The reference here isn’t to the actual hurricane (which was far from that if you were black, poor, and lived in downtown New Orleans) but to the economic ‘near miss’ I think we are watching, and to the difficult decision Alan Greenspan and his team will now have to take on 20 September next.
The blogs [...]

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but there seems to have been a deafening silence on outcomes following last weeks ‘informal’ EU foreign ministers gathering in Newport. The only thing I have been able to find was a piece from Radio Free Europe which informed me that ‘No News Is Good News‘. Possibly, [...]

Now just remember, you read about it first on Afoe. Bertrand Benoit and David Pilling have an excellent article in the FT today:
Question: Which of the world�s biggest economies is holding an early election this month dominated by debate over radical economic reforms?
Two clues: The economy, long in the doldrums, is showing signs of [...]