Some time ago I wrote about Metin Kaplan, the ‘Caliph of Cologne’, and the attempts of the Keystone Kommisare to pack him off to his Turkish homeland. As I learned from Abiola Lapite this morning, they have finally succeeded. Kaplan has been flown to Istanbul and today stands before a Turkish court. (See here and [...]

This post might not pass any seriousness test, yet when a friend sent me the photo below I could not help but feel that this clearly unindented design is a subconscious consequence of the embryonic German desire to actually look into the future and reap the benefits of the socio-economic changes (”Hartz IV”) as well [...]

The Frankfurter Allgemeine, whose web site could generally be better organized, gets it right in their main comments on the election of extreme right candidates to state legislatures in Saarland, Brandenburg and Saxony:

We hope the debate that the two big parties were at each other’s throats about after the election in Saarland will not be [...]

Some nazis won elections yesterday, and nobody in Germany is quite sure what to do about it. Should one adopt a tone of moral outrage? Or would it be better to make reassuring noises? (‘Germany is not moving towards extemism. This was merely a protest vote’. Repeat till you feel better.)
In the elections to the [...]

In a state election (Landtagswahl) in the Saarland that was widely considered another benchmark for the approval of the German federal government’s reform efforts, particularly of the labour market deregulation programme known as “Hartz IV” - these elections are, often to a significant extent, second order national contests - the Social Democrats have been dealt [...]

Lot’s of bits and pieces of news in from Germany today. Volkswagen one more time threaten to get tough with the unions, the Federal Statistics Office confirm yet another time that it is exports which are driving the German economy, whilst domestic demand actually fell (0.1%) during the second quarter. Meantime a 668-page report from [...]

Interesting piece in the FT today about the imagined consequences of the new German “Hartz IV” laws. These laws will among other things reduce non-means-tested unemployment benefits to one year’s duration. The measure forms part of the package of labour market ’structural reforms’, and personally I see little to argue with here.
The interesting part relates [...]

Picking up a riff from the gutter-press Bild-Zeitung, the Spiegel* discusses the coming-out of Guido Westerwelle, leader of the Free Democrats. (As a technical matter, this seems in fact to have been more an outing by the press, with the close and willing cooperation of the outee.)
Abiola Lapite waxes indignant at Bild’s front-page story [...]

it looks like Nick has beaten me by publishing his Euro 2004 thoughts first. But in a sense, this post begins where Nick ends his, with a look at the consequences of Europeanization, and Globalization, for the European, particularly the German, football.
As a reaction to the dissatisfactory results of a German team in yet [...]

Busy times in Europe, especially with so much f?tbol to watch. Some notes from all parts:

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Germany’s government and opposition have reached a compromise on laws to regulate immigration. [...]