Category Archives: Germany

Whew, What A Relief!

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The Bavarian cabinet is proposing a law allowing cars to be washed on Sundays and holidays. But only in the afternoons, you understand, so as not to interfere with church attendance. This is something like progress.

Now, since on average 7 percent of Germans attend services on Sundays, you may well ask what about the other 93 percent? And what of the residents for whom Friday or Saturday may be the week’s holy day? Well, you may well ask, but that doesn’t mean there are any good answers. But thank, er, Someone, for that old separation of church and state.

Angela Merkel The New Mrs Thatcher?

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It was inevitable I suppose. Comparisons between Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher are starting to roll. Such comparisons seem ludicrous to me, but I’d love to know what our German readers, who are undoubtedly a lot better informed than I am, think of it:

“Think of Angela Merkel as German chancellor and Nicolas Sarkozy as French president, and an intriguing notion arises – could Thatcherism belatedly arrive in Germany and France?

As soon as one imagines it, qualifications flood in. Ms Merkel has some characteristics of the former British prime minister – notably support for more radical economic reforms than previous CDU leaders – but not the same implacable force. She will probably tone down reformist zeal so as not to frighten the voters, and in any case faces internal resistance from conservatives, including the CSU sister party.“

Lafontaine Muddies The Waters

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Any opinions from Germany on this?

“Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der’s re-election hopes were dealt a fresh blow on Tuesday after a charismatic political rival said he would join leftwing groupings to run against the German leader.

Oskar Lafontaine, former chairman of Mr Schr?der’s Social Democratic party, said he would give up his party membership and enter the electoral battle if other SPD dissidents and neo-communists ran on a joint ticket.”

Is this a real issue, or a media event?

And this is also being floated:

Should the umbrella group win in sufficient numbers, it could rob both centre-right and centre-left of an outright majority, forcing the opposition Christian Democratic Union into a grand coalition with the SPD.

Germany On The Road To Reform?

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“Voting for the C.D.U. Sunday meant putting a stop to Schr?der’s reform agenda…..But in the future, if the C.D.U. has power, there is no stopping the reforms.” says Morgan Stanley’s Elga Barsch (remember her?). This argument draws attention to an important enigma which must be puzzling a lot of people. As the New York Times puts it:

“If voters are angry about economic legislation that rolls back the social welfare state, and they take out their anger on the governing party, does that make more such legislation inevitable?

As undemocratic as that might sound, investors in Germany seem to think so. As financial analysts said chances of new legislation had increased, the country’s stock market rallied Monday after a stinging defeat in regional elections for the Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der, which led him to call for national elections in the fall.”
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Schr?der Strikes Back

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What better way to bury the news of your party’s ouster from power in a state it’s ruled for nearly 40 years than to up the ante?

Give this to Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der, he still knows how to dominate the news cycle like no one else in Germany. Angela Merkel didn’t hear the news until she was walking into the TV studios. I just saw Edmund Stoiber hem and haw about who would actually be the opposition candidate for chancellor. Squirming on the end of the moderator’s pointed questions, he was. Could not bring himself to say, “Yes, I support Angela Merkel.” Just couldn’t do it.

And there’s this:
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Schr?der: early elections in Autumn.

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I suppose German politics aren’t entirely predictable anymore. A few minutes ago, German Chancellor Schroeder confirmed earlier statements by Franz Muentefering, the SPD’s chairman, that the current red-green coalition will seek a – constitutionally problematic – vote of no-confidence to allow the early dissolution of the Bundestag and hold federal elections in autumn this year.
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Shifting points of reference?

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Two days ago, Brad DeLong published an unfortunate post with an even more unfortunate title – “G?nter Grass minimizes the Holocaust” – in which he harshly criticised the German Nobel laureate G?nter Grass and even called him “Nazi scum”, an accusation he retracted later following intense criticism on his own blog as well as on others, including Crooked Timber – for statements he made in a radio address on German NDR radio a couple of days ago (“Freiheit nach B?rsenma?” – mp3 in German, read by himself, text in German (via DIE ZEIT), English translation) which was later translated and reprinted by the New York Times on May 7, the day before the 60th anniversary of VE-day.
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No Fire Without Smoke

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First a bit of ‘breaking news’ for German readers: the main factor which has lead to the massive round of cost cutting and staff reductions in Germany has not been the activity of a small group of hedge funds, the main culprit, let’s get it out of the cupboard, has been the high euro.

Whilst the contents of G7 meetings are never formally disclosed, it has been a more or less open secret that for some time now that the focus of recent meetings has been on how to overcome perceived imbalances in the global economy, and in particular how to force through ‘structural reforms’ in countries like Germany and Japan where such reforms are enormously politically unpopular. So the structural reforms have been pushed via the indirect route: making them virually inevitable due to cost pressures in export dependent economies.
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Locusts, or Incongruency Revisited.

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It seems we’re not the only ones who are beginning to see governance model incongruencies behind some of the German economic ills (see two of my last posts (1, 2), and, especially the comments to the last one).

Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell (who knows Germany well, having beeen a research fellow at the The Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) gets a bit angry at the Economist for their usually biased coverage of Continental European social and economic models, before declaring his support for Franz M?ntefering.
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Hysteria In The Kindergarten.

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Someone must have put something really bad in their lemonade. I am at loss for words about the hysteria that the ongoing German class struggle has become (for more information see the comments to my last entry). It’s like a gang fight in kindergarten.

While Nobel Price laureate G?nther Grass (literature, not economics) made headlines with his important realization that even German MEPs are not living in a dimension of their own, and thus – in spite of the constitution’s stipulation that their decision’s are only subject to their conscience – are often subject to pressure from “a ring of lobbyists”, Guido Westerwelle, chairman of the German Liberals, thought he was missing out on all the fun and – in a truly surprising move – lashed out against trade unions, apaprently calling them ‘a plague upon the country’ and ‘traitors of the interests of employees’.

The latest, and most bizarre, development: In what is apparently an attempt to amend Godwin’s Law ["As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."] , the Jewish German historian Michael Wolffsohn compared the SPD’s chairman Franz M?ntefering’s statement about ‘Financial investors that descended upon companies like locusts’ to the anti-jewish agitation of the Nazi era and demanded that Mr. M?ntefering apologize to all affected by the Nazi dicatatorship.

According to a report from the Frankfurter Neue Presse he wrote among other things (translation mine) -

“…a boycot of companies is called for. And that should nor remind me, as a historian and a Jew, of January 1, 1933? ‘Don’t buy from Jews’ they said back then and just as now it was allegedly all for the good of the people and the simple man against the “greedy capital”, which was called “Jewish capital” then.”

Paul Spiegel, Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, hurried to tell the press that he finds it absurd to allege antisemitic motives for M?ntefering’s statements, but added that comparisons of humans to animals were generally hapless.

Hapless. Quite right. Like the entire debate. At least now I know that Germany really needs more kindergarten teachers…