The first preliminary projections in the German election have been released, as usual, at 18.00. As expected, the Union have the most votes. As unexpected, they’re not doing nearly as well as people had thought, polling a mere 2% ahead of the SPD at 35.7%. Of those 10 million voters ‘undecided’ as the campaign drew to a close, 30% broke for the Union, but 33% for SPD. The big surprise is the FDP, who with more than 10% are doing much better than I’d have expected. But at this point neither B/Y nor R/G have a majority.

This is all to be taken with many very large grains of salt. It’s early evening yet, and those numbers are but a preliminary extrapolation. Still, at this moment the likeliest outcomes (to judge on a purely numerical basis) seem to be a grand coalition or the ‘Ampel‘ that everybody had been rejecting out of hand.

Oodles of stuff here about the German elections these days, you’ll have noticed. Meanwhile, in our secret headquarters deep beneath Brussels, we afoers are sitting round enjoying fat Cohibas and lashings of ancient brandy in snifters the size of your head, talking about (what else?) football, when suddenly one of the technical staff rushes into the boardroom, all apologies at disturbing us but perhaps we’d better have a look at this item that has just come across his monitor:

EuroSportwetten has a unique 50-1 double-header for Hanover’s modest soccer club to beat German champions Bayern Munich on Saturday and Hanover’s best-known citizen, Schroeder, to be victorious the day after.

Schröder to beat Merkel and Hannover to beat FCB? At 50-1 those odds are far too short, surely. Daniel Davies is fascinated by electoral betting markets; perhaps he’ll want to look into the arbitrage opportunity here.

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 was something nearer to a lethal dose.

AP reports that the Russian navy does not have the funds this year to buy underwater rescue vessels of the type Britain sent to Russia to save the lives of seven men trapped in a mini-sub in the Pacific last month:

“We do not have the money at the moment,” but the navy expected to obtain the money next year, Adm. Vladimir Masorin was quoted as saying by the RIA-Novosti news agency.

Russian naval authorities said after the crisis that they would buy two Scorpio underwater robotic vehicles. Each vessel costs between $1 million and $5 million, depending on the configuration.

Is this the man who is destined to lead the British conservative party back from the wilderness and hurtling into office. I really don’t know, but it certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing for British democracyif he was. With all due respect for the Lib Dems, what the UK has now seems to be something like a ‘one party system’.

Here’s my take on the IRA peace announcement, written for Slate yesterday.

The smartest thing I have to say involves pointing out how wrong I’ve been about a few things in the past.
Continue reading →