Word: bundestag
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...goes for the grand coalition which, at its inception, inspired more skepticism than confidence. Nor is there much of an opposition in Berlin to highlight a government's shortcomings: the Greens, liberal Free Democrats and post-communist Left Party between them fill just 27% of the seats in the Bundestag. But Merkel is more than just fortunate: she has made her luck. Meetings with world leaders from President Bush to Vladimir Putin have won praise for a nicely calibrated blend of multilateral fence mending and principled criticism. At home, she toned down the free-market rhetoric that made voters uneasy...
...things will get tough once they start talking about labor-market reform." The question of how to lower the cost of labor speaks to major differences between the two partners in the coalition. Laurenz Meyer, a former secretary-general of the cdu and current economics expert in the Bundestag, says that since last year's elections, the spd has been looking "to align [itself] with the unions" even more strongly than before. It's not been a winning strategy. According to the latest Forsa poll, backing for the party is down to 28%, from 39% six months ago (Merkel...
...Europeans who have soured on mass immigration, stabilizing Congo may be preferable to having to cope with thousands trying to escape the fighting. "If we do not succeed, this would result in more waves of refugees [into] Europe and Germany," government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said last week. The Bundestag is expected to approve the troops measure in May. Europe's parliamentary debates feel a world away from Dubie, where the battle is focused on daily survival rather than on the country's political future. "People want roads reconstructed and land to dig," says Jan Peter Stellema, msf's relief coordinator...
...their fingers on the damned-either-way dilemma of governments who either acquiesced to the secret flights or didn't know about them. "I cannot imagine how something like this should happen without (the government) knowing," thundered Gregor Gysi, head of Germany's Left Party, this week in the Bundestag. "International law has to be used to limit the power of the strongest." The idea that European governments might have been complicit in holding detainees in secret challenges Europeans' sense that they hold the moral high ground over the U.S. on issues of human rights...
...renowned for their fondness for Cuban cigars and a comfortable lifestyle. "Governing is fun!" Schröder quipped at the end of his first term, sending shock waves though Germany's conservative establishment. "They all wore suits and ties to the office," Lindner said of his colleagues in the Bundestag. But "in their heads they saw themselves as from another culture." "There was a feeling that they were on the same wavelength as you, that we had something in common," Stefan Hermes, 25, a Berlin student wrote recently in a tribute in Der Tagesspiegel. "The '68ers changed politics." They certainly...