Word: derlying
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...Europeans. As was painfully obvious during last week's summit meeting of the 25 E.U. heads of government in Brussels, Europe's elected leaders are either on the defensive or lame ducks. After his party was trounced in a state poll last month, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has called a snap election for the fall - which he looks likely to lose. In France, President Jacques Chirac is foundering after his country's voters rejected the European Constitution; in Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair recently saw his parliamentary majority sharply reduced; and in recessionary Italy, Premier Silvio Berlusconi...
Just how doomed is German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's political future? His party, the Social Democrats, suffered a decisive election defeat last week in the party's longtime stronghold of North Rhine-Westphalia-a loss so humiliating, the country's media likened it to George W. Bush's losing Texas. But once the returns were in, Schröder shocked the country right back by putting his job on the line and calling for national elections in September, a year earlier than originally scheduled. Was Schröder, who has served as Chancellor since 1998, cannily distracting voters from his party...
...interview with TIME, Schröder, 61, vowed he would prevail. "Giving up is not one of my character traits," he said. But lately the leader of the world's third largest economy has certainly looked in political peril. The nation's unemployment rate is at a post-World War II high of nearly 12%, and the rate of business closures has reached record levels. As a result, the Social Democrats trail the conservative Christian Democrats, the main opposition party in the fall elections, by 15 points in opinion polls...
...leader of the Christian Democrats is Angela Merkel, who, as a protégé of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl's, is known to be a tough political fighter, if lacking in Schröder's campaign experience. Should her party succeed in September, Merkel, 50, a former physics professor who was raised in East Germany, would become Germany's first female Chancellor. She has said her immediate focus would be domestic issues, particularly the economy. (She supports loosening job-protection laws, overhauling pensions and curbing the power of trade unions.) But on international affairs, she is likely to be somewhat friendlier...
OPENED. THE MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE, by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Jewish leaders from around the world; in Berlin. The memorial, an undulating 19,000-sq-m field of 2,711 concrete slabs, was designed by American architect Peter Eisenman and cost $35 million to build. Although the idea for a memorial was first mooted by German journalist Lea Rosh in 1988, it took 15 years of debate over the design before construction began in 2003. Parliamentary President Wolfgang Thierse said the monument, which is dedicated to the Holocaust's 6 million Jewish victims...