Word: fischers
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...indecisive interior decorator, Germany has been mulling gaudy color schemes for its new coalition. Yet even if this week sees a final choice - pairing Christian Democrat black with Social Democratic red - the government will appear oddly colorless. Missing from any Cabinet will be the country's brightest politician, Joschka Fischer, 57, Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor since 1998. The street-fighting iconoclast who settled happily into a role at the peak of the German establishment, and whose international fame and personal popularity always seemed out of kilter with the modest size of his Green party, has retired from frontline politics...
...Fischer split from the more extreme factions in his own movement and later brought his pragmatic style and trenchant wit to the Greens, which he joined in 1982, just two years after the party was founded. He was the first Green to take a government post, wearing sneakers to his swearing-in ceremony in 1985 as Environment Minister in the state of Hesse. His appointment as German Foreign Minister, the highest post held by a Green politician, lent Germany a distinctive presence on the international stage, one enhanced when the former anti-militarist turned humanitarian interventionist backed German troop participation...
...longer stand in the way of market reforms, and can sound as fiscally responsible as Germany's postwar Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard. "Our concern was never the redistribution of wealth, but rather justice between the generations," says Renate Künast, outgoing Minister for Agriculture and Consumer Protection and Fischer's successor as co-leader of the Green parliamentary group. Matthias Berninger, 34, the co-leader of the Greens in the Hesse state parliament, says he fights with other leading party members "about how much debt the state should take on. We can't pass the burden to the next...
...There is no obvious way to cobble together a majority that can govern Germany for the next four years. Theoretically, the Social Democrat-Green coalition could recruit the FDP. But the party's chairman insists that he won't get into bed with Schr?der's Social Democrats and Joschka Fischer's Greens. On the right side of the political divide, Merkel could try to pry the Greens out of Schr?der's embrace. Arithmetically, this is a fetching idea; ideologically, it is not. How would she harness her own Conservatives, the free-market FDP and the leftish environmentalists of the Green...
...working: the Christian Democrats last week led the Social Democrats by 13 points, though 29% of voters say they're still undecided. Merkel was feeling upbeat enough last week to take on her most voluble rivals. At a televised roundtable of candidates, she even managed to silence Joschka Fischer, the garrulous leader of the Greens and Germany's Foreign Minister. "You will listen to me," she intoned when he interrupted her, elucidating her tax plan...