Word: joschka
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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...
...with as much spark as a soggy book of matches? Of course, there were plenty of them at the conference, too, but the merest hint that it might soon be fashionable to be young and conservative in Britain confirms the significance of other developments. There's the retirement of Joschka Fischer, the iconic figure of the politics of rebellion; the discovery that many young European Catholics are more traditionally devout than their parents; even, perhaps, the rejection by younger voters of the draft E.U. constitution in the Dutch and French referendums. Put all that together and you can detect...
...worse. 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...
...strategy is 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...
...some E.U., Iranian and U.N. officials were hailing as a potential breakthrough an agreement in which Iran would suspend its enrichment activities in exchange for additional nuclear technology and guaranteed fuel deliveries for a civilian nuclear capability. But at week's end, the optimism was fading. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said that there had been no breakthrough, and French negotiators said they were "still analyzing" the latest Iranian counterproposal...