Word: merkel
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...Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schröder were all over the German media last week; often as the butt of political cartoons and doctored photos ridiculing their poor election showings. What Germans didn't see, though, was a clear picture of a new Chancellor. Germany's vote produced no decisive result. The leaders of the two big parties - Schröder of the Social Democrats (spd) and Merkel of the Christian Democrats (cdu) - both claimed victory, but the real winners were the smaller parties. The Left Party, made up of disaffected ex-spd members and former communists, won 54 seats...
...reactions of France's political class to the German electoral stalemate, the French plainly see their own malaise reflected back from across the Rhine - and that's a depressing prospect for the main parties of both the left and the right. The French conversation casts CDU leader Angela Merkel as a Teutonic stand-in for Nicolas Sarkozy, France's super-ambitious interior minister who heads the ruling conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), yet regularly issues pithy calls for a total "rupture" of the status quo politics of President Jacques Chirac and his current prime minister, Dominique de Villepin...
...France is out of step with its neighbors in its reticence to embrace market and labor reforms. "He always talks about France as an anomaly," says Reynie´. "The idea is that 'the others' have either done reforms or want to, and are doing better than France as a result. Merkel's lackluster showing makes that idea look fragile? - particularly since it comes after the defeat of the conservative Aznar government in Spain, and just after the Hurricane Katrina debacle appeared, in European eyes, to further dim the appeal of President Bush's free market mantra...
...more moderate tack of the Villepin government is not only what the French people want, but what the Germans apparently favor as well. That means marshalling the power of the state to solve problems like entrenched unemployment rather than reducing its role and unshackling entrepreneurial forces, as Sarkozy (and Merkel) have advocated...
...While the Socialists joined the Chiraquiens in rejoicing over Merkel's performance, they also have reason for concern over the happenings on the German left as well. After all, their cousins in Schroeder's SPD would have won hands-down if it weren't for the renegade Left party of Oskar Lafontaine and Gregor Gysi, with its roots in the old East Germany ruling party. The French Socialists have been here before, of course: Their candidate Lionel Jospin failed to reach the second round of the 2002 presidential elections because so many traditionally Socialist voters opted for stronger tobacco...