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...plans to appoint 100 ruling politicians to oversee ministries. In order to transfer more power to the Cabinet - and away from ministry bureaucrats - the DPJ will also replace the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, an advisory group to the Prime Minister's office set up in 2001, with a National Strategy Bureau (NSB) reporting to the Prime Minister. The NSB will be key in budget and diplomatic-policy formulation. The DPJ also wants to eliminate amakudari, or descent from heaven, which places retired bureaucrats in plush jobs. "This is a new way of doing business in this country," says...
...German politics is no longer dominated by the two big parties - the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats - with the kind of stable two-party coalitions that were typical of West Germany. The political game is much more open, with at least five parties vying for power and reflecting the much broader spectrum of political opinion in the population. This seemingly unstable coalition system is the new normal. "The trend for the future is a stabilization of instability," says Ulrich von Alemann, a political scientist at the University of Düsseldorf. (Read "Busting Out: German Pol Plays the Cleavage...
...According to opinion polls, Chancellor Angela Merkel seemed to be coasting to victory in September - but now the race seems more uncertain than ever. Her CDU party lost its absolute majority in Thuringia and Saar and may lose power altogether to three-party left-leaning coalitions in those states. In Saxony, the CDU and FDP govern together and were re-elected - but for the first time in a German state parliament, a neo-Nazi party, the NPD, kept its seats...
...Germany's political landscape grows less divided along old Cold War lines, the power of the smaller parties is increasing, and that, the left-leaning daily Tageszeitung noted on Monday, could make it impossible for Merkel's CDU and FDP to gain a majority in September. "The only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain," the paper wrote. "Now it is clear that we have a five-party system, which in the end could result in a return of the Grand Coalition [between...
Tuesday in Libya was slated to be a blowout party for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bloodless coup that brought him to power. And it might have been, had the world's longest-serving ruler not been wrangling for nearly two weeks with British and U.S. officials over the rapturous homecoming of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi after his release from a Scottish prison...