Tag Archives: germany

Spain turns to the right – but are the voters rejecting ‘the left’ or incumbents?

By Stephen Tall | Published 21st November 2011 - 8:00 am

As the polls had predicted, Spain has a new government: Rajoy’s right-wing Partido Popular (PP) defeated Zapatero’s left-of-centre Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). The only surprise was the large margin of victory, 16%, the worst defeat for Spain’s socialists in their electoral history.

So yet another right-wing government takes power in a European nation. On the face of it, it seems almost perverse that at a time when confidence in the deregulated capitalist system associated with the right is at its lowest ebb that those parties which champion it are winning elections. As I noted here on LibDemVoice back in …

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Posted in Europe / International, News | Also tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Opinion: we must learn lessons from German Greens

By Alexis Rowell | Published 5th April 2011 - 6:08 pm

It is interesting to note last weekend’s election results from Germany in the context of Nick Clegg and David Laws’ attempts to turn the Liberal Democrats into an economic liberal party. There is an economic liberal party in Germany – it’s called the Free Democratic Party (FDP). On Sunday in state elections in Baden-Württemberg and in Rhineland-Palatinate they got trounced. In the former poll they barely made it into the state parliament with 5.3% of the vote; in the latter they didn’t cross the 5% threshold and are no longer represented.

One thing that has changed in …

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Posted in Europe / International, Op-eds | 34 Comments

Nick Clegg declares “Ich bin ein Berliner”

By The Voice | Published 10th June 2010 - 9:20 pm

Well, sort of. Here’s the AFP report:

BERLIN — Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has already made history with his meteoric political career and on Thursday he notched up another feat: speaking German to the Germans.

“I find the famous Berlin fresh air very refreshing,” the Liberal Democrat leader told reporters in fluent German after talks with Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in Berlin, before talking up the importance of bilateral relations.

But perhaps to the relief of Clegg’s notoriously monolingual compatriots — he speaks five tongues — he was not completely at ease with the grammatical minefield that is the German language,

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged , | 23 Comments

Opinion: Deutschland über Europa? And why the UK should care

By Mike Guillaume | Published 11th April 2010 - 12:20 pm

Since the World Cup of 1966 there has been a number of occasions for the British to hear the first lines of the former German national anthem: “Deutschland über alles. Über alles in der Welt” (“Germany above all, above all in the world”). Should a new line been added in the wake of the recent Greek crisis, and in the wait for the next one? Then it would go as “German above Europe”.

As the third major country in the EU, with France and Germany, the UK opinion and leaders should pay heed, even if this distracts a bit from home …

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Posted in Europe / International, Op-eds | Also tagged | 18 Comments

Opinion: Another Greek tragedy? Time for Europhiles to admit the dream is over

By Mike Guillaume | Published 9th March 2010 - 11:50 am

In case you wouldn’t have noticed, another crisis has come on top of the big one.

For those who understand French, read carefully this article in the March 5 edition of French daily “Le Monde” . A former German finance vice-minister buries the euro as it is now and advises all Southern-Europe economies (including France) to get out of the Eurozone if they don’t clean up their act, behave more like Germany and adopt many unacceptable social measures. Some German backbenchers have suggested these might include selling off some islands (who would buy these? You guess).

That doesn’t yet …

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Posted in Europe / International, Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , , , | 54 Comments

News updates: tax-dodging Germans and Andrew Rosindell

By Mark Pack | Published 1st March 2010 - 9:19 pm

In February I reported on the question facing various governments in Europe: should they buy stolen data which will help identify law breaking tax-dodgers? The German government did this in 2008 and the threat of a repeat was sufficient to cause a mini-sampede of people confessing their sins. Nearly 2,500 Germans have now agreed to pay up. That has not been enough to stop the German government though: it has not only purchased the data but is also now talking about making another purchase of an extra CD containing further Swiss data.

More recently, I also linked to a story …

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Daily View 2×2: 8 November 2009

By Mark Pack | Published 8th November 2009 - 7:00 am

It’s Sunday. It’s 7am. It’s time to find out how peanut butter is made. But first, the news.

2 Big Stories

Gordon Brown floats idea of tax on financial transactions

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s idea of a financial transactions tax has received a lukewarm response from G20 countries.

The proposal, which took delegates by surprise at the meeting in St Andrew’s overshadowed other items on the agenda.

The US said it would “not support” a transaction tax and Canada added it was “not an idea we would look at”.

The Conservatives said that Downing Street had previously “poured cold water on this proposal” and that the Treasury had called it “unworkable”.

Chancellor Alistair Darling said the leaders had agreed the International Monetary Fund should now consider the possibility of introducing an international transactions tax, which would be used to create a fund for bank bailouts. (BBC)

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Daily View 2×2: 28 September 2009

By Stephen Tall | Published 28th September 2009 - 9:45 am

2 Big Stories


Germany elects new centre-right government to be led by Angela Merkel

The Financial Times reports:

Germany is on course for its first centre-right government in 11 years after voters gave chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and her Free Democratic allies a majority in parliament.

The victory of the conservative-liberal alliance – which had campaigned for tax cuts and a return to nuclear energy, but also social justice and tougher rules for finance – in Sunday’s poll ends four years of awkward co-operation between the CDU and its rival Social Democratic party in a grand coalition. …

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German elections: the view from the chalk face

By Katie Ritson | Published 17th September 2009 - 11:25 am

If you clicked on this hoping for some in-depth political analysis from a seasoned commentator drawing on the full range of German daily newspapers – then stop reading here. Hardbitten politico I am not; my grasp on the minute-by-minute situation as a time-pressed mother of a toddler with no voting rights (as a UK citizen) is tenuous. Nonetheless, in these pre-election weeks, it would be hard not to pick up on the political vibes in the air and catch some of the excitement; even the discussions round the sandpit in our local park have been touching on party politics in …

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Posted in Europe / International, Op-eds | Also tagged , , , | 8 Comments