As everyone knows by now, the 2012 London Olympics open in just two days’ time. This blog is not so very interested, at least from an athletics point-of-view, although perhaps noteworthy incidents might still arise.

Meanwhile, Christian Hönicke from the German business newspaper Handelsblatt approaches the Games from a proper business perspective to expound on How metropolises profit from the Olympics. Yes, the medals-won table is already there over on the right side (all zeros for now, of course; “Afghanistan,” “Albania,” and right on through) and Hönicke’s piece is regularly interrupted by mini-accounts of past medal-winners, but the text itself provides a good treatment of the question: “Is it worth it for a city to host the Games?” (more…)

Here’s a disturbing fact that got lost in the widespread (fully unjustified) relief that greeted New Democracy’s victory in the last Greek elections: that “Golden Dawn” party, basically a bunch of neo-Nazis, once again gained 7% of the vote, despite a scandalous TV appearance by one of that party’s leading politicians just prior to this second vote, in which he threw water at as well as actually struck a pair of women panelists who took exception to the far-right opinions he was expressing.

This news tidbit we get in a report out of Athens from Die Tageszeitung reporter Schwabinggrad Ballett (sic; you’ve got to hope that is some sort of nom-de-plume) entitled The Social Holes.

In fact, Golden Dawn’s pre-election outrages were not confined to the TV studio, but also extended to the streets (in the best private fascist army tradition – look up e.g. the Nazi SA, Mussolini’s Black Shirts) where they went around bashing immigrants. Still, they seem to have provoked little if any backlash, other than occasional anti-Golden Dawn demonstrations organized in immigrant communities. The author worries whether we are seeing here the granting of political legitimization to Golden Dawn which most feel they do not deserve.

But it gets worse. Ballett cites figures of between 17% and 25% support for Golden Dawn from the special ballot-boxes where police can go to vote on election day as they take a brief break from duty to do so. What is more, it seems that the party has even started engaging in providing an impressive list of social services to residents of a particularly supportive Athens neighborhood called Agios Panteleimonas: supplying medicines and food to those who need them, taking emergency cases to the hospital, and yes (it’s in the article, though I can’t tell if Ballett is being serious here), helping little old ladies across the street. After all, by and large provision of these sorts of services from the government has melted away, since that government can’t afford them anymore; that’s the meaning of this piece’s title, Social Holes. Golden Dawn leaders may not exactly be as crazy as everyone thinks.

You might want to click through and check out as well that rather chilling picture at the top of the article, apparently of a Golden Dawn street demo – looks like something straight out of Apple’s famed “1984” TV advertisement.

Returning to its non-English-language roots, EuroSavant today examines reactions to the unveiling of the draft EU constitution on the Continent (or “in Europe,” as certain British newspapers are wont to call that land mass stretching out on the other side of the Channel – as if they don’t happen to be part of it, legally, administratively, and even historically). And yes, loyal and long-standing €S readers, we first consider France. Surely there everyone is firmly on the side of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the Constitutonal Convention’s president, and his draft document. (more…)

In the run-up to the War in Iraq Germany joined Russia and France in what the Economist has termed the salon des refusés in opposition to the US hard line. Now, as yesterday’s entry showed, a deep split between the US and France has arisen on lifting economic sanctions and the legal basis for proceeding with Iraq’s reconstruction generally, while Germany has downplayed its differences with the Bush administration. What is the German judgment on the Franco-American tiff? (more…)

Today I’m on enforced exile from my reporting and commentary upon parochial Netherlands concerns. Still, not all the important things that are happening have to do with Iraq. An important case in point is the EU Athens summit, at which the fifteen current EU member-states and all ten candidate states yesterday signed the Accession Treaty. (Recall that only three of those states – Malta, Slovenia, and Hungary, in that order – have yet held the national referenda authorizing actually joining the EU in a year’s time. And Cyprus, due to its special circumstances, will hold no referendum at all.) (more…)