The key figure at the summit, as always, will be German Chancellor Angela Merkel, fresh and possibly even slightly sun-tanned off an official visit to various African countries. Just as she is preparing for Thursday’s meeting, however, scattered press speculation has arisen to the effect that Helmut Kohl – the German Reunification Chancellor, and probably the mentor who did most to make Merkel what she is today – now cannot hold himself back from criticizing her Eurodebt policy. Die macht mir mein Europa kaputt! is the catchy quote from Kohl – “She’s destroying my Europe!” – and it comes from a fairly reputable source, namely the German news-magazine Der Spiegel. Ed Harrison over at Credit Writedowns identifies this Spiegel article and provides his own translation.

The thing is, Kohl himself recants everything; Harrison even writes of him “vehemently [denying] the Spiegel account” but at the same time ventures that “it is likely true in substance if not form.” Still, there is an alternate source to this story, one pointed out by Presseurop, namely from the respected Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel: Kohl disputes Merkel’s Europe policy. (By the way, Kohl is quoted in this piece as dismissing the Spiegel report as “freely invented,” i.e. out of whole cloth – but Der Tagesspiegel would print that about a competitor’s piece, wouldn’t they?)

So what does the Berlin paper put forth that Helmut Kohl does not deny? He is said to have issued some remarks to the Bild Zeitung – a considerably more down-market paper, but never mind – expressing his concern that the euro be shored up and that the current problems be seen not as structural, but as merely “the results of home-made mistakes.” Der Tagesspiegel also claims to know that Kohl is certainly willing to criticize Merkel, but only in private when people come to visit him, which he often takes as opportunities to decry her lack of vision for Europe and her neglect of the all-important Franco-German relationship. (It’s true that she and French President Sarkozy don’t like each other much.)

Der Tagesspiegel is also able to quote another former German heavy-hitter very close to Kohl, namely his foreign policy advisor Horst Teltschik, about Merkel:

She has developed no concept for Europe’s future, although that’s just what we now need. For this systematic crisis [sorry, Helmut!] Europe must find a systematic answer. It’s obvious that we need a common European budget-, debt- and financial policy.

So yes, it’s fair to say that those who are supposed to be in Angela Merkel’s corner are starting to grow rather nervous at the recent turn of events.

                          

Er – Gesundheit! What’s that you say? Why that’s Pyeongchang, not a city at all strictly-speaking, but a county, located in the east part of South Korea, and the locale which was chosen yesterday to be the host of the 2018 Winter Olympics. Maybe/probably you don’t know it now; you’ll know the name enough by, say, March of 2018.

With their victory, the South Koreans left behind in their dust their other two main competitors for this designation, namely Munich/Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany, of course) and Annecy (in the French Alps, right by the Swiss border). But don’t labor under any mistaken impression that Pyeongchang ran away with the competition based on any super-spectacular presentation they made earlier this week before the International Olympic Committee’s conclave in Durban, South Africa. No no no – as a quite informative article by Friedhard Teuffel in Der Tagesspiegel points out (Fiddling your way to Olympic victory, reprinted in Die Zeit as Race of the string-pullers), every one of those 110 IOC members charged with voting on the matter had certainly made up his/her mind before the presentations even started.

Note well that this article was published in both papers before the decision for Pyeongchang was announced, so that it’s written within a context that still holds out the prospect for a German victory. In reality, though, Teuffel could already confidently predict that the Koreans would win, that Munich had but a slim chance left and the French none at all. Everybody who had any insight into the process at all could figure that out already, he writes, and of course they were proven right.

So what about this process? The clue to understanding it, reasonably enough, is grasping what happened last time when it came time to choose a Winter Games host, namely the selection of Sochi, Russia – located, you might recall, very close to Russia’s southern border in the Caucasus, thus not with what you could call the best winter climate, and which in fact had no winter sport facilities already available at the time of its selection. Kind of reminds you of the selection of Qatar – doesn’t it, with its ferocious summer heat? – for the 2022 World Cup. Except that IOC proceedings are supposed to be a bit less corrupt than those of FIFA (remember the Salt Lake City 2002 scandal!), and no doubt they are, but only on a relative scale.

How does it work, then? Herr Teuffel (the name means “devil” BTW – could it be but a pen name?) provides a fantastic annotated checklist of the factors that are important in Olympic site-selection, and those that are not. Among the latter (not important) are environmental considerations (just a pious fig-leaf), the actual desire on the part of the local population to host the Games (of little interest to the IOC, although Pyeongchang was ahead in this by far) and, interestingly enough, the report of the Evaluation Committee that is sent to extensively evaluate each short-listed candidate-city. After all, during the last round the Evaluation Committee had little good to say about Sochi.

Money – Money Changes Everything

What factors are important? Mostly those having to do with money. Are there government institutions and/or big companies present ready to pump in a lot of it? Does the country constitute an interesting new market for winter sports, so that sports-equipment companies can use the Olympics to start selling where previously they had not been? South Korea scored high in these areas; according to Teuffel, the Samsung CEO has been so involved in the Pyeongchang bid that he’s practically an honorary IOC member. Then there are the sheer tactical considerations among IOC members; remember, many of them are from hot countries with no native interest in winter sports (!), they therefore have no “genuine” motivations to vote for any particular city and so it boils down to what sort of return favors they can get in exchange for their vote.

There in the realm of movers-and-shakers, of string-pullers (Strippenzieher) was where the South Koreans were canny enough to triumph – finally, in their third consecutive attempt to bag those winter games. Ah, Citius, Altius, Fortius – “Faster, Higher, Stronger” – indeed!

UPDATE: Now here’s some German reaction from after the announcement of Pyeongchang’s win:

Olympiavergabe 2018 nach Pyeongchang: Gestatten, Verlierer!: Wir packen es einfach nicht: Seit 1945 hat sich… http://bit.ly/nMXZiq

July 7, 2011 8:00 am via stern.deReplyRetweetFavorite

@sternde

stern.de

Roughly translated: We won’t be that easy to get rid of! Sebastian Kemnitzer launches an appeal for Germany to pick itself up, brush itself off, come back and try again. It now makes five times that one German city or another has applied to host the Olympics (Summer or Winter) since the end of World War II, he points out, with only one success (the Summer Games of 1972 – themselves not the most triumphant of events, you might recall). This when the country has had such success in other sporting fields, such as the fantastically-popular (i.e. both inside and outside the country) World Cup of 2006, and indeed the Women’s World Cup that is being held there now. Come on, he urges: Time to get moving to win the 2022 Winter Games for Munich and so make it the first city ever to host both Summer and Winter Games – exactly 50 years apart!

Still, Mr. Kemnitzer of Stern needs to compare notes with Friedhard Teuffel of Der Tagesspiegel (i.e. of the article discussed above). Kemnitzer puts forth a somewhat naive explanation for Germany’s 2018 failure involving lack of local population involvement and arrogant statements from leading businessmen. As we saw Teuffel describe it, in the final analysis these things don’t much matter either way; IOC decisions are delivered according to bit more cynical considerations (€€€). Perhaps the “ra-ra!” Mr. Kemnitzer needs to internalize a bit of that realism as well.

                          

That would be a complacent thing to do; and after all, Die Zeit republished Fetscher’s piece under the new title Complacency is the enemy of Democracy. So where are there problems elsewhere in Europe? Well, there’s the Vatican, with its pedophilia scandals; Italy itself where “there rules an operetta-premier, who systematically subjugates the media, laws, and several submissive girls”; the Netherlands, where eurosceptic and anti-Islam ideologies thrive (and where Jews live uncomfortably – allegedly); and then Hungary, where antisemitism and anti-Gypsy feelings prevail.

This is mostly incoherent. First of all, Fetscher’s subject is supposed to be threats to democracy; the Roman Catholic scandals have little to do with that, while one would think that at least some of the opinions she condemns (at least euroscepticism) are precisely what free, democratic peoples are supposed to be allowed to hold if that suits them. She also strangely misses one recent phenomenon that would seem to have constituted a datapoint strongly supporting her thesis, namely the new media-supervision law in Hungary (which I recently covered here) that some see as paving the way for the return of something resembling a dictatorship.

But does the new law really make up such a threat? Why not go ask someone actually on the ground there, which is what Hanno Mussler of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung does in an interview with Jan Mainka, publisher in Budapest of a German-language weekly.

This is a remarkable piece, mainly because of the calm lack of concern Mainka displays for the new media law:

The Budapester Zeitung [his paper] reports in a fair and balanced manner. In our editorials we support no party. At most you could describe our line as pro-Hungary. I don’t see that we will get in conflict with the new law. I’m not so sure about other Hungarian media outlets. Many are anything but fair and balanced. The interregional dailies stand on the side of either the opposition or the government.

To him, concern elsewhere in Europe over the media law (even as expressed by German Chancellor Merkel, or by the EU Commission) is “hysteria.” The new Hungarian premier, Viktor Orbán, was after all one of the leaders of the opposition that brought Communism down in Hungary twenty years ago. Of much more concern for the country’s media business are its economic troubles, for which the Orbán administration is just the set of personnel you would want to look to for solutions. Yes, recent taxation measures (bank tax, tax on foreign companies) have been drastic, but drastic solutions are what is needed; only their somewhat unpredictable nature is to be regretted.

So there you have it. If we are to believe Herr Mainka – again, responsible for putting out and making money with a publication in Hungary’s capital – neither the new media law nor Orbán’s ruthless revenue-raising measures are anything to worry about. But I don’t know: in particular, his dismissal of the Hungarian dailies – implying that it’s no problem if the government comes down hard on them, after all, they’re partisan – for me strikes the wrong note: newspapers are supposed to be allowed to be partisan! I’m getting too much here of the syndrome “OK, they’re going after the Jews; but I’m an upstanding and decent citizen, and they’ll never come after me!”

Still, this is a “don’t worry” viewpoint from an expert who is right there where the things are happening. Maybe all of us who were viewing developments in Hungary with alarm should stop and reconsider. Mainka also makes the point that few if any have likely taken the trouble to read the new media-law act to see what it actually says – maybe that would be a good first step for everyone!

                          

All that Congress stuff is not so often the focus of foreign coverage of American politics, however. Generally, it’s the President foreigners are interested in – the American executive in charge of the country’s relations with other governments, after all – and especially this one who broke once and for all the 200-year-plus color barrier to the office.

So we have, for example, a piece from France’s left-wing Libération (Midterm: Obama launches the final assault). There is a disappointed tone here even as journalist Fabrice Rousselot goes into detail about how Barack Obama (together with Michelle) has stepped up his campaigning in the last weeks before the election, using his electoral support organization Organizing for America to go after young voters especially aggressively and get them to the polls tomorrow. After all, Rousselot also notes how, this time, the President’s campaign is not about “Yes we can”; this time it’s more like “It’s hard, and we have to persevere.” That’s not quite so inspiring as a slogan, and so he doubts Obama will be able to do much to ward off a serious electoral defeat for his party.

Then again, that might be a good thing. Such, at least, is the speculation of Chritoph von Marschall writing in the (also left-wing) Berlin paper Der Tagesspiegel (Liberating defeat for Obama). The President’s lack of progress on the foreign affairs front, the author admits, is even more noticeable than his domestic performance (despite the Nobel Prize): Iran, the MidEast, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo still operating. Is he fated to do even worse in the second half of his term after these elections?

Actually, probably the opposite. Here Von Marschall either draws on his own rather sophisticated study of American presidential affairs or else has access to good academic advisors, as he brings forward the insight that, after all, presidents have much more freedom of action in foreign affairs, and so it has repeatedly been the case that they have devoted themselves to these whenever they have felt stifled on the home front. After all, every president must build his own “legacy” for the history books one way or the other; the presidency is not just a matter of warming some historic seat for four or eight years.

Furthering this line of argument, Van Marschall also points out how there is also greater scope to ignore the demands of his own party in the area of foreign affairs, because of that greater freedom there to do what he sees fit. Supposedly his positions on Afghanistan and Iraq in particular are even closer to what Republicans prefer. Then again, this does not guarantee any sort of cosier cooperation between the Executive and Legislative branches coming in with the new Congress; keep in mind the almost pathological determination by Republicans to oppose anything Obama might want to do, seemingly even if at some fundamental level they agree with it. And Obama will still need a 2/3 vote of the Senate to ratify treaties, including the update to the START nuclear weapons treaty he recently signed with Russia. It’s easy to imagine that that, too (and, with it, American-Russian relations generally), could fall victim to the new congressional intransigence likely to be elected tomorrow and installed at the beginning of next January.

UPDATE: Renowned MidEast expert Prof. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan weighs in with this closer examination (in English) of how a Republican-dominated Congress (even if it’s just the House of Representatives) could still hamper the President’s conduct of foreign policy, e.g. by calling hearings on the planned withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan (and even from Iraq) as a means to pressure him to slow them down.

                          

But remember, this is above all a weblog with a European bent, so – if it makes you feel better – I can let you know (from an article in Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel) that a certain turbulence is also currently afflicting that model of social(ist) health care provision, the German Krankenkassen. Those are the non-profit, government-supervised insurance companies that cover the vast majority of Germany’s population and are restricted to basing their premiums solely on the insured’s income. (You’re required to have medical insurance coverage there, of course, with very few exceptions, although if you prefer you can buy it from purely-private, for-profit insurers instead.) As the article reports, the public Krankenkassen are now experiencing extraordinary customer-turnover, often in the hundreds-of-thousands. Why? Because the government authorized them in February to charge those they insure up to €8 (= $10.85) more per month in order to shore up their balance-sheets, and some of them took advantage of that.

That’s right: eight euros per month more! Apparently that’s a deal-breaker for many Germans, who in remarkable numbers have proceeded to resign from the Krankenkassen which implemented the measure (known as the Zusatzbeitrag, or “supplementary contribution”) to go join those which did not. It didn’t help that someone made an elementary mistake about how to implement it, in that they made any interested Krankenkasse have to bill customers directly for the extra amount, rather than just letting it be charged as medical insurance premiums normally are as a wage-deduction collected by employers.

Just a word here, then, to let all interested know that it is not always sweetness & light over where citizens need not worry about medical coverage. (Not that there’s any indication that the firms losing customers are in any danger of going bust – like I say, they are state-supported.)

                          

But not exclusively so. One difference between the two cities that leaps out him he describes in his latest piece, The eyes lying in ambush of the CCTV. He remembers back to his first visit to Berlin, a little over a year ago: what accounted for that strange feeling of freedom, of exaltation even, that he felt then while walking through the streets of the city center? Well, you already know the answer from his piece’s title. It was actually the absence of something that inspired such enthusiasm, the absence there of the closed-circuit TV cameras that, as he puts it, “bristle on every corner” in London.

To be sure, Espiner had previously rather perversely made use of his special journalist’s access to aggravate this hang-up of his: he managed to visit a monitoring center in London (a “dingy room, deep below the streets”), where he witnessed officials there using the cameras to zoom in – to a “scary” level of detail – on anyone who seemed “suspicious,” or else interesting to take a close look at for any other reason. Therefore, although coming back to Berlin he does observe a few more Video Überwachung signs than he noticed before, the apparent forebearance on the part of the Berlin authorities to spy on their own citizens is still quite refreshing.

The reason for all that is not hard to grasp: after all, as he does point out, some of those Berlin city authorities not so long ago lived under a Stasi regime, which itself followed a Nazi regime. Still, Espiner warns against any complacency – not necessarily in the face of officialdom suddenly changing its mind and deciding to bring in the cameras, but rather in the form of new private shopping centers and “gated communities” being built, which inevitably bring with them an associated bunch of such cameras, to provide “protection” and “security.”

Anyway, it turns out that you can check out his argument for yourself, as Der Tagesspiegel has taken to posting parallel versions of his columns in English. (No doubt the original English that Espiner wrote them in, of course; this one is called CCTV: Invasion of privacy.) I reveal that to you as a public service, even as it is an unwelcome development since you’ll no longer need the assistance of your neighborhood EuroSavant to read these particular columns from Der Tagesspiegel.

UPDATE: Please also be sure to see this: Spy Cameras Won’t Make Us Safer, from a renowned security expert, and including up-to-the-minute insights on the topic from the recent very professional assassination of that Hamas official in Dubai.

                          

The latest Knut developments have unfortunately taken a somewhat bizarre turn, verging on the gothic. As might be expected, there’s a woman involved. Her name is Giovanna, Gianna for short, and she was introduced into Knut’s cage-complex a while back to provide him with a little companionship – and, in particular, to further the fond hope that the two might do some great things together tending towards an enlargement of the stock of polar bears held in captivity. Giovanna, though, revealed a nasty streak in an incident reported by the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel a month ago, when a cormorant (a seabird) found its way into Berlin’s polar bear compound and Giovanna gave it a hit with her paw that left it wounded. Then again, perhaps she was merely defending her man: that same report states that the bird first had “pinched” (gezwickt) Knut’s nose.

Anyway, by that point it was clear that Giovanna was no shrinking violet. Now the German news-magazine Focus is reporting that she is also Knut’s cousin – the two share the same grandfather! Suddenly the thought of those two bearing some polar-bear cubs is no longer so desirable. This from PETA Deutschland spokesman Frank Albrecht: “Knut fans should be aware that only Knut’s castration will allow a lengthy life together with Gianna. All other hopes and desires bring the population of polar bears in captivity even faster to the end that is pre-programmed for them anyway.” This from an organization that is supposed to have Knut’s happiness at heart! (As you may gather, PETA Deutschland advocates simply not holding any polar bears in captivity, at all.)

She was set to be his lover – but she is also his cousin! And now he risks castration! I remarked before on these pages how interest in Knut (and the money resulting from it) understandably started to wane once he stopped being a cute baby polar bear and became a somewhat slovenly-looking teenage one – did Berlin Zoo officials go off in search of a publicist to tell them how to resuscitate interest in Knut and wind up with Tennessee Williams?

                          

Unless, perhaps, a quake hits somewhere else while the world remains preoccupied with an earlier one. Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel reminds us that just yesterday a 6.2 Richter-scale earthquake hit just off the coast near the Indonesian town of Manokwari. We don’t know anything about damage or deaths yet, but that’s mainly because we’re talking about the western part of that huge island of New Guinea – it hit just above the big piece of land that looks like some animal’s head, you know the one I mean, the Vogelkop Peninsula.

We do know, however, that no tsunami-warning was given, even though the quake’s epicenter was in the ocean. Is that because there truly was no tsunami, or because the judgment was made that there are not enough genuine population centers in the area to make any such warning worthwhile?

                          

It was a contest between residents of those two Berlin neighborhoods, Kreuzberg and Neukölln, waged across the ditch in the park’s middle (with combat photographers in attendance, of course; the on-line article has an amusing YouTube video.) In the end Kreuzberg was declared the winner, controversially, but most by that time were too tired to care and settled down instead to drinking Glühwein (wine mixed with spices, a Christmas drink) and letting a DJ entertain them.

                          

Sure enough, as the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reports today, the struggle over the Knut-millions is now occupying the courts. Those millions are of course the millions of euros that the (at one time) cute little abandoned polar bear earned for the Berlin Zoo, through the flood of visitors he inspired, souvenir sales, those above-mentioned photo-shoots, and the like. The point of the news-piece is that the Newmünster Zoo (up in northern Germany, which owns Knut’s father and therefore claims an ownership interest in Knut) has now run out of patience with attempts to come up with some agreement with the Berlin Zoo to split up this Knut-money – they’re heading off to the federal court (Landgericht) in Berlin to settle this, as of tomorrow. And step one is to demand that the Berlin Zoo make an accurate accounting of just how much they have earned off of the erstwhile polar bear baby. That amount is alleged to be around €6 million.