The Danish commentator on American affairs whose writings I have discussed numerous times before, Poul Høi, has a new column up on the Rand Paul phenomenon (Rand Paul: The Revolution begins now; note that Høi may now seem to have switched to another publication, Ugen, which means “The Week,” but in reality that’s just the new on-line weekly of his long-time newspaper employer, Berlingske Tidende).

Høi turns out to have some interesting things to say, despite the fact that he might as well be describing a space alien, so far apart are Paul’s libertarian political views and those prevailing in Høi’s native Denmark, land of 25% value-added tax and the world’s highest income tax. He sets up the Republican situation in Kentucky as a straightforward struggle between Rand Paul on one side (“pitchfork Republicanism”) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (he of the “polished floors”) on the other. That’s because Paul is not really of the Republican Party, although he did just win its nomination for Senate in Kentucky – he’s really a creature of the Tea Party, what Høi calls “a fundamentally conservative grassroots movement.” (more…)

The word came in earlier this morning on the @Deutschland_ Twitter-feed that I follow for EuroSavant purposes (it’s only in German):

The tweet refers to an interesting article in Der Spiegel, Economic crisis accelerates dying-out of hospitals, and normally is something I would gladly re-tweet.* But then I realized that, when it comes to news about any European country’s health system, I owe my readers a bit more than that in view of the couple of posts I wrote on that subject in the recent past, especially one on the same German system that astute readers will have perceived as particularly heavy in its irony. (more…)

Economic coverage in Europe continues to be dominated by the plight of the euro and of the Greek government. In a way, that’s too bad, because there are plenty of other simmering problems which lose the spotlight when crises pop up elsewhere – even though that hardly means that their own situation has been resolved. One such remaining problem is the question of what to do about Opel, the European-based subsidiary of General Motors which got into trouble last year more-or-less because its parent company actually had to declare bankruptcy (on 1 June 2009) and be restructured, with a majority ownership share going to the US Government.

Reviewing my own Opel coverage on this blog, I have to confess to also being guilty of that “follow-the-spotlight” syndrome, in that my last Opel post, on September 14 of last year, came prior to the latest and most intriguing development in that saga. That happened in November, when GM decided to go back on an agreement that had been reached two months before with the German government to sell off Opel to a consortium led by the Canadian auto parts-manufacturer Magna. Yes, that deal was suddenly canceled, so it was back to the status quo ante: Opel remained a GM subsidiary and the German government could resume worrying about how much in subsidies to let GM extort against the threat of shutting down some or all the Opel plants in Germany and thereby throwing thousands out of work. (Then again, at least it had seemed back in September, before GM reneged on the deal, that the German government had found a solution to keep Opel going, and it was that timing that was the most important consideration – there was a nationwide election held in late September 2009, after all!) (more…)

Who knows? It’s seems more possible than it has been before – even in the Netherlands, with its softer-than-usual policy towards such things as marijuana – after an opinion piece (Save the country, allow drugs), co-written by some local political notables, appeared yesterday in the leading quality newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad. Among the article’s nine co-signatories, the ones that stand out above the rest are probably Dr. Els Borst-Eilers and Ms. Hedy d’Ancona, both former national Ministers of Health, and most definitely Prof. Frits Bolkestein, former Dutch Eurocommissioner, former Minister of Defense, and one of the most influential politicians on the national scene in the last twenty years.

Even here, such a policy suggestion is highly controversial and, in view of the high-profile names attached to it, it immediately provoked comment within the Dutch press – from within the NRC itself, of course, but also in the form of a press-agency treatment available in other newspapers, among which Trouw (Bolkestein wants to legalize all drugs). (more…)

A quick mention here of the interesting recent article from the Amsterdam weekly De Groene Amsterdammer about the evolution and impact on Danish politics of the Dansk Folkeparti, or Danish People’s Party. That’s the main anti-immigrant party there, which nonetheless in the mere 15 years since its founding has attained a powerful and even respected position within the edifice of Danish politics, as the article describes very clearly.

But just don’t take my word for this, even if you can’t read Dutch. In fact, I first became aware myself of this piece from an English translation posted on the Presseurop site. There’s just one main discrepancy that I can see, though. That Danish People’s Party: why would De Groene Amsterdammer happen to be writing about them just now? Silly – there’s a general election about to occur here in the Netherlands on June 9, and one of its biggest sub-plots is how favorable the results will turn out to be for the PVV or Party for Freedom, which, yes, is the main anti-immigrant party in this country. Indeed, the lede to De Groene Amsterdammer’s piece cites the Dansk Folkeparti as “a beautiful source of inspiration” for Geert Wilders, the PVV’s leader.

On the other hand, the Presseurop piece makes no mention at all of the PVV! I must ask: why? Because English-language-only readers should not have their intellects burdened further with an additional consideration such as this? Because it would just not be “politically correct,” due to the PVV’s shady reputation in many circles, to mention what is – after all – the really sole motivation for why this particular article appeared in De Groene Amsterdammer at this particular time? I hate to break it to the Presseurop editors but, although the Dutch and the Danish feel quite a bit of common cultural make-up between them, the Dutch (at least) are not terribly interested in the details of the Danish political system or its workings for most of the time!

One key factor affecting the entire ongoing Eurocrisis was known to cognoscenti as “NRW” – short for Nordrhein-Westfalen, the German state whose local elections on May 9 did much to influence both the nature and timing of Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel’s response to the grave threat to the euro and even the EU arising from the Greek financial problems. That is well and good, but those same NRW elections at the same time had another rather different significance for a separate voting bloc, one not necessarily so interested in the mere potential for collapse of the common European currency. These citizens are overwhelmingly young and male; they usually converse in Java and C++ as easily as in their native German; and they vote for the German Pirate Party, whose disappointing results in that same ballot saw its share of the overall vote drop to 1.5% from the full 2% share it had enjoyed during last Fall’s nationwide election.

You might recall that this political organization, like all the off-shoots of the original Pirate Party in Sweden, takes for its purpose advocacy mainly for Internet-related issues such as copyright reform, digital civil rights, and the prevention of Internet censorship. Philip Kuhn of Die Welt recently sat down with party leader Jens Seipenbusch for a brief interview in the wake of those poor electoral results. (more…)

. . . mainly to include the 500+ million European Union! That at least is the message of Libération Brussels correspondent Jean Quatremer in the lastest post on his Coulisses de Bruxelles, UE (=”Brussels Corridors”) weblog, entitled “Barack Obama, the president of the European Council (Potec).” The basic assertion Quatremer wants to make here is that Obama should get the main credit for the bold/desperate €750 billion emergency aid package that European leaders cobbled together last Sunday night – just after voting in the crucial Nordrhein-Westphalen German state election had closed but just before Asian markets started trading again on the Monday morning of a new week, you understand.

Sure, the President was nowhere near Brussels at the time. Still, in Quatremer’s view it was the key telephone calls he placed to the main decision-makers – mainly France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel, of course – that made sure something big and decisive would happen. And then it seems he also gave a call on Monday to the Spanish premier, Zapatero, to persuade him to buckle down with some serious government cost-saving measures (that included lowering public employees’ salaries and cutting pensions), and he may have similarly bent the ear of Portuguese premier Socrates as well. (more…)

In case you haven’t heard – maybe you’ve just been too busy with your status updates – Facebook has come under considerable fire lately for its apparent loose attitude towards security and users’ privacy. Maybe you also haven’t heard about the four NYU students who managed in a relative flash to raise tens of thousands of dollars for their project to create an open-source alternative to Facebook called “Diaspora*.” (Yes, with that asterix at the end; further information about their project here.)

But here at EuroSavant our job is to inform you of things that you may not have heard about from the Eurosphere. So had you heard that your great-uncle in Germany also doesn’t want you using Facebook? Well OK, maybe he’s not really your great-uncle, he just looks like he should be, as you will realize if you surf to the recent interview with him in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose rather sensationalist title I have borrowed for the title of this post out of similarly sensationalist motivations. Actually, he’s probably someone worth listening to even more than any great-uncle in Germany: he’s Ernst Pöppel, renowned professor of psychology at the University of Munich. (more…)

I’d like to expand a bit on the article from Le Monde that I linked to in one of my tweets today. I’d also like to try out the new facility Twitter has made available to embed tweets, thusly:

Oooooh, looks pretty good! (Feel free to write me to ask how to do it!)

Anyway, the immediate point of that piece is contained in its title: Israeli government announces that it wants to relaunch construction in East Jerusalem. The Netanyahu government had previously conceded a brief suspension of such construction, but only as a sort of fig-leaf measure in response to heavy pressure it was getting from the US – because, of course, any such construction in East Jerusalem, territory conquered in battle that the rest of the world will not concede is owned by Israel in any way, sounds the death-knell for what are supposed to be peace negotiations with Palestinian representatives. (more…)

Just like mushrooms popping up after spring rainfall (at least as they do here in Northern European climes) comes a new journalistic phenomenon: some pre-planned world-scale event occurs in China (e.g. the 2008 Olympics, the recent opening of the Shanghai World Expo) and is immediately followed by articles in the American press taking a bemused look at the stumbles of the Chinese as they try to come to grips with the English language, efforts that produce something usually termed “Chinglish.” The latest instance of this is a recent article in the NYT together with the almost-indispensable accompanying slide-show displaying some prime Chinglish examples (e.g. “Slip and fall down carefully”).

It’s often pretty funny stuff. Then again, another thought may come to anyone inclined to think about such things a bit more deeply. (And/or to those quick to take offense – or are these two cohorts actually one-and-the-same?) Could it be that the “paper of record” of one great civilization is, in effect, mocking the citizens of yet another for their well-intentioned struggles in navigating the former’s language? When, in fact, relations between these two great civilizations are of possibly the most crucial importance to world peace as well as progress on most other global-scale problems (e.g. environment, trade, financial regulation)? (more…)

You’re surely all aware of the big current European story: that minor matter about saving the euro from tremendous speculative pressures on its currency, in light of a threatened Greece sovereign bankruptcy which threatens to drag down further other vulnerable EU sovereign borrowers as well. As always, my policy in approaching this topic is to consider only those non-English-language articles which add something to the discussion that my readers are not likely to have already seen elsewhere in the English-language press. So I admit I haven’t provided much coverage as yet, other than the translation of the French Finance Minister interview yesterday/below.

Then again, that’s also a little disingenuous; a unique viewpoint on virtually any European economic or political issue is almost always to be had from L’Humanité, the organ of the French Communist Party. Naturally, those folks have also been glad to hold forth on the new measures and funding facilities arising from last weekend’s Eurozone crisis meetings over the Greek debt problem, as we see in the piece by Bruno Odent provocatively entitled Euro: the plan aimed at saving the hostage-takers. (more…)

The finance blog Naked Capitalism today linked to a current article of high interest which happens to be available only in a foreign language, in this case French. I’m referring to the interview with French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde in the business newspaper Les Echos – newsworthy at any time, but of crucial interest appearing just now.

This is not the first time this has happened on Naked Capitalism, but my intent here is certainly not to scold. In many of those previous instances I have been happy to step in and provide a translation of the article in question on this site, and I do the same below after the jump with the Lagarde interview. The piece’s lede is “‘There’s a determination to construct a new edifice, to reinvent the European model,’ declared the Minister of the Economy in an interview with Les Echos.” (Interviewer’s questions are in bold.) (more…)

Going to Berlin in the next month or so? Looking for a unique tourist experience? Here’s one that comes not out of some guidebook, but rather from no less than Die Zeit: the lobby-tour, a tour of the German capital from a lobbyist’s point-of-view.

These tours are run by Lobby Control (site only in German), a lobbyist-tracking NGO which, as the site’s headline reads, is “Active for Transparency and Democracy.” According to the Die Zeit piece, Berlin has it’s own “Iron Triangle” of lobbyists, actually a sort of Iron Trapezoid, running from the Reichstag to the Friedrichstrasse S-bahn station to the Gendarmenmarkt to Potsdamerplatz (respectively the NW, NE, SE and SW corners). Through it runs majestically the famous avenue Unter den Linden, unfortunately now known among many capital cynics as Unter den Lobbyisten – “among the lobbyists.” For €10 per person (cheap!), one of Lobby Control’s guides will take a group on a roughly 2 1/2 hour tour through this territoriy, stopping at 15 different locations to give a brief presentation (probably only in German) about each: trade association offices, PR agencies, and think-tanks, of course, but also such places as eateries and beer-halls where the heavy political back-slapping really goes on – such as the Ständige Vertretung restaurant on the River Spree, where the tour starts out. (more…)

I came across this amusing piece while surfing through the European press today and immediately realized that compressing the tale down to 140 characters to send out as a tweet would in no way do it justice. Note that it’s from the leading Flemish newspaper De Standaard; it’s about a Belgian guy, to be sure, but it’s also easy to see other reasons why that paper would want to write about something like this, since the Flemings and Dutch like to make fun of each other.

There was this Belgian guy, see, living in the Netherlands, just above the Belgian border in Roosendaal, and he found that he had lost his Dutch residence permit and so needed visit the local police station to get a new one. Bad move: he was, after all, wanted for questioning in connection with his alleged assault with a knife on his then-girlfriend back in August, 2008, something the police officer there discovered rather easily while looking up his records.

So the Rosendaal police got to chalk up an easy win, with a wanted suspect falling right into their lap, right? Not exactly: he was able rather swiftly to escape “via the garden” – aren’t police-gardens against regulations? – so that an arrest order for him was issued yet again. Easy come, easy go.

“Not again!” That was surely the reaction among recent travelers to/from airports in Ireland, Scotland, and even some parts of Northern England upon finding that, once again, flights had to be canceled for a brief period due to airborne ash from that Eyjafjallajökull Icelandic volcano. In the meantime, Scottish government officials issued predictably annoyed statements aimed at the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority for taking such action, just like on a larger scale it had been loud complaints from all across the affected area that had hastened the lifting of the continent-wide flight ban that paralyzed air travel within Europe for more than a week last month.

Central to the European complaints had been assertions that the flight-bans were too extreme, that the ash really did not pose enough of a danger to justify the considerable economic damage that the bans caused – after all, a number of airlines actually went ahead and flew test-flights on their own responsibility (manned only by crews and observers, of course) up into the grit-cloud and everything seemed fine. Now the Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny reports on how Europe’s scientific community is finally getting its act together with some direct research aimed at setting firm norms for when it’s safe to fly in volcano ash, and when it is not. (more…)

Even as the first Greek act in the developing euro-crisis plays on – now with fatalities, as three people die during violent demonstrations in Athens – the focus of public attention is starting to shift to a feared second act in other countries with similarly weak finances, like Portugal or Spain. With that come calming assurances from high EU officials, like EU Council President Herman van Rompuy (remember him?) who characterized any such fears of financial contagion as “irrational.” Going to the horse’s mouth, though – so to speak – we find them to be anything but, as we can see from an article by Luis Doncel (Spanish risk runs rampant) in the mainstream Spanish paper El País. (The hat-tip for discovering this article goes to Eurointelligence – in English, of course – whose piece itself offers a potpourri of interesting current news items on the Greek crisis.) (more…)

It’s now early May, the time of year when many West European countries celebrate their liberation at the end of World War II. Today is in fact Liberation Day in the Netherlands, a public holiday, while yesterday was Dodenherdenkingdag – Day for the Remembrance of the Dead. And at a ceremony in The Hague a certain Eberhard van der Laan, a former government minister for the Dutch Labor Party, gave an interesting, even provocative speech (covered here in the Algemeen Dagblad) calling for a line of a certain sort to be drawn under the WWII experience so that society can finally move on.

The “hook” to Van der Laan’s speech, as it were, was the fact that it has now been 65 years since the end of the war – that’s the standard retirement age, at least within Europe, so why don’t we finally put WWII out to retirement as well? With this, the ex-politician was giving voice to what many in Europe surely have always thought in secret about the War (especially those too young to have lived through it): for how long will we have to keep paying respect, keep letting it influence our lives? It’s a very pertinent question, especially when applied to Germany and the issue of when, if ever, the guilt for what that nation perpetrated will finally be washed away and made irrelevant through the eroding effect of all the passing years. (more…)

And now we have the proverbial bomb going off in the middle of a crowded Times Square in New York City – a rather crude explosive device, we’re told, but one that could certainly have taken many lives and caused who-knows-what other damage to the markets, to American Constitutional liberties, etc. had it not been for an alert sidewalk T-shirt seller who noticed something strange and notified the police in time.

Notice something? That tragedy (almost) happened, not in Baghdad or some exotic place like that, but in one of the most American of American places. And don’t forget Major Hasan and his homicidal rage at another bastion of the red-white-and-blue, Fort Hood, TX. What ever happened to President George W. Bush’s 2003 promise: “We are fighting that enemy [i.e. terrorists] in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities”? I guess American soldiers are not fighting so much anymore in Iraq, at least; could that be the reason? (more…)

Another behind-the-scenes revelation about the COP15 United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen last December has emerged, this time in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. This one is different enough from the secret report from the Danish government that I discussed in my last post that I felt a new entry was appropriate. It has to do with the leaked transcript of a crucial part of the climactic negotiations on the afternoon of the conference’s very last day – Friday, 18 December 2009. And it’s quite a bit juicier than the leaked Danish report, since it directly involves superstar national-leader celebrities such as Obama, Merkel, and Sarkozy – although not Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who had indeed traveled to Copemhagen but at this critical stage was deliberately cooling his heels in his hotel room, having sent a deputy (one He Yafei) to represent China in his place. (more…)