Monday, May 31, 2010

German President Horst Köhler Resigns

...after criticizing German military deployments overseas. Der Spiegel has some thoughts here.

Not sure what this means for Chancellor Angela Merkel, but she's not having a good week- that's for sure. Bits and bobs of German political coverage that I can get (such as it is, here in the land of the superficial and completely pointless news coverage) seems to point towards an unhappy German electorate. With her understandable reluctance to bailout Greece from its own debt-ridden folly collapsing under pressure from her fellow Eurozone Members that essentially seemed to have railroaded Germany into ponying up the lion's share of the bailout package, it's easy to see why the German electorate might be unhappy with her. (Also: speculation on what a collapse of the Euro would mean for the USA, here.)

The recent state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia seem to have produced a hung parliament which has been read as a defeat for the governing coalition of the CDU and Free Democrats and seems to have been hailed as the start of a comeback for the SDP and the German Left. Time will tell which way the German electorate is going to turn- and if the elections in Britain are any indication, it may be that Germany in its next Federal elections gets handed a 'tie' to force a coalition government to make the tough compromises to do what needs to be done to clean up budgets and right the economy.

But we'll see how it goes. Worth keeping an eye open for, anyway.

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