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German conservative MP Peter Gauweiler repeated his intention to bring the treaty before the country's constitutional court.
"What Brussels is supposed to get in powers is not compatible with our democratic principles,"
He said his reason for bringing the case is the constitutional court's loss of power to the European court. The constitutional court has until now kept an eye on the inalienable rights of German citizens given to them by Germany's constitution (Grundgesetz), he noted.
EU Observer 25/4 2008
Det är dock inte tillfredsställande att grundlagen ger ett så vagt och otydligt besked om förutsättningarna för Sveriges medlemskap i EU. Som lagrådet påpekade i sitt yttrande över det konstitutionella fördraget ”synes det ... väl kunna hävdas att principerna för statsskicket påverkas enligt det nya fördraget”.
SIEPS remissvar på Lissabon 2008
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EU treaty ratification may be delayed in Germany
The text then needs to be signed off by the country's president, Horst Kohler.
If Mr Gauweiler, a centre-right politician from CSU put a case before the he country's constitutional court...
EU Observer 20/2 2008
According to a report in German daily Die Welt, politicians from the Left Party as well as Peter Gauweiler, a centre-right politician from one of governing parties -the CSU - are examining the text of the EU treaty to see if they can bring a case before the country's constitutional court.
Their move could mean that the final formal step of ratification is delayed. German MPs are widely expected to approve the treaty when it comes before parliament in May.
However, the text then needs to be signed off by the country's president, Horst Kohler.
If Mr Gauweiler has put a case before the court, Mr Kohler will then have to decide whether to go ahead and sign off the treaty anyway or wait for the court to make its case.
There has already been a precedent for this. In June 2005, Mr Kohler refused to sign off the German law approving the original EU constitution. In addition to France and the Netherlands having rejected the document, Mr Gauweiler had also brought a case against the EU constitution before Germany's constitutional court.
At the time, the constitutional judge in charge of the issue, Siegfried Bross, advised Mr Kohler to wait until the court's decision before signing off the EU document, notes Die Welt.
Mr Gauweiler had complained that the EU constitution took too much power away from the country's national parliament, arguing that the document overstepped the boundaries that the German constitution provides for the integration of state institutions in the EU.
Mr Kohler, who hopes to be re-elected as president in May 2009, now finds himself in an awkward position.
Formally, it is possible to sign off the treaty even if the court is examining it, but such a move is politically difficult, especially if the constitutional court were to eventually decide against the legality of the EU document.
Questions are being raised in Germany about the new treaty,
following Germany’s failure to ratify the constitution.
An appeal lodged with the federal constitutional court obtaining an injunction from the court
preventing the federal president from signing the instrument of ratification
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung/Freeeurope.info
In a long and carefully ambiguous interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
the President of the federal constitutional court, Hans-Jürgen Papier,
has said that “the EU is not a state” and that “it should not become one.”
Professor Paul de Grauwe
"Without further steps towards political union, the eurozone has little chance of survival"
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph 16/7 2007
There is no doubt that containment of Germany
– usually politely put as the banishment of war from Europe –
has been fundamental to the development of the EU.
Gideon Rachman, Financial Times July 17 2007
The Common Agricultural Policy – still the EU’s most expensive policy – was, in effect, a form of disguised war reparations.
The euro – the biggest single act of economic and political integration yet – was largely a reaction to German reunification. France’s President François Mitterrand was initially panicked. So Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany persuaded him that a single currency would bind Germany irrevocably into a united Europe.
In 2000 it was they who played the role now assigned to the Poles – resisting the idea that Germany’s larger population should entitle it to greater voting power. The French insisted that the founding bargain of the EU – rooted in the war – was that France and Germany should always be equal.
It is certainly true that Germany has faced its own past with an honesty lacking in many other European countries. I remember the astonishment of German colleagues a couple of years ago, when they discovered that the building in Rome in which the ill-fated EU constitution was being negotiated still had heroic friezes of Mussolini carved into the walls.
More than 15 years after reunification, most Europeans seem comfortable with the new Germany. They fear a weak German economy more than a strong one, and they accept that the welcoming face that the Germans presented during last year’s football World Cup is the country’s real face, not just a mask. The EU really has moved on from the days when the containment of Germany was its central objective.
The only country where the external adjustment has taken place has been Germany:
but even in this case the adjustment was very slow and took more than a decade:
the shock of German unification and the ensuing loss of competitiveness of Germany took more of a decade to be unraveled
via a painful process of corporate restructuring and significant wage moderation.
Nouriel Roubini, New York University and RGE Monitor, 28/6 2007
Almost a new economic miracle
It became conventional to say that Germany was prevented by the European monetary union from having a needed devaluation.
But Germany has had a real devaluation.
It has been one of the very few countries apart from Japan to experience an actual fall in unit labour costs in manufacturing.
Samuel Brittan, FT April 13 2007
Unemployment, which peaked in 2005 at 10 per cent of the labour force is now down to 7.7 per cent on standardised international definitions.
What is so fascinating about the change is that it owes comparatively little to official policy. The government is using some of the extra VAT revenues to reduce social charges. But most of the turnround seems to reflect spontaneous behaviour by both business and labour. German businesses had to contend with both the rise in the euro and the “one size fits all” policies of the European Central Bank.
While the nominal trade-weighted exchange rate for the euro has risen by more than 20 per cent since the beginning of 2000, the real effective German rate has fallen by nearly 10 per cent.
None of this vindicates the “one size fits all” policy of the monetary union; nor does it suggest that the UK should throw away the inestimable advantage of a floating exchange rate to join the euro.
Milton Friedman once put the case for a floating exchange rate by comparing it with daylight saving time, which spared us the need to get up an hour earlier to take advantage of the extra sunlight.
Comment by Rolf Englund:
Economic miracle?
Or is it just NAIRU working?
High unemployment gives low inflation? But the cost is much higher to do it that way than by
letting the currency adjust.
Unemployment at 7.7 per cent, isn't it a bit to high for being in a miracle economy country?
In Sweden we call that Utanförskap....
NAIRU
An overwhelming majority of citizens in the big eurozone countries believe the euro has damaged their national economies, highlighting the popular scepticism that still surrounds Europe’s eight-year-old monetary union.
Almost two-thirds of Germans say they preferred their former currency, the D-Mark.
Financial Times 29/1 2007
Farewell to the Mark
Amity Shlaes, member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial
board.
Wall Street Journal, December 31, 1998
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes.
This new book is the finest history of the Great Depression ever written.
Steven F. Hayward, National Review, July 30, 2007
Germany's parliamentary democracy is under threat from the European Union
which is slowly taking away all the national parliament's powers
Roman Herzog, the country's ex-president, has said in Welt am Sonntag.
EU Observer 15/1 2007
Det är fel att bortse från den positiva utvecklingen med stigande sysselsättning på den tyska arbetsmarknaden.
- Detta kan ha olika orsaker, inte minst de konjunkturella, och behöver inte bero på just att a-kassan sänktes.
säger Johnny Munkhammar, programansvarig på Timbro.
I Tyskland sänktes ersättningen i a-kassan drastiskt förra året.
Ett av målen med reformen var att få arbetslösa att acceptera jobb med låga löner.
Men effekterna på arbetsmarknaden har uteblivit, enligt forskare.
Kristian Åström, Ekot 25/10 2006
Det var för snart två år sedan som ersättningsnivån sänktes. Reformen, som heter Hartz fyra, drevs igenom av den tidigare kanslern Gerhard Schröder. Den fick också en stor betydelse i hans eget fall.
Den arbetsmarknadsreform som den förra regeringen Schröder genomförde (Hartz IV) och som var avsedd att spara och få fler att arbeta mer har visat sig lika verkningslös som kostsam.
Barbro Hedvall, DNs ledarsida, 22/6 2006
De tyska offentliga finanserna är i ett tillstånd som "trotsar all beskrivning" enligt förbundskanslern själv. Och detta också om man räknar med effekten av den treprocentiga höjningen av momsen som var ett vallöfte från CDU, förbundskanslerns parti.
Den arbetsmarknadsreform som den förra regeringen Schröder genomförde och som var avsedd att spara och få fler att arbeta mer har visat sig lika verkningslös som kostsam. Hartz IV, som denna reform kallas, har drivit upp utgifterna för social- och arbetslöshetsunderstöd till svindlande nivåer, bland annat därför att den tvärtemot avsikten inte uppmuntrar människor att ta alla slags arbeten. Arbetslösheten har förblivit hög och alltför många tyskar stannat kvar i bidragsberoende. Något måste göras åt Hartz IV, det medger förbundskanslern.
Se även:
Last week, Germany’s grand coalition claimed it had effectively solved the pension problem after deciding to increase the retirement age from 65 to 67.
The German government has therefore solved the pension problem by turning it into a deflation problem.
Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times 13/3 2006
Angela Merkel kan tyckas grå i sin framtoning, men hon har skakat liv i Tyskland. Framtidstron har återvänt.
Tysklands ekonomiska stagnation med rekordhög arbetslöshet och budgetunderskott som bryter mot EU:s regelverk har två viktiga förklaringar.
SvD-ledare 28/3 2006
Tysklands ekonomiska stagnation med rekordhög arbetslöshet och budgetunderskott som bryter mot EU:s regelverk har två viktiga förklaringar.
Å ena sidan är arbetskraftskostnaderna för höga, och, å andra sidan, gäller detsamma för välfärdsstaten.
En gång kunde kostnaderna bäras, men världen (globaliseringen), EU (östutvidgningen, euron och inre marknaden) och Tyskland (återföreningen) har förändrats.
Merkel gick till val på reformer och detta är också grunden för hennes vision av Tyskland - och Europa. Hittills har det dock mest varit prat, men läget blir snart skarpt. Närmast gäller det sjukvården som blöder. Det handlar om att minska underskotten för staten och sänka arbetskraftskostnaderna för arbetsgivarna.
Det hävdas ibland att medier förstorar enskilda personers betydelse i politiken.
Men i fallet Angela Merkel är det svårt att överdriva den roll som hon redan spelat som tysk förbundskansler.
Arbetslösheten på 12 procent måste sjunka och välståndet växa.
DN-ledare 12/3 2006
Tyskland har med ekonomen Hans-Werner Sinns ord drabbats av fem chocker. Först den tilltagande globaliseringen som slagit ut tusentals traditionella industrijobb. Sedan EU-integrationen som bidragit till att minska landets skalfördelar gentemot små länder. Och så eurons ankomst som innebar att andra länder plötsligt fick lika låga räntor som Tyskland.
Förbundskansler Merkel har än så länge inte presenterat någon lösning på landets ekonomiska kris. Men hon har tagit några betydelsefulla steg. Pensionsåldern har höjts till 67 år. Det förs diskussioner om sjukvårdsreformer samt förändringar av skattesystemet och energipolitiken.
Nästan alla ekonomer underskattar effekterna av globaliseringen, hävdade professorerna Mats Persson och Marian Radetzki i måndagens DN. Deras budskap till kollegerna var tydligt: i stället för att intressera sig för sjukskrivningar, a-kassor och styrräntor borde de oroa sig för vad som händer i den globala ekonomin.
DN-ledare 14/1 2006
Germany wants to bind Russia to EU
EU Observer 1/9 2006
"The goal must be to make the political, economic and cultural ties between the EU and Russia – its anchor in a wider Europe – irreversible", says a foreign ministry paper seen by German daily Handelsblatt.
"A complete European peace regime and the resolution of important security and political problems from the Balkans to the Middle East can only be attained with Russia and not without it," the paper says.
Germany’s export strength also makes it export-dependent and vulnerable to a downturn in global demand.
Any distress in the US will transmit to the rest of the world economy via the financial markets.
Direct trade has long ceased to be the main transmission mechanism of transatlantic shocks, at least for the UK and the eurozone.
Wolfgang Munchau, FT March 4 2007
I have heard some economists argue that Germany would be in a better position than France to withstand any global shocks, given Germany’s recent improvements in competitiveness. I disagree. Germany’s economic strategy is far more dependent on a friendly global economic macroeconomic and financial environment – precisely the kind of environment that was called into question last week. France may be suffering from a deteriorating export performance, but at least France still manages to generate a decent rate of domestic demand.
The Morgan Stanley calculation is, in fact, not even a worst-case scenario. For that you would need to add a big rise in the trade-weighted exchange rate of the euro.
So how real are these alarmist scenarios? Last week, we saw a taste of how quickly the markets’ euphoria can turn. While Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, did not forecast a recession, the mere fact that he used the word is remarkable. As I predicted in my New Year outlook on the global economy, there is a non-trivial, though incalculable risk of a recession in the US and a fairly significant probability of a hard landing.
Full textThe world confronts the risk of a US recession next year,
brought on by a collapse in house prices.
Europe will not escape the impact of dollar depreciation
Wolfgang Munchau, FT 4/12 2006
The countries worst affected would be the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the UK and Switzerland. Interestingly none of these countries, save for the Netherlands, is a eurozone member.
A recession would almost certainly lead to a fall in the US current account deficit, and possibly a further significant decline in the dollar’s real exchange rate.
Philip Lane from Trinity College in Dublin and Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti from the International Monetary Fund looked at three scenarios: a soft landing scenario, a disruptive scenario and one in which the world’s policymakers would do all the right things at the right time – the “triumph-of-hope-over-experience” scenario.
Scenarios one and three are both benign and improbable. It is scenario two we should worry about.
Dollar - Houseprices - Top of page
Ms Merkel’s star has tumbled over the past week as the government’s reform agenda has come unstuck.
Only seven months ago she enjoyed the highest popularity ratings ever recorded by a postwar chancellor.
Today it looks as if the grand coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats is failing to deliver change.
Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times 9/7 2006
Der Spiegel, the influential German news magazine, last week asked whether she might end up as a less successful chancellor than Gerhard Schröder, her not very successful predecessor.
The compromise Ms Merkel tried to sell to the German public last week failed the main test – to break the link between health costs and wages. Nor did it include market-based mechanisms that would put a lid on overall spending on healthcare. Its main element was an increase in user charges. What Ms Merkel calls reforms in reality amount to little more than a hike in insurance rates. The main structural change is a new layer of bureaucracy to shuffle money between patients and the various health insurance companies.
Last week, the critics finally came out from their hiding places. Rarely have German political commentators used such vituperative prose as they did last week. The style of debate is getting rougher even within the grand coalition itself. Its leaders spent the last few days openly trading insults, accusing each other of a breach of trust. After seven months, this is the first genuine coalition bust-up.
Germany’s national economic strategy consists of two planks, budgetary consolidation and a beggar-thy-neighbour real devaluation inside the eurozone as Germany improves its competitiveness through wage moderation.
One could make a case for budgetary consolidation during a cyclical upswing, but a systemic policy of real devaluation is destructive from the perspective of the eurozone as a whole.
Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times 15/5 2006
Last week, Germany’s grand coalition claimed it had effectively solved the pension problem after deciding to increase the retirement age from 65 to 67.
The German government has therefore solved the pension problem by turning it into a deflation problem.
Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times 13/3 2006
In fact, welfare reforms may have caused the recent rise in protectionism. As reforms, they have been successful. They plugged financial gaps in the social security system and cut down welfare abuses. But they were unbalanced. They affected the social system but not the wider economy.
In a book published in Germany last week - Das Ende der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft, Hanser-Verlag, 2006 - I argued that the German government should have focused on reforms of the corporatist system, the so-called social market economy, rather than on social reforms.
The Hartz IV reforms, introduced by the previous government, dramatically reduced welfare entitlement. Unemployed single people, for example, now receive no more than a paltry €345 ($409) a month.
Welfare and pension reform, in particular, has had an undesirable macroeconomic effect.
A senior economic adviser to the German government told me he expected real wage deflation to continue for many years to come, even as the economy recovered.
The fall in pensions is even more dramatic than the fall in wages. Ten years ago, the German government projected that average pensions would reach €1,510 this year. Today’s average pension is only €1,184, about 22 per cent lower than forecast. What we are witnessing is a deflationary spiral in full swing, with both wages and pensions in real decline. The German government has therefore solved the pension problem by turning it into a deflation problem.
The causes of Germany’s fundamental economic weakness are still there.
There are several conventional explanations, none of which is fully convincing.
The consensus among central bankers is that failure to reform labour markets has depressed the trend growth rate, which may now be as little as 1 per cent a year.
Switzerland has been a model of a deregulated, low-tax economy. Yet its average growth rate since 1991 has been 1.1 per cent.
Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times, January 16 2006
The consensus among central bankers is that failure to reform labour markets has depressed the trend growth rate, which may now be as little as 1 per cent a year. The flaw in this theory is that other countries, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland, have tried to reform their labour markets yet are performing even worse than Germany. Switzerland has been a model of a deregulated, low-tax economy. Yet its average growth rate since 1991 has been 1.1 per cent. If labour market reforms were the answer, the partial reforms of the previous German government should have improved growth by now. They have not.
An alternative reason is the macroeconomic policy regime.
Neither theory can explain, for example, Germany’s export puzzle. How can it be that the country is the world’s second largest exporter and yet is unable to generate domestic economic growth?
It is true that the wages of German production workers may not be internationally competitive. But the solution cannot be to cut their wages until they become competitive. What is needed is more economic flexibility, to give displaced industrial workers an opportunity to seek alternative high-wage specialisations. This would also be the best long-term response to a fall in the dollar.
Few have realised the most dangerous feature of EMU:
it has locked Germany into a seriously uncompetitive real exchange rate
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, March 31, 1999
Gerhard Schroeder's Sellout
It's one thing for a legislator to resign his job, leave his committee chairmanship and go to work for a company over whose industry he once had jurisdiction. It's quite another thing when the chancellor of Germany - one of the world's largest economies - leaves his job and goes to work for a company controlled by the Russian government
the chief executive of the pipeline consortium is none other than a former East German secret police officer who was friendly with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, back when Mr. Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany.
Washington Post editorial, December 13, 2005
IT'S THE SORT of behavior we have - sadly - come to expect from some in Congress. But when Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, announced last week that he was going to work for Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth, he catapulted himself into a different league. It's one thing for a legislator to resign his job, leave his committee chairmanship and go to work for a company over whose industry he once had jurisdiction. It's quite another thing when the chancellor of Germany -- one of the world's largest economies -- leaves his job and goes to work for a company controlled by the Russian government that is helping to build a Baltic Sea gas pipeline that he championed while in office. To make the decision even more unpalatable, it turns out that the chief executive of the pipeline consortium is none other than a former East German secret police officer who was friendly with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, back when Mr. Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany.
The pipeline has cost Germany diplomatically by infuriating its Central European and Baltic neighbors. They point out that the Russian government chose to use the sea route rather than run a new pipeline alongside one that already exists on land, despite the far greater expense. The only possible reason for doing so was political: The Baltic Sea pipeline could allow Russia, a country that has made political use of its energy resources, to cut off gas to Central Europe and the Baltic states while still delivering gas to Germany.
Tysklands problem är låg ekonomisk tillväxt, hög arbetslöshet, svag konsumtion och ett för stort budgetunderskott.
Huvudmålet är att minska budgetunderskottet utan hänsyn till följderna för den ekonomiska aktiviteten - vad som brukar kallas dumsnålhet
DN, huvudledare 16/11 2005
Tysklands problem är låg ekonomisk tillväxt, hög arbetslöshet, svag konsumtion och ett för stort budgetunderskott. Samt en allmänt nedslagen stämning och ängslan inför framtiden. Det ska nu botas med högre skatter, både på inkomster och konsumtion. Borta är de skattesänkningar kristdemokraterna ville ha under valrörelsen, borta är också förslagen om att flytta löneförhandlingarna till företagen. Provanställningsperioden förlängs visserligen från sex till tjugofyra månader men möjligheterna begränsas att visstidsanställa.
Huvudmålet är att minska budgetunderskottet utan hänsyn till följderna för den ekonomiska aktiviteten. Den stora koalitionen kommer nära vad som brukar kallas dumsnålhet.
Risken är därför stor att Tyskland kommer att fortsätta i samma tillstånd som hittills, och det är inte så dåligt för den majoritet som har jobb. Men hos alla de miljoner som inte kommer in på arbetsmarknaden och hos alla dem som blir av med sina jobb till andra mer dynamiska länder kommer besvikelsen att växa. Och för Europa som helhet betyder ett problemtyngt Tyskland ännu en tid av svaghet.
Kommentar av Rolf Englund:
Man undrar när DN, och många andra, skall erkänna den svenska
dumsnålheten 1992 ff ?
A method to the dollar madness
So what's going on? Currencies are supposed to tumble in price when trade deficits climb this high.
The dollar's up because the euro is down
Jim Jubak, CNBC 15/11 2005
The parties seem to be deliberately over-ambitious
in their deficit goals and it is hard to understand why
Dirk Schumacher, economist at Goldman Sachs, Financial Times, 12/11 2005
Germany is set to breach the EU's budget rules for the fifth year in a row in 2006 as growth remains sluggish, the government's so-called "Five Wise Men" said in their latest forecast
Deutsche Welle 9/11 2005
As the incoming government under chancellor-to-be Angela Merkel tries to put together a program of reforms to get the German economy back on its feet, the Wise Men warned Berlin not to seek to plug the gaping holes in Germany's public purse by raising the sales tax, as is highly likely.
The European Central Bank is about to raise its interest rate for the first time in two and a half years. Does this move make any sense?
The ECB must not let an obsessive worry over what appear to be non-existent inflationary dangers kill off a fragile recovery.
That would be worse than a crime. It would be a blunder.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, November 30 2005
Critic: Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad! At the very first signs of life in the eurozone, the ECB raises interest rates
Conservative: This is a typically hysterical reaction to the mildest of policy changes. All the ECB intends is to make an exceptionally accommodative monetary policy a little less so. Real short-term interest rates have been zero or negative for most of the last two years and the growth of money and credit has now reached 8.5 per cent.
The ECB believes that structural policies are chiefly to blame for the eurozone’s economic weakness.
The pre-announced interest rate rise that the European Central Bank is due to agree this Thursday must rank as one of the most bizarre monetary policy decisions of recent times
While the ECB does not pursue strict monetary targets, it has a monetarist tradition.
Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times 28/11 2005
The real problem with the ECB is the mindset that has led to this decision. This mindset is also reflected in the Maastricht treaty, which establishes the central bank’s operating rules. It mandates that the ECB focus exclusively on price stability at the expense of other policy goals
The now defunct European constitution would have provided a golden opportunity for ECB reform. But EU leaders ducked the issue for fear of provoking a crisis of confidence in the euro. It is still not too late to propose ECB reform as part of the next treaty revision. For as long as EU leaders maintain the status quo, they have the central bank they deserve.
The ECB consensus holds that monetary policy has no “real” effects – those that affect growth and employment – and that monetary policy should therefore focus on price stability.
In the wide range of economic opinion, this is an extreme view.
So what institutional changes would it take to force the ECB to change its policy? Three specific, but moderate, amendments to the Maastricht treaty would do the trick.
Wolfgang Munchau is an associate editor of the Financial Times.
Mats Svegfors 1994:
Visst beror dagens problem i ekonomin i någon mån på missgrepp i slutet av 80-talet och början av 90-talet.
Men i grunden har Sverige inte hamnat i en stabiliseringspolitisk kris. Underskottet i statsbudgeten beror djupare sett på att vi försöker överbrygga en konjunkturnedgång när det i själva verket handlar om en grundläggande strukturell förändring.
Klicka här
Germany’s incoming “grand coalition” of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats is about to commit the biggest economic policy error since unification – the attempt to pursue budget consolidation at the expense of all other economic policy goals. In doing so, it risks turning a five-year-long stagnation into a full-scale depression.
It would be more accurate, perhaps, to compare her /Ms Merkel/ to Heinrich Brüning, a Christian conservative who was German chancellor from 1930 to 1932.
Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times, 7/11 2005
Wolfgang Munchau is an associate editor of the Financial Times
The CDU and SPD have discovered a financing gap of between €35bn and €70bn which they plan to consolidate at once in 2006.
What does the new German government hope to accomplish with this policy? Part of the answer lies in the ideological zealotry of some Christian Democrats who believe that deficits are sinful. The other part is economic incompetence. The quality of economic policy advice at the level of the central government must rank among the worst in all developed nations. The few economists at the finance ministry are vastly outnumbered by lawyers. The legal case for deficit reduction – in terms of compliance with the European and domestic fiscal rules – is much stronger than the economic case.
One could conceivably justify a deficit-cutting strategy in combination with structural reforms that generate some short-term economic growth – such as deregulation of the services sector or financial markets, reduction in the transaction costs for house purchases, or an attempt to inject more competition into the market for housing finance. But the present state of coalition negotiations suggests this is not going to happen either. Ms Merkel may have campaigned on an agenda of reforms. But her “grand coalition” government will undertake far fewer reforms than the coalition of Gerhard Schröder, the outgoing chancellor.
Ms Merkel has often been compared to Baroness Thatcher, the former British prime minister. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to compare her to Heinrich Brüning, a Christian conservative who was German chancellor from 1930 to 1932. Mr Brüning was infamous for his insistence on balancing the budget every year, even though the country had already entered a depression. This coincided with the pursuit by the Reichsbank, the former German central bank, of a deflationary monetary policy.
Heinrich Brüning - Göran Persson - Carl Bildt
Part of what makes German politics so hard to read is the absence of an element present in virtually all western democracies: a body of publicly debated, right-of-centre doctrine.
It is easy to point to Mr Stoiber’s mix of Catholic social values and corporatism but harder to say whether his departure shifts Ms Merkel’s government “right” or “left”, or alters nothing. German politicians do not talk that way.
Udo di Fabio has written an American-style book. The Culture of Freedom (Die Kultur der Freiheit, C.H.Beck)
Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times, November 5 2005
Now he has written an American-style book. The Culture of Freedom (Die Kultur der Freiheit, C.H.Beck) chides Germans – and westerners in general – for embracing a specious idea of personal freedom that has actually made them less free. He seeks to rally them to a “new bourgeois age”. The book can be compared to Charles Murray’s Losing Ground (1984) or Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which violated a set of social-democratic taboos and helped win over a politically disorientated middle class to conservatism and the Republican party.
EU political elites have no idea how to deal with globalisation and the EU’s institutions are not the place to tackle it.
The consensus in France is that globalisation is a threat against which one needs protection.
The Germans, supply-siders to the core, treat globalisation as a pure competitiveness problem. Their answer is wage cutting.
For the European Commission, globalisation is a good opportunity to launch wasteful programmes. The latest is the “shock-absorber” fund.
Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times, 31/10 2005
The leaders of Germany's government-in-waiting agreed on Monday night to make spending cuts worth at least €35bn by 2007 in order to bring the budget deficit back in line with the European Union's fiscal rules
Financial Times 25/10 2005
Georg Milbradt, state premier of the eastern state of Saxony and a CDU finance expert, said on Monday that the necessary cuts would be painful. He told Financial Times Deutschland: “It's an illusion to believe that one could resolve Germany's budgetary problems without affecting the incomes of ordinary people. There are no easy solutions any more.”
Angela Merkel, the CDU's chancellor designate, has acknowledged that pensions would be frozen next year for the third successive year, and that cuts of at least €10bn to unemployment benefits for long-term unemployed were necessary.
Ms Merkel's comments came as she also sought to limit the damage of a debate within her own party over reasons why the CDU performed relatively poorly in last month's election.
Sir, Wolfgang Munchau could not be more right to argue that the current debate about European social models has got things the wrong way round (FT 9/11 2005)
It is time to set aside the tired debate pitting Europe against the nation state. Forced to choose between the two, voters in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere will not hesitate to opt for the national alternative.
The solution is not to push forward with “Europe”, but to explain to the voters that they do not need to choose. Put another way, if Europe is to recapture the popular imagination (and popular support), we need to make practical suggestions for how European integration can continue to rescue the nation state well into the 21st century.
At Chatham House we have been running a project on “Rethinking European Economic Governance” for almost a year now.
The Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), also known as Chatham House
Erik Jones, Resident Associate Professor of European Studies—based at Bologna Center
These days, it is difficult to find a European think-tank that does not advocate adoption of the Scandinavian social model.
But the notion that the social model in small, consensual, wealthy and ethnically homogenous northern European countries such as Sweden and Denmark should serve as a model for large economies with huge wealth and income differences and mass immigration such as Germany or Italy is surely bordering on insanity.
Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times 24/10 2005
Yet this is precisely the debate that European Union leaders will be having when they meet for their special summit at Hampton Court near London on Thursday. Instead of focusing on reforms of the social model, they should look at reforms of the EU’s economic system. The latter refers to the regulation of markets and macroeconomic governance. The former relates to risk insurance and social transfer systems. In the European debate, we
The right answer is therefore to liberalise markets, while retaining welfare and insurance systems. Instead, Europeans have been doing the opposite. We have scaled down our welfare systems without opening up our markets.
After 10 years of economic reforms, the Germans decided they had had enough.
The German electorate has launched a new era in European economic policy – a post-reform era.
The reforms by Schröder made life tougher but did not inject any new dynamism into the economy.
Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times, October 10 2005
To outsiders, this sounds like a surprising statement. Germany does not feel like a reformed economy. Children leave school at 1pm. Mothers generally do not work. The shops close at 8pm. Most people work 35 hours a week. Trade unions and employers’ associations have a de facto monopoly over the wage level. Most companies cannot dismiss their workers. Trade unions hold 50 per cent of the votes in the supervisory boards. The list goes on and on.
His Hartz-IV welfare reforms extended means-testing and reduced overall entitlements. But they came at the wrong time – in the middle of an economic downturn – and most importantly, they were not accompanied by supporting reforms in other areas – for example, a liberalisation in services. They created plenty of uncertainty but no new jobs.
Among European policy elites, it has been virtually impossible even to contemplate the possibility that reforms might fail in the end. The worst possible scenario people had been imagining was for these reforms to be delayed.
The truth is that Europe has mismanaged the process of economic reform by making false promises and failing to explain what reforms should accomplish, by what time and through what channels.
Före 1970 hade Sverige låga skatter, 65 procents ersättning i a-kassa och sjukförsäkring samt flera karensdagar vid sjukdom - och reallönerna ökade i raketfart. Under 1970- och 1980-talet rusade skatter och ersättningar i väg - och reallönerna låg still.
Kom tillbaka, Carl Bildt, Bengt Westerberg och Bo Lundgren. Allt är förlåtet.
Niklas Ekdal, signerat DN 10/10
Kronkursförsvaret
Capitalism Vs. Democracy
The recent German and Japanese elections deserve more attention than they've received because they illustrate the uneasy relationship between capitalism and democracy.
Capitalism thrives on change - it inspires new technologies, products and profit opportunities.
Democracy resists change - it creates powerful constituencies with a stake in the status quo.
Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post, September 28, 2005
In a study, political scientist Stephen Silvia of American University writes: "The [government's] share of the German economy has become too large, crowding out more productive economic activity. The cost of employing people -- in particular, non-wage costs -- has become too high. Government regulations . . . dampen competition." Schroeder made some changes. He cut lavish unemployment benefits (which made joblessness attractive). Merkel proposed easing restrictions against firing workers (which, perversely, deter companies from hiring new workers) and also wanted to relax nationwide collective bargaining (which makes wages rigid).
The weak Japanese and German economies partly explain the lopsided nature of world economic growth, which is overly dependent on constantly expanding U.S. trade deficits.
From 2000 to 2004, virtually all of Germany's meager economic expansion stemmed from increased exports; Japan's performance was also one-sided. Many economists regard this pattern as unstable, risking a global recession.
I am a bit more cautious than most about projecting a massive boom if Germany implements efficiency enhancing reforms.
The link between reform and growth is not obvious in the short-run. The dislocations associated with efficiency enhancing reforms (efficiency enhancing reform is economese for making it easier to fire people among other things ... ) can dampen consumer spending, as workers worry that they may lose their job and start to save more.
I do think Germany needs to do more to prepare for a world where the US no longer supports global demand growth, and to make sure the German government's future commitments are commensurate with its resources.
Brad Setser blog 15/9 2005
Long-term efficiency improvements do not always translate into higher consumer spending in the short-run. One potential explanation for why consumer demand has been so weak in Germany (see the OECD data) is the fact that Germany has started to reform. Unit labor costs in Germany are falling. That may be part of the reason why German household savings rose from 9.7% to 10.7% between 2000 and 2003.
German grand coalition plan in turmoil
Efforts to build Germany's grand coalition government descended into chaos on Tuesday as Edmund Stoiber, Bavarian premier, said he was no longer willing to join the cabinet of Angela Merkel, the chancellor-in-waiting.
Financial Times, 2/11 2005
Mr Stoiber's surprise decision not to become economics and technology minister means that Germany's unprecedented political crisis has now spread to the conservative parties following the unexpected resignation earlier this week of Franz Müntefering, leader of the Social Democrats, over an internal party power struggle.
Mr Stoiber was also annoyed that his proposals for a “super economics ministry”, encompassing aspects of the economics, technology and finance portfolios, had been watered down by Ms Merkel, analysts said. There are now fears in the CDU that Mr Stoiber, who failed in the 2002 election to become chancellor and has strained relations with Ms Merkel, will attack the coalition from his Bavarian power base.
SPD and CDU leaders said they still aimed to conclude a coalition agreement by their self-imposed deadline of November 12, but would continue negotiating if this target was not met. If they fail to reach an agreement, then both parties could try to form alliances with other, smaller parties. Fresh elections would be called if no coalition is formed.
No one wanted publicly to contemplate the prospect of more political uncertainty for Europe's largest economy, let alone the prospect of fresh elections if the current disarray leads to deadlock. But the prospects that Merkel, who hopes to be elected chancellor by Parliament on Nov. 22, could serve out a four-year term as Germany's first woman leader appeared diminished.
Nevertheless, she appeared on television Tuesday night and told the country: "I am fully committed to making a grand coalition possible. We will work to make a success of it."
In the first setback for Merkel, Franz Müntefering, the designated vice chancellor and labor minister, resigned suddenly on Monday as leader of the Social Democrats after a rebellion by a younger generation of politicians in the party.
With Müntefering no longer having the authority to push through a coalition agreement on the left and Stoiber no longer involved in the talks, Merkel is in an even weaker position to have a coalition accord accepted by either the conservatives or the Social Democrats.
International Herald Tribune 1/11 2005
Brandenburg Premier Matthias Platzeck has said he had won enough support to lead the Social Democratic (SPD) party
Platzeck will be the SPD's first leader from eastern Germany
Press Review: Bizarre Spectacle of German Politics
Deutsche Welle 2/11 2005
Brandenburg Premier Matthias Platzeck has said he had won enough support to lead the Social Democratic (SPD) party, ending a crisis after party chief Franz Müntefering said he would step down. Platzeck, 51, said he would take over as party president after meeting with a rival for the post, Kurt Beck, the premier of Rhineland-Palatinate. Beck said he was supporting Platzeck, who in turn said he had received the backing of all of the party's regional groups. Platzeck said he would combine the party leadership with his functions as state permier in the eastern German state of Brandenburg. As he governs with a grand coalition of SPD and CDU in his state, he is also well prepared to take part in grand coalition talks on the national level.
Den politiska krisen i Tyskland har förvärrats efter att socialdemokraternas ordförande Franz Müntefering oväntat hoppat av.
Sex veckor efter nyvalet har Tyskand fortfarande ingen ny regering och de pågående förhandlingarna om en storkoalition riskerar att spricka.
Ekot 1/11 2005
35 miljarder euro ska sparas och det är det största sparpaketet i tysk efterkrigstid. Båda partierna ska godkänna regeringsplanen om två veckor och därefter ska Angela Merkel tillträda som kansler. Så är det tänkt.
Gero Neugebauer, a professor of political sociology at Berlin's Free University, does not believe the current uproar over the SPD leadership and Stoiber's return to Munich necessarily means the end of the grand coalition, despite the shaken confidence of the parties involved. "Both parties have a long-term interest in making it work for now," he said. "Both need to build a stable government and look toward to the 2009 elections."
But he added: "The chances of that coalition being stable are now not as good."
Deutsche Welle
Germany
All the political parties, and their leaders, are now engaged in tortuous manoeuvring over possible coalitions that smacks more of Weimar than of the Federal Republic
The Economist editorial 22/9 2005
Comment by Rolf Englund:
Weimar was not so bad, until The Great Depression, the latest
research shows
Det tyska valet kan som de franska och holländska nejen till EU-författningen ses som utslag av den förtroendeklyfta mellan väljare och politiker som blivit allt mer uppenbar i Europa.
DN-ledare 22/9 2005
Den kanaliseras lätt till EU-projektet men gäller något mer: Medborgarna misstror framtiden och politikerna misströstar om sin förmåga att övertyga dem om att de har en lösning för denna framtid.
VOTERS OF GERMANY, I salute you! On Sunday you delivered a fair, constructive and intelligent verdict on your political class.
The fact that all respectable commentators in the German and European establishment agreed in declaring this election to have been an utter disaster — “the worst of all possible outcomes” is the cliché of the hour — merely confirms the democracy’s main premise:
the collective wisdom of the people is usually wiser than the conventional wisdom of a self-regarding elite.
Anatole Kaletsky, The Times, September 22, 2005
The German election was a triumph of democracy in the same way as the referendums in France and the Netherlands. Just like those referendums, it has created a political stalemate, neutered diplomacy and paralysed the economic reform process. But political paralysis was exactly what German voters wanted — and quite rightly so.
Germans were right to vote for political paralysis for the same reason that the French and the Dutch were right to immobilise Europe: because German politicians were all, without exception, determined to push their country in the wrong direction, and if you are moving in the wrong direction towards the edge of a precipice, immobility is a better option than dynamism
If these were the policies that could pull a country out of recession, then Herbert Hoover would be remembered as the greatest US President of the 20th century and Montagu Norman would be more celebrated as an economist than Maynard Keynes.
The new German government’s deflationary macroeconomic policies will sabotage potentially favourable results of supply-side reforms.
The need for mutual support between pro-competitive supply-side reforms and expansionary macroeconomic policies should be obvious to anyone with an understanding of Keynesian economics.
It has been amply demonstrated in practice — positively by the success of the US and UK economies since the mid-1980s and negatively by the consistent forecasting failures of the pre-Keynesian economic flat-earthers of the European Central Bank
Anatole Kaletsky, The Times, September 19, 2005
Angela Merkel
Why a science degree and a handbag are not enough for the new Iron Lady
Anatole Kaletsky, The Times, September 8, 2005
The reasons for scepticism about Germany are twofold. The first is that Germany’s electoral system is still very biased against a strong Thatcher-style government.
Frau Merkel’s reform programme, for all its fine rhetoric about competition and incentives, is economically misconceived. In fact, if Frau Merkel really implements her election promises, the German economy will probably slide into an even deeper morass.
This is because the austerity measures in her initial reform plans — higher consumer taxes, smaller government deficits, cutbacks in pensions and job security — would initially exacerbate unemployment and weaken economic growth... If Frau Merkel sticks to these masochistic priorities, not only will she push Germany into deeper recession: she could well set back pro-market reform across Europe for another decade.
To German devotees of Thatcherism this may seem an outrageous accusation; the Iron Lady, after all, pushed Britain into deep recession in 1979 and still emerged triumphant. What such masochistic neo-Thatcherites forget is that Britain in 1979 needed austerity because it had to stop economic overheating and inflation; Germany today has exactly the opposite problem.
In sum, Angela Merkel may seem to have a great deal in common with Margaret Thatcher, given her science degree, her bluntness and her hand-bag. But such superficial similarities may deceive. Thatcher did not, in general, demand pointless sacrifices and pick fights that she was bound to lose.
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The formation of a Grand Coalition will put an enormous strain on a party system that is already fragmented, by encouraging more radical small parties to formulate ever more outrageous alternatives to existing policies. |
Machtübernahme and all that |
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For Angela Merkel, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democrats, the grip on power is slowly slipping away. |
Angela Merkel’s failure to land a decisive victory in the German elections has sent shockwaves around the European Union and left supporters of economic reform in despair. |
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Det största nederlaget led ändå kristdemokraterna, som gjorde sitt sämsta val sedan 50-talet. |
När jobben står på spel är det ohållbart att centrala kollektivavtal ska kunna hindra lokala uppgörelser om längre arbetstider och lägre löner. En uppluckring av det starka anställningsskyddet skulle öka rörligheten och antalet nya jobb. |
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The disappointing result suggests that Ms Merkel may not have been the right candidate for the CDU, because she is so atypical of a party with deep catholic, social and western elements. |
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Tyskland har hittills sluppit högerpopulismen. Landets mycket civiliserade politiska kultur har varit stark. Men även den tyska valmanskåren är föränderlig och inget är givet. |
Massarbetslöshet, ekonomisk stagnation och offentliga underskott till trots misslyckades CDU och liberala FDP att samla en majoritet bakom sig. Tyskarna önskade sig förändringar men svek förändringsbenägna politiker. Ett dystert resultat för hela Europa. |
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Tyska arbetare måste bli billigare och tyska konsumenter få det litet dyrare. Så ser Angela Merkels program ut i stark förenkling. |
Många tyskar inser dock, glädjande nog, att förändringar behövs. Annars skulle kristdemokraterna, som vill gå ännu längre än SPD i fråga om reformer, knappast ha fått mer än var tredje röst. |
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Euron är inte problemet för Tyskland, tvärtemot vad många tror. Europeiska centralbankens styrränta på 2 procent är inte högre än den räntenivå som gamla Bundesbank skulle ha hållit |
For 34 years she worked in the same factory, but she lost her job in December 2002. |
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The lavish welfare state, financed from levies on wages, has raised average labour costs in the manufacturing sector to €27.60 ($33.70, £18.60) an hour, making German workers some of the most expensive to employ on the planet – Americans cost €18.76, Poles €3.29. |
Few have realised the most dangerous feature of EMU: it has locked Germany into a seriously uncompetitive real exchange rate |
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Angela Merkel, who was brought up in East Germany, is an uncharismatic campaigner who appears thoroughly uncomfortable at being called a German Margaret Thatcher. |
Det är ganska enkelt. Loket i den europeiska ekonomin behöver nytt bränsle för att åter kunna få upp farten och det ställer krav på förändringar av den tyska sociala modellen... |
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On Friday a senior CDU politician admitted for the first that the public might not support the tough economic reforms likely under a CDU-FDP alliance. |
If Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is ousted from office in just over a week, it will largely be because he failed to address Germany's joblessness - currently stuck at an alltime postwar high |
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Wolfgang Schauble, foreign affairs adviser in opposition leader Angela Merkel's pre-election team |
Ken Clarke’s dismissal of the euro as a “failure” is like a cardinal telling us that God doesn’t really exist. |
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The federal government will borrow €22 billion ($27 billion) next year, pushing the overall budget deficit well above 3% of GDP, the ceiling supposedly set by the euro-area's stability pact. Public debt will hit €1.5 trillion by the end of 2005, or 68% of GDP. If nothing is done, some projections have debt rising to an Italian-style 111% by 2050. Adding implicit debt, such as pension liabilities, pushes the ratio to three times as high. |
It is economic performance – not the European Union budget or any proposed constitution – that will determine the fate of the “European Project”. |
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It is extraordinary to consider, for example, that the German people never had the opportunity to express their views in a referendum as to whether they ought to abandon one of the most successful post-war monetary regimes in favour of an untried and untested currency. Even if one makes allowances for Germany’s traditional post-war phobia of being perceived as “bad Europeans”, it is almost certain that most would have voted to retain the D-mark, had they been given the opportunity to express themselves in a proper democratic forum. |
Bild, a leading German tabloid, showed overwhelming hostility in Germany to the constitution. |
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Gerhard Schröder; Det är under hans tid vid makten som den mödosamma omprövningen av en förkalkad välfärdsstat till sist ändå har inletts. |
Visst är det lustigt att moderaterna i Sverige går till val på det som
väljarna i Tyskland just med kraft har avvisat. |
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UPI press agency |
De omstridda så kallade Harzreformerna innebär bland annat en sänkning av ersättningsnivåerna för många arbetslösa och hårdare krav på att ta de jobb som erbjuds. |
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In North Rhine-Westphalia, as in the rest of the country, the No. 1 issue is unemployment. Of the country's five million jobless, more than one million live in North Rhine-Westphalia. In Gelsenkirchen, a city in the Ruhr Valley, Germany's industrial heartland, the jobless rate is a whopping 25%, double the national average. "My most important job is to give people hope, to make sure depression doesn't take over," said Mayor Frank Baranowski just before the elections. "It might take another 15 to 20 years before things are back to normal here, but at least people know that their children will have a better life." |
Given the results of yesterday's elections, it's clear that voters - furious about recent cuts to unemployment benefits - don't have that kind of patience. |
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The most ignominious defeat of Gerhard Schröder's political career may be at hand. |
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder plans to seek early elections following his party's devastating loss of a key powerbase |
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The ruling coalition of Gerhard Schröder faces a crucial test in North Rhine-Westphalia this Sunday. |
Tysklands största delstat Nordrhein-Westfalen |
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Enligt tidningen Süddeutsche Zeitung ska EU-författningen föras upp i den tyska Författningsdomstolen |
Det tyska folket har egentligen inte frånhänt sig några befogenheter, argumenterade domstolen. Dessa är bara utlånade. Unionen är ett provisorium. Därigenom kränks inte den tyska demokratin. |
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The proposal for a new European Union services directive, issued when Frits Bolkestein was single market commissioner, is under attack from all sides. |
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The new constitution, with its nonsense about a "social union", makes the wrong choices. |
As Germany becomes part of a bigger labour market with hugely divergent welfare standards, it will become a magnet for immigrants. |
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When Gerhard Schröder was first elected German Chancellor in 1998, 3.8 million Germans were out of work. |
Without the Stability Pact there would have been no support in Germany for the new currency. |
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Det finns ingen trovärdig vändpunkt i sikte. I dag står cirka 5,2 miljoner tyskar utan arbete. |
Gloom about Europe's economic outlook intensified markedly on Thursday after a plunge in economic confidence across the continent and further rises in French and German unemployment. |
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Germany would be able to cite the costs of its reunification as an excuse for breaking the European Union’s stability and growth pact. |
Germany does U-turn on competition in services
Germany has joined France in asking the European Commission to rethink ambitious plans to open the services sector to cross-border competition. |
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Five million Germans out of work |
Fem miljoner tyskar utan jobb |
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German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month in December - making the year's average jobless total the highest since reunification.
The seasonally adjusted jobless total rose a higher than expected 17,000 to 4.483 million, the Bundesbank said.
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Hans Eichel, finance minister, criticised the Bundesbank for refusing to help ease government financial problems by selling gold reserves. |
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– Det multikulturella samhället är dömt att misslyckas. |
Tack gode Allah för Europeiska Unionen |
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Germany's unemployment rate rose in November to the highest since December 1998 as business confidence fell to its lowest in more than a year |
Others countered that - at least as far as the European Union is concerned - English should not necessarily be given the status of the bloc's foremost language. |
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One Euro, One Way out of Unemployment? |
Continental Europe, and more specifically, Germany, would have to
find enough of an autonomous momentum to achieve a higher relative growth path. For this scenario to
materialise, a modicum of stability in oil prices and exchange rates is required, which would allow a
traditionally weakly resilient euro area to start catching up with the fast growing economies of the OECD.
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Euron spricker när dollarn faller |
How long will the euro survive? The author shows that the answer depends principally on Germany. |
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Business confidence in Germany, Europe's largest economy, has fallen to its lowest level in more than a year, over concerns at a strengthening euro. |
German economy grew just 0.1% in the three months to September, slower than expected.
The figure is the lowest since the outright contraction in the second quarter of 2003. |
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The number of unemployed in Germay rose to 4.457 million. |
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has said Turkish entry to the European Union would be as important for Europe as the D-Day invasion 60 years ago. |
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German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's hard-won labour market reforms could weaken his country's generous but underfunded social security system and fail to reduce unemployment, Germany's six leading economic institutes said |
External relations commissioner-designate Benita Ferrero-Waldner has put forward the case for a EU role on the UN’s Security Council. |
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The German Christian Democrat Party appears to be suffering an internal split over the Turkish issue. The leader of Germany's centre-right opposition party, Angela Merkel, earlier this month wrote to other centre-right leaders in the EU in a bid to block Turkey's full membership of the EU, offering instead a "privileged partnership". Chairman of the German Parliament’s foreign affairs committee Volker Rühe has however criticised the party’s leader Angela Merkel of being out of step with the majority in Europe. |
For the first time since 1989, Germans are questioning the old assumption that East would eventually meld into West. Instead it is becoming apparent that the two sides have begun to diverge economically, politically and culturally. | |
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I mötet mellan Stasi och den västtyska välfärdsstaten förenades det sämsta av två världar |
EMU bäddar för bråk |
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Hans Tson Söderström: Tur att vi har vår flytande krona |
Germany's mainstream political parties were sharply rebuffed on Sunday when voters in two regional elections in formerly communist East Germany handed extremists their best results in years |
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Schroeder said Monday he "would have wished for a better result |
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Commission's quarterly economic report |
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Can the world trust Germany, and can Germans trust themselves? |
It has never been clear whether the intention of the
stability pact was to secure fiscal sustainability, to run an optimal fiscal
policy for the eurozone as a whole or - as I always suspected - to dissuade
some countries from joining the euro Wolfgang Munchau Financial Times 24/5 2004 |
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"The [European] project has broken down: no-one today can
give a satisfactory answer to the question of why Europe [exists] and where it
is going" |
The finance ministers of Britain, France and Germany are
joining forces to call for reinterpretation of the eurozone's stability and
growth pact |
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Stora euro-länder som Tyskland och Frankrike, men
även nya medlemmar som Polen och Tjeckien, riskerar att få extremt
stora problem med sina offentliga finanser. |
Europe's traditions deserve a debate that identifies distinctive
European values and defines the nature of the great political experiment in
which the states of Europe are engaged. A document that raises the spirit.
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Den 13 juni är det val till Europaparlamentet. Den centrala
frågan inför detta val borde vara hur mycket makt vi är beredda
att överlåta till EU. |
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With present policies and public finance structures, Germany
is on course for insolvency |
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Stora euro-länder som
Tyskland och Frankrike, men även nya medlemmar som Polen och Tjeckien,
riskerar att få extremt stora problem med sina offentliga finanser.
Kreditvärderingsföretaget Standard & Poor’s har gjort framtidsberäkningar för 25 industriländer, däribland Sverige.Politikerna komemr med tiden att tvingas till en rad impopulära beslut, tror Marianne Flink, chef för Standard & Poor’s i Sverige: Trots den här varningen ser Standard & Poor’s ingen katastrof inom synhåll de närmaste 10-15 åren. Det är först därefter som de offentliga finanserna står inför ett hotande haveri. Men som vanligt är många faktorer inblandade, till exempel att förmånerna i välfärdssystemen är oförändrat stora, att skatterna inte höjs, att ålderspyramiden och tillväxten fortsätter utvecklas ungefär som i dag. Men i så fall kommer mycket att gå över styr. Inte minst i stora euro-länder som Tyskland och Frankrike. Men även nya medlemmar som Polen och Tjeckien, riskerar att få extremt stora problem med sina offentliga finanser. Växande problemen tornar upp sig, inte bara i Europa utan även i USA, Japan och i en asiatisk tigerekonomi som Sydkorea. Vid en jämförelse kommer några länder att klara bättre. Dit hör bland andra Sverige och Storbritannien, som ser ut att klara de nuvarande kraven i EU:s stabilitetspakt. |
German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his
conservative opponent Edmund Stoiber have blasted new EU member states for
policies of tax-dumping and unfair tax competition. |
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"Vi befinner oss i en dämpad uppgångsfas, utan
någon bredare bas. |
Why Germany's economy is failing to fly |
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Delstatsvalet i Hamburg på söndagen är
det första av 14 val i Tyskland i år och supervalåret inleddes
med en stor förlust för socialdemokraterna. |
Europe is doing much worse than the United States
economically, right? Not if you subtract Germany. Without Germany's
figures, The Economist magazine has computed, Europe's economic performance
would look as good as America's. |
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Turkiets förhållande till EU blir en
valfråga i den kommande valrörelsen inför valet till
Europaparlamentet |