How will Nikolić presidency affect Serbian diplomacy with Kosovo? (and with Russia and the EU?)

With recently defeated Serbian president Boris Tadić likely to become prime minister, and with his center-left Democratic Party (Демократска странка / DS) almost certain to control the government, as it has since 2000, Serbia’s domestic policy is unlikely to change much (somewhat curiously, as I discussed earlier), despite a very different president in Tomislav Nikolić.  

But on foreign policy, Nikolić will have a more amorphous — and powerful — hand, as Serbia begins to mark the first transfer of real power from pro-Western, liberal progressive forces that have controlled its government in the 12 years since Serbia was the chief pariah state of Europe.  The one-time ultranationalist Nikolić will have won the presidency just two months after Serbia became an official candidate for membership in the European Union and just two years after Kosovo — populated mainly with ethnic Albanians, but also a significant population of Serbs in the north — declared its independence (yet to be recognized by the United Nations) in 2010.

Today, during the campaign, and really, ever since his departure in 2008 from the more nationalist Radical Party, Nikolić has emphasized that his election would result in continuity for Serbia’s European integration.  But only four years ago, as The New York Times notes in the lede of its profile on Serbia’s new president, Nikolić said it would have been better for Serbia to become a province of Russian than to become a member of the EU.

Indeed, it seems difficult to imagine that Serbia will not have a more intimate relationship in the next four years with Russia: Nikolić will travel to Moscow next week to attend the United Russia congress and to meet with newly inaugurated Russian president Vladimir Putin, a sign that’s already being seen as a rare diplomatic coup for Russia. Continue reading How will Nikolić presidency affect Serbian diplomacy with Kosovo? (and with Russia and the EU?)

Outgoing Serbian president now frontrunner to be prime minister

Following Serbia’s May 20 presidential runoff, which saw longtime challenger Tomislav Nikolić defeat incumbent Boris Tadić, Tadić has emerged as the leading candidate to become prime minister of Serbia.

Nikolić — who was running for the fifth time — won Sunday’s runoff with 51.12% to just 48.88% for Tadić, who had served as president since 2004.  In the prior May 6 vote, Tadić had won 25.31% to just 25.05 for Nikolić.

Despite the fact that Nikolić’s party, the right-wing Serbian Progressive Party (Српска напредна странка / SNS), narrowly won the most seats in the simultaneous May 6 parliamentary elections, Tadić ‘s left-wing Democratic Party (Демократска странка / DS) has been in coalition talks with the third-place Socialist Party of Serbia (Социјалистичка партија Србије / SPS), which will continue notwithstanding Nikolić’s victory.

The result, however curious, would be to block the new president’s party from government, notwithstanding the fact that the SNS won the greatest number of votes on May 6 and Nikolić won a direct runoff against Tadić — who now seems likely to become prime minister.

In the event that Tadić had won the presidential runoff, it seemed likely that the SPS’s leader, Ivica Dačić, might become prime minister.

Although the SNS holds 73 seats in the 250-member parliament, the DS’s 67 seats and the SPS’s 44 seats bring them just 15 seats shy of a majority.  It is expected that the DS-SPS coalition talks will continue with smaller parties in the coming weeks to form a government — former prime minister Vojislav Koštunica’s Democratic Party of Serbia holds 21 seats, the “U-Turn” coalition of various parties, holds 19 seats, and the federalist United Regions of Serbia coalition won 16 seats.

The DS, in coalition with various partners, has essentially controlled Serbia’s government since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000.  The prime minister has much more power than the president in setting domestic policy.  Although he is seen as more nationalist than Tadić, Nikolić pledged during the campaign that his presidency would mark continuity with Serbia’s integration into the European Union.

ND regains polling momentum against SYRIZA in upcoming Greek election

As predicted, the upcoming (second) Greek election is increasingly looking like a showdown between the two key figures of the pro-bailout and anti-austerity camps — between Antonis Samaras, the leader of the center-right New Democracy (Νέα Δημοκρατία) and Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the leftist SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς).

Polls show that New Democracy may be regaining momentum against SYRIZA, which had jumped into the lead in polls following the election and during the coalition talks that failed to produce a viable government.  Each of the two parties can point to polls showing a lead, with nearly a month to go until Greeks return to the polls.  Both parties are polling over 20% after an election in which no single party won over one-fifth of a historically fragmented electorate.

Both leaders are already sniping at one another in advance of June 17 elections, the second in two months in Greece, amid global concern that the possibility of an anti-bailout government’s election could lead to Greece’s exit from the eurozone (with a fear that the process of ‘de-euroization’ has already begun and could well accelerate — capital flowing out of not just Greek banks, but banks in Spain, Portugal and Italy as well).

Tsipras on Tuesday was in Berlin, after a visit to Paris on Monday with popular leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon (pictured above), with the dual goals of calming fears about a potential SYRIZA-led government (Tsipras does not want Greece to leave the eurozone, but would like to renegotiate the terms of Greece’s bailout and austerity measures, four years into a devastating recession) and also building common cause with European leftists.  Tsipras has couched his electoral success in terms of a wider turn across Europe from austerity towards a more growth-oriented policy, as evidenced by the election of leftist anti-austerity François Hollande in France:

“Greece is a link in a chain. If it breaks it is not just the link that is broken but the whole chain. What people have to understand is that the Greek crisis concerns not just Greece but all European people so a common European solution has to be found,” Tsipras told reporters. Continue reading ND regains polling momentum against SYRIZA in upcoming Greek election

Medina apparent winner in Dominican presidential race

Although his opponent is claiming fraud, it appears that Danilo Medina, the candidate of the ruling Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (the Dominican Liberation Party) has won Sunday’s presidential election on a vote of 51.21% to just 46.95% for former president Hipólito Mejía, with 99% of the official count complete.

Medina will succeed outgoing PLD president Leonel Fernández, who served as president from 1996 to 2000 and who has served as president since 2004 — Fernández is barred from seeking more than two consecutive terms as president, but his wife, Margarita Cedeño, was Medina’s running mate, fueling speculation that Fernández may yet be viewing a third comeback in 2016.  Cedeño, as first lady, was especially active in health and education policy.

Medina has defeated Mejía of the center-left Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (the Dominican Revolutionary Party). Mejía served from 2000 to 2004 and defeated Medina himself in the 2000 election.  Mejía presided over a banking crisis that led to a faltering economy; in the ensuing eight years, the Dominican economy has been one of the fastest-growing in the Western Hemisphere, especially in marked contrast to Haiti, the other nation with which the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola.

Medina campaigned on a platform of reducing income inequality and reducing unemployment — despite a robust economy, almost a third of Dominicans live under the poverty line.

Although outside observers have not raised any red flags about voting irregularities, Mejía has refused to concede defeat and the PRD has alleged massive voter fraud.

Fifth time’s a charm as Nikolić wins Serbian presidential race

Just days after protesting election fraud in the first round of Serbia’s presidential and parliamentary elections two weeks ago, Tomislav Nikolić of the right-wing Serbian Progressive Party (Српска напредна странка / SNS) has won the Serbian presidential runoff today, ousting incumbent Boris Tadić of the center-left / progressive Democratic Party (Демократска странка / DS), who has been Serbia’s president since 2004 and who was seeking a third term on Sunday.

Preliminary results gave Nikolić around 49.7% of today’s vote, to just 47.1 for Tadić — if the result holds up and Nikolić becomes president, it will be the first transfer of the Serbian presidency from one party to another party in Serbia since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000 — in many ways, the 2012 election was Serbia’s first ‘normal’ post-Milošević election, in which the campaign revolved not around foreign policy and the ghosts of Serbia’s past, but rather focused on Serbia’s sagging economy, the falling value of  the dinar, Serbia’s currency, and unemployment rates nearing a continent-high of 25%.

In the first round on May 6, Tadić finished with 25.31%, followed closely by Nikolić with 25.03%.  In each of the past two presidential elections, Nikolić had lost to Tadić, and Tadić seemed likely to triumph again today.  Nikolić had also contested earlier presidential elections in 2000 and in 2003.

Nikolić’s SNS had won the greatest number of seats in Serbia’s parliament on May 6, but look to remain in the opposition after Tadić’s DS has made a preliminary agreement to form a coalition with the third-place leftist/nationalist Socialist Party of Serbia (Социјалистичка партија Србије / SPS.

So what can Serbia expect with longtime opposition figure Nikolić as its new president?

Given that the DS will now still largely control domestic policymaking in Serbia, and given the endorsement of Tadić by several other Serbian party leaders, including the SPS’s Ivica Dačić, it had seemed that the momentum was with Tadić, if just narrowly.

On Europe, Nikolić has spent much of his campaign convincing voters that is really, truly pro-Europe, despite a career in which Serbia’s new president has often seemed more comfortable looking to the east rather than to the west.   Although the DS has steered Serbia toward a very pro-European course — Serbia became an official candidate for European Union membership just in March 2012 — both the SNS and the even more nationalist SPS (the SPS was once Milošević’s party) have pledged not to pull Serbia off its course for EU membership.

Tsipras: Austerity will send us ‘directly to the hell’

It was somewhat of a coup for Christiane Amanpour to get an interview in English with SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras.

With new elections scheduled in Greece for June 17 and with the radical left SYRIZA leading and/or tied with the center-right New Democracy for first place, Tsipras has become the face of Greece’s anti-austerity front.

Even in English, you can understand how his brazen charm and direct message — he has refused to accept the harsh budget cuts demanded in exchange for Greece’s bailout — has made him one of the most popular politician in Greece.

But I don’t think he did his cause any favors here — it’s mostly his limited command of English, I suppose, but he came across more as a Greek communist Balki Bartokomous* than as a mature leader ready to reassure the European Central Bank, the European Commission, Angel Merkel, Christine Lagarde or, frankly, even the Greek people. Continue reading Tsipras: Austerity will send us ‘directly to the hell’

Netanyahu’s new broad unity coalition a week later: winners and losers

It’s been more than a week since Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a staggeringly unexpected coalition with his main opposition, Kadima.

Netanyahu’s prior coalition in the Knesset (Israeli’s 120-seat parliament) already included his own hawkish Likud Party (27 seats), the populist, nationalist and secular Yisrael Beiteinu (15 seats), whose leader Avigdor Lieberman has served as Israel’s deputy prime minister and its minister of foreign affairs, several haredim, ultra-orthodox parties, the largest of which is Shas (11 seats), and Independence (5 seats), a breakaway segment of former Labor Party members loyal to defense minister and former prime minister Ehud Barak.

In the 2009 election, Kadima — the party, which means ‘forward’ in Hebrew, was founded by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2005 with members of the Labor Party to support Sharon’s disengagement plan and was the party of his successor, Ehud Olmert — actually won a greater number of seats (28 seats) under leader Tzipi Livni.

The deal leaves the Labor Party, with its eight seats, as the primary opposition in the Knesset.

Kadima’s March 2012 leadership election saw Livni defeated by Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister under Sharon.  It took Mofaz, who once called Netanyahu a “liar” and pledged not to join a Netanyahu government, only two months to join the Netanyahu government, as acting vice prime minister, thereby giving Netanyahu a 94-seat coalition, the widest such Israeli government in 28 years.

Why the coalition, just 24 hours after Netanyahu had called for early elections?

Jeffrey Goldberg, writing for The Atlantic, suggested seven must-read reasons last week, ranging from a potential strike on Iran to giving Netanyahu the centrist support to negotiate with the Palestinians to allowing Netanyahu and Lieberman to push forward with a reform of the Tal Law to provide an alternative form of national service for currently-exempt ultraorthodox Israelis from the two-year military service requirement.

For Kadima, the answer is simple: “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

Whatever the reason, the conventional wisdom has been fairly standard across the board:
  • It’s a masterstroke for Netanyahu, who will now have another year and a half as prime minister with the widest government possible.
  • It’s nearly a masterstroke for Mofaz and Kadima, which polls suggested would have lost many seats in a September election.
  • It’s a good deal for Barak, whose Independence slate might not have even returned to the Knesset in early elections, and whose support Netanyahu has always coveted.
  • It’s decent news for the haredim parties, which did not want elections and which can now, having been part of the government for three years, can protest any reforms to the Tal Law, leave the government, and have a pertinent campaign issue in 2013.
  • It’s bad news for Labor under its new leader Shelly Yachimovich, as it would have been the main winner in early elections — taking many of the seats Kadima was set to lose.
  • It’s also bad news for Yair Lapid, the new force in Israeli politics whose new political party / vehicle Yesh Atid (‘There is a Future’) will now be shut out of the Knesset for at least 18 more months, in which time his momentum may stall.
  • It’s horrible news for Livni, who quit the Knesset in early May, days before the unity deal was announced.  Continue reading Netanyahu’s new broad unity coalition a week later: winners and losers

New York a swing state — in Dominican presidential election

Electoral geography fans, take note: New York could be the deciding constituency in Sunday’s Dominican presidential vote:

Thanks to a law passed in 1997, expatriate Dominicans no longer have to fly to the country’s capital of Santo Domingo to vote in presidential elections. Dominicans voted locally for the first time in 2004 and tens of thousands of Dominican expatriates registered to vote for the 2012 contest – making New York one of the island nation’s most important constituencies in the neck-and-neck election scheduled for May 20….

On Feb. 5, the Board reported that it had registered 328,649 Dominicans living abroad in countries such as the U.S., Canada, Spain and Italy—about 5 percent of the total pool of 6.5 million registered voters, according to the JCE.

The number of Dominican residents of New York City registered to vote has almost doubled over the last four years, from 55,989 in 2008 to over 103,000 today….

About 20 percent of the Dominican Republic’s nearly 10 million citizens currently live abroad. The majority, over 1.4 million Dominicans, live in the U.S., according to the 2010 U.S. Census.

Almost half of them, approximately 674,000, live in New York State. New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida and Pennsylvania also have high Dominican populations.

Voters in New York help make the U.S.-based voting bloc larger than 27 of 31 provinces within the Dominican Republic.

Indeed, both major presidential candidates visited New York — as well as Miami and New Jersey — over Holy Week and Easter, when campaigning traditionally pauses in the Dominican Republic.

Sunday’s election will see a tight race between Danilo Medina, the candidate of the centrist Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (the Dominican Liberation Party) and Hipólito Mejía, former president from 2000 to 2004 and candidate of the center-left Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (the Dominican Revolutionary Party).  Outgoing PLD president Leonel Fernández defeated Mejía in 2004, but is term-limited by the Dominican constitution to just two four-year terms.  Mejía, in turn, defeated Medina in the 2000 race.

Although many Dominican business interests and voters looking for change support Mejía, other voters are wary of Mejía’s first term in the early 2000s, which coincided with an economic crisis that improved after Fernández’s election in 2004.

Within Dominican politics, both parties are seen as fairly leftist, although the PLD is seen has having moved to a more centrist position (although it was once further left than the PRD).  The third major party, the Partido Reformista Social Cristiano (Social Christian Reformist Party) was once the major center-right of the Dominican Republic, and was the party of longtime former president Joaquín Balaguer, who governed the Dominican Republic from 1960 to 1962, from 1966 to 1978 and again from 1986 to 1996.  The PRSC is not fielding a candidate, however, in this election, and its supporters are backing both Medina and Mejía.

The Santo Domingo-based Hoy shows Medina with a slight 54% lead over Mejía’s 44%, as both campaigns launched their final swings this week.

Hollande fills out his cabinet: Moscovici, Fabius, Valls and Taubira take top jobs

 

After announcing Jean-Marc Ayrault as his prime minister yesterday, newly inaugurated president François Hollande announced the rest of his cabinet today.

Laurent Fabius’s appointment as foreign minister was expected, even though he campaigned against the European Union constitution in 2005.  Fabius (above, center) is a grandee of the Parti socialiste, having served as prime minister from 1984 to 1986 during the Mitterand administration, and later as finance minister from 2000 to 2002 under former prime minister Lionel Jospin.

Martine Aubry, a leftist firebrand who had been seen as a contender for prime minister and the runner-up to Hollande in the presidential nomination race, will not take part at all in the cabinet, which is mildly surprising.  She had been allegedly offered and rejected a “super ministry” role from Hollande.

Nor will Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s one-time partner of four decades and former presidential candidate, which is not surprising, as it is rumored that she will be appointed president of the Assemblée nationale if the Parti socialiste wins June parliamentary elections.

The biggest surprise, perhaps, is the appointment of Pierre Moscovici as finance minister.  Hollande’s campaign manager and former minister for European Affairs from 1997 to 2002, Moscovici (above, top) was close to former IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  His European experience will guide him well, as the ongoing eurozone sovereign debt crisis stands to be the French economy’s largest immediate challenge for Hollande’s government.

Michel Sapin, another chief economic adviser to Hollande, had been tipped for finance minister, but will instead serve as labor minister.  The fiscally conservative Sapin served as finance minister from 1992 to 1993 during the Mitterand administration and as the minister of Civil Servants and Sate Reforms from 2000 to 2002.

As expected, Manuel Valls, an up-and-coming MP, who served as the Hollande campaign’s communications chief and who comes from the more pro-market wing of the PS, was named interior minister.  Nicolas Sarkozy used the interior ministry as a stepping stone in the mid 2000s to launch his successful 2007 campaign.

Former 2002 presidential candidate and the South America-born Christiane Taubira (above, bottom), who is currently an MP for French Guiana, will serve as minister of justice as the highest-ranking woman in a cabinet that will achieve gender parity.  Taubira is not a member of the PS, but rather the founder of the French Guiana-based Walwari party and a bit of a “free electron” in French politics.

Nicole Bricq, a member of France’s Senate and another ally of Strauss-Kahn, will serve as minister of the environment.

Le Monde has a full infographic of the new cabinet here and full bios here.

Worries about Greece’s immediate eurozone exit are extremely overblown

Earlier this week, as the chances of a pro-bailout Greek coalition fell apart, you would think that the failure to cobble together a coalition was tantamount to Greece withdrawing from the euro and reintroducing the drachma.

Sure enough, signs of a “bank jog” emerged this week, as Greeks pulled out over €1.2 billion in deposits from Greek banks on Monday and Tuesday amid the political tumult.  An article in Der Spiegel declared that it is time for Greece to leave the euro and even Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund said that, although it would be “quite messy,” it is time to start thinking about how to engineer a Greek exit from the euro.

But with an interim caretaker prime minister, Panagiotis Pikrammenos, being sworn in today, and new elections scheduled for just over a month from today, the warnings of Greece’s immediate exit from the eurozone are extremely overblown. Continue reading Worries about Greece’s immediate eurozone exit are extremely overblown

Pro-referendum forces maintain momentum in Ireland

For me, one of the key questions about the recent French and Greek elections has been how those results would play in Ireland — would a firm anti-austerity wave across the continent make Irish voters more or less likely, in the upcoming May 31 referendum, to endorse the December fiscal compact agreed among all of the European Union members (except the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic)?

Surprisingly, perhaps, given the increasingly cynical response of Irish voters in these EU treaty referenda, the “Yes” vote camp still seems to be maintaining (or even strengthening) its lead over the “No” vote.  The latest poll shows 53% in favor of the treaty (an increase of 6% over the prior poll), with only 31% opposed.

The momentum comes even as German chancellor Angela Merkel finds herself increasingly on the defense against an emergent pro-growth (and anti-austerity) wing from both the periphery — e.g. Greece — and the heart — e.g. France, North Rhine-Westphalia — of the EU.

Say what you will about the current Eurocrisis, it is fascinating to watch the increasingly interlinked politics among the EU member states.  For the first time in EU history, notwithstanding decades of (politically meaningless?) European parliamentary elections, a bona fide European politics has emerged in the austerity/growth debate.  It transcends the traditional right/left axis of national politics and the very existential debate of federalism vs. intergovernmentalism.

Yesterday, Irish finance minister Michael Noonan argued that supporting the fiscal compact would send a message to the EU that Ireland is serious:

Mr Noonan said adopting the treaty will send a signal out to Europe that the Irish are serious, committed people, and committed to the repair job required for the economy.

If we vote No, he said, Europe will move on and we will be left with less than full membership of the eurozone.

To laughter from the audience at an economic summit organised by Bloomberg in Dublin this morning, Mr Noonan said he does not want Ireland to be a pavilion member of the eurozone “where you are allowed drink in the bar, but not play the course”. Continue reading Pro-referendum forces maintain momentum in Ireland

Who is Jean-Marc Ayrault?

On a day that François Hollande was inaugurated and held his first meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel, his appointment of a new prime minister in Jean-Marc Ayrault may be the third-most important news of day in French politics.

Nonetheless, Ayrault’s appointment to lead Hollande’s government is the first clear sign we have of how Hollande might govern over the next five years, long after the bloom of his (short) inaugural honeymoon is over and with many, many more meetings between the two leaders of the Franco-German axis that has traditionally moulded the European Union’s direction.  It’s not quite a surprise, given that Hollande seemed to hint at the appointment last week when he said his prime minister “must know the Socialist Party well, its left-wing members of parliament and be on the best of terms with me.”

Ayrault, also the mayor of Nantes, has served as the president of the Parti socialiste parliamentary group in the Assemblée national since 1997, when Hollande was chairman of the Parti socialiste. The two worked hand-in-hand during the ‘cohabitation‘ government of prime minister Lionel Jospin, who served simultaneously with President Jacques Chirac from 1997 until the 2002 election when Jospin, in a shock result, was edged into third place by the Front national‘s Jean-Marie Le Pen.

As Le Monde put it:

Ce sont deux sociaux démocrates, deux adeptes du compromis, deux européens convaincus qui se sont donnés pour mission d’apaiser la France et de la redresser. (“The pair are both Social Democrats, both supporters of compromise, both Europeans who believe their task will be to soothe France and also to reform it.”)

Known as a quiet pragmatist, a “normal” prime minister for a “normal” president (in a presidency that may come to be more reminiscent of Pompidou rather than Mitterand), Ayrault is notably moderate, notably uncharismatic and notably Germanophile — he is a former German teacher.

So what does Ayrault’s appointment indicate about Hollande’s thinking?  Continue reading Who is Jean-Marc Ayrault?

Former Alberta premier Stemlach: Climate change doomed Wildrose

In the aftermath of the upstart conservative Wildrose Party’s electoral freefall in last month’s Albertan provincial election, former Albertan premier Ed Stemlach earlier this week claimed that Wildrose leader Danielle Smith’s comments on climate change may have been the decisive factor that sent Albertan voters running back to the long-standing Progressive Conservatives:

“These are serious matters,” he told reporters…. “You’re going to go to Europe today and tell them you don’t believe in climate change? And you are going to sell them oil?”

Stemlach said that’s the question he heard at the doors while campaigning for Tory candidates during the election.

“You don’t have to believe in it or disbelieve it. That’s not the issue,” he explained. “Your customer is demanding it, so if you are selling black suits and your customer wants white, what are you going to do? Convince them that black is white?”

 

Although the Wildrose had been tipped to win the election from nearly the moment it was announced, and although prime minister Stephen Harper and the federal Conservative Party was seen as informally backing Smith and Wildrose, it lost badly to the PCs in the April 23 election, winning just 17 seats in the provincial legislature with 34.3%, far behind the PCs with 44.0% and 61 seats.  The Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party languished in third place, with just under 10% each and five and four seats, respectively.  Continue reading Former Alberta premier Stemlach: Climate change doomed Wildrose

New Greek elections imminent amid alarm over potential euro exit

With each of the top three leaders exhausting their mandate to form a government following the May 6 Greek elections, and with Greek president Karolos Papoulias failing in his attempt to bring party leaders together to form a caretaker, technocratic government of non-political leaders, Greece will head to the polls again in June, as concern swept the eurozone that Greece’s exit from the single currency might be imminent.

The election will pit center-right New Democracy (Νέα Δημοκρατία) and center-left PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement – Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα) against SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς)  and a stable of various anti-austerity parties on both the left and the right.  In the prior May 6 election, ND won 18.85% of the vote and 108 seats in the Greek parliament; SYRIZA finished a strong second with 16.78% and 52 seats, besting PASOK at 13.18% and 41 seats. PASOK had won the previous 2009 elections and had joined in a unity coalition in November 2011 alongside ND to support Greece’s bailout and accompanying budget cuts.

The battle for first place — under Greek election law, the first-place winner takes an automatic bonus of 50 seats in the Hellenic parliament, while the remaining 250 seats are distributed proportionally among all parties achieving over 3% support — will be between New Democracy and SYRIZA, however, and their leaders were quick to point fingers at one another Tuesday for the breakdown over a potential government. Continue reading New Greek elections imminent amid alarm over potential euro exit

Hollande inaugurated, names Ayrault as prime minister, flies to Berlin

Newly inaugurated president François Hollande’s flight was struck by lightning en route to Berlin earlier today to meet with German chancellor Angela Merkel — hopefully, not an omen of things to come.

Omen or not, Hollande cannot expect to have any honeymoon after a subdued inauguration.

Hollande also named longtime ally Jean-Marc Ayrault as his prime minister. Ayrault, the president of the Parti socialiste parliamentary group in the Assemblée nationale since 1997, had been considered among the frontrunners for the position.

In his brief address, Hollande emphasized many of the same themes of his campaign: that budget discipline must not come at the expense of potential GDP growth:

“Power will be exercised at the summit of the state with dignity and simplicity,” Hollande declared in an inaugural address to Socialist leaders, trade unionists, military officers, churchmen and officials.

“Europe needs plans. It needs solidarity. It needs growth,” he said, renewing his vow to turn the page on austerity and invest for the future, and implicitly underlining his differences with Merkel.

“To our partners I will propose a new pact that links a necessary reduction in public debt with indispensable economic stimulus,” he said.

“And I will tell them of our continent’s need in such an unstable world to protect not only its values but its interests.”