Tag Archives: social democrats

Finland

Finland election results — and what they mean for Europe

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sipilaPhoto credit to Jari Laukkanen/Suomenmaa.

As expected, the liberal Suomen Keskusta (Centre Party) won the largest share of the vote in Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Finland after a campaign dominated by Finland’s flagging economic recovery.finland flag

That means Juha Sipilä, a former telecommunications executive who entered Finnish politics just four years ago, will become the country’s next prime minister, and he will prioritize an agenda of economic reform that includes personal and business tax cuts, further budget-trimming and steps designed to increase the competitiveness of Finnish industry.

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The Centre Party led Finland’s government most recently between 2003 and 2010 under former prime minister Matti Vanhanen, who also emphasized tax cuts and promoted innovation — Vanhanen’s government was the first in the world to introduce a legal right to broadband internet. Olli Rehn (pictured above), who from 2004 to 2014 became the European Commission’s chief official for economic and monetary policy, won a constituency in Helsinki to return to the Finnish parliament, where he’s expected to play a leading role in the new government — quite possibly as Finland’s next finance minister.

But the Centre Party’s narrow victory wasn’t the most convincing — it only defeated the governing center-right Kansallinen Kokoomus (National Coalition Party) by just over 3%. Another two parties, the far-right Perussuomalaiset (PS, Finns Party) and the center-left Suomen Sosialidemokraattinen Puolue (SDP, Social Democratic Party) weren’t far behind.

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Each of Finland’s four major parties won between 17% and 21% of the vote, hardly a ringing endorsement for anything other than the traditional moderation and consensus that has marked past Finnish governments. For now, the Centre Party’s victory will end talk of Finland’s potential accession to NATO, a position that outgoing prime minister Alexander Stubb favored and that Sipilä (along with most Finns) opposes.

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RELATED: Who is Juha Sipilä?
The man who wants to become CEO of Finland, Inc.

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But it also means Sipilä’s government will almost certainly depend on the Finns Party in some form. Throughout the Finnish election campaign, that has caused trepidation throughout Europe for two reasons. First, the eurosceptic far right will now hold the balance of power in Finland, a scenario that’s becoming increasingly common in the Nordics as anti-EU nationalists continue to gain support throughout all of Europe. Second, because the Finns Party are opposed to future Greek bailouts, Finland’s new government could complicate efforts to reach a new deal on Greece’s financing that will allow it to remain in the eurozone.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in Sunday’s vote was the strong showing of the Vihreä liitto (Green League), which gained five seats (for a total of 15) in the 200-member Eduskunta, the unicameral Finnish parliament.

Sipilä hopes to avoid the same unwieldy coalition that hampered the National Coalition-led government since 2011, first under Jyrki Katainen and under Stubb for the past 10 months after Katainen joined the European Commission (where he currently serves as vice president for jobs, growth, investment and competitiveness). Katainen was disappointed in his plan to enact deeper reforms, in part because he was forced to balance an unwieldy six-party coalition that included not only the center-right National Coalition, but the Social Democrats, the Green League and the Left Alliance (Vasemmistoliitto).

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Sipilä starts out with less than half the seats he needs for a coalition. If Sipilä includes the conservative Kristillisdemokraatit (Christian Democrats) and the Svenska folkpartiet i Finland (Swedish People’s Party), a small party devoted to the interests of Finland’s Swedish-speaking population, he’ll have just 63 seats.

Continue reading Finland election results — and what they mean for Europe →

Finland

Who is Juha Sipilä? The man who wants to become CEO of Finland, Inc.

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sipila

If the voters of Finland elect challenger Juha Sipilä as its next prime minister, the former telecommunications minister will have the iPhone to thank.finland flag

That’s because the Finnish economy was in recession in 2012 and 2013, and it registered only tepid growth last year. In part, it’s due to Nokia’s loss of market share. Once a synonym for state-of-the-art technology in mobile phones, the exponential rise of the iPhone in the past eight years left the Finnish champion reeling for new areas of growth and shedding jobs near the Finnish capital of Helsinki.

Notwithstanding plans for Nokia to merge with French telecoms equipment provider Alcatel announced last week, Nokia’s global dominance in mobile smartphones collapsed over the course of the four-year government of the center-right, liberal Kansallinen Kokoomus (National Coalition Party) while Samsung and Apple increasingly pushed Nokia out of the market. Nokia ultimately sold it devices and services business to Microsoft in 2013. Simultaneous woes have afflicted Finland’s once-thriving timber market.

So it’s not surprising that voters are poised to elect Sipilä as their next prime minister, a former telecommunications executive who aims to run Finland like a private-sector company.

There’s a sense that voters also want to punish the National Coalition. Even former prime minister Jyrki Katainen appeared to sense that when he stepped down last spring to take a position at the European Commission, where he currently serves as the Commission’s vice president for jobs, growth, investment and competitiveness. Katainen left it to his former European affairs minister, Alexander Stubb, to lead his party into the March 19 elections. Polls suggest that has become increasingly difficult over the course of the past 10 months since Stubb assumed the premiership.

A victory for Sipilä would return the Suomen Keskusta (Centre Party) back to power after a four-year hiatus in opposition. Sipilä came to politics only recently, elected for the first time in 2011 to the Eduskunta, Finland’s 200-member unicameral parliament after a successful career in the telecommunications  industry.  Continue reading Who is Juha Sipilä? The man who wants to become CEO of Finland, Inc. →

Estonia, Uncategorized

Estonian election results: Reform Party wins third term

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Estonia’s parliamentary election proves what is becoming a nearly iron-clad thesis about Baltic politics: so long as social democratic parties in the Baltic States nurture ties with Moscow and pitch themselves to the narrow pool of ethnic Russian voters, centrist and center-right governments will continue to win elections and govern.estonia

So it was in Estonia on March 1, as it became clear that the center-right Eesti Reformierakond (Estonian Reform Party) would win its third consecutive national election, the first under its 35-year-old prime minister Taavi Rõivas (pictured above in Ukraine last year), who is expected to continue leading Estonia’s government.

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RELATED: Russian threat dominates Estonian election campaign

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Despite polls that showed that the center-left Eesti Keskerakond (Estonian Centre Party), led by former prime minister and Tallinn mayor Edgar Savisaar might emerge as the leading party, Reform bested the Centre Party by nearly 3%.

Nevertheless, both the Reform Party and its junior partner in government, the Sotsiaaldemokraatlik Erakond (Social Democratic Party), lost some ground — the two parties will, in aggregate, lose seven seats and six short of an absolute majority in the Riigikogu, Estonia’s 101-member unicameral parliament.

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Luckily for Rõivas and the Reform Party, there are two new parties in the Estonian parliament, and one of them is a strong fit for a three-party coalition. The liberal Eesti Vabaerakond (Free Party), founded last September by Andres Herkel, an Estonian intellectual, could easily find common ground with Reform. Continue reading Estonian election results: Reform Party wins third term →

Germany, Hamburg

AfD, FDP thrive in Hamburg state elections

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It’s a slow election year in Germany, so there will be few tests at the state level for chancellor Angela Merkel, her center-left ‘grand coalition’ partners or any of the various challengers to Merkel’s hold on German centrism.hamburgGermany Flag Icon

That makes the results from Sunday’s election in Hamburg, a city-state in the German north, perhaps more important than they otherwise would be, and it’s not great news for Merkel’s center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Union), which won just one-third as much support as its center-left rival (and partner in federal government), the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party).

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RELATED: Thuringia and Brandenburg election results —
Left, AfD on the rise

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The CDU and the SPD continue to be the largest of Germany’s political parties and, notwithstanding the fact that they have joined together in the second ‘grand coalition’ in 10 years, the two parties fight fiercely at the state level and will contest Germany’s next national elections later this decade. Nevertheless, it wasn’t unexpected that the SPD, under the leadership of Hamburg first mayor Olaf Scholz (pictured above), would easily win the election. Though the SPD lost four seats, enough to deprive it of its absolute majority, Scholz will almost certainly form the next government, likely with Die Grünen (the Greens).

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The troubling aspect for the CDU isn’t that it did so poorly in Hamburg, which has traditionally leaned toward the SPD, but that it seems to be losing voters to more right-wing alternatives, including the mildly eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany), which actively advocates that Greece and other countries leave the eurozone. It’s the four state where the AfD has now surpassed the minimal threshold to win seats in the state parliament/assembly.  Continue reading AfD, FDP thrive in Hamburg state elections →

Germany, Thuringia

Germany’s Left Party comes of age with Ramelow victory

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bodoramelow

After months of inter-party negotiations, the east-central German state of Thuringia will have a government led by Bodo Ramelow, the state leader of the democratic socialist Die Linke (Left Party).thuringiaGermany Flag Icon

On the surface, it means that Die Linke, partially the successor to  Socialist Unity Party (SED) that ruled the eastern German Democratic Republic, will control a state government for the first time since reunification, which has bred a significant amount of controversy:

Never before in a fully democratic Germany has a regional election triggered so much protest, with thousands demonstrating outside the parliament in Erfurt on Thursday evening ahead of the vote, declaring that the “perpetrators” were heading back into office.

Demonstrators included former East German dissidents, some of whom had spent time behind bars for their opposition views. They shouted “Stasi out!” in reference to East Germany’s repressive secret police, and “The Social Democrats have betrayed us”.

Even center-right chancellor Angela Merkel has used stark language to reject a Left-led government, arguing that Ramelow’s victory is equivalent to putting Karl Marx in charge of government.

But that’s a fairly oversimplified narrative.

Ramelow and the Left will govern in coalition with two far more moderate center-left parties, the Die Grünen (the Greens) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party). The SPD, nationally, governs in a ‘grand coalition’ with chancellor Merkel’s conservative Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Union).

Moreover, the Left isn’t even the largest party in the Thuringia Landtag, the regional assembly:

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Far from bringing a police state or a socialist revolution to the tranquil streets of sleepy Erfurt, the Left will be governing in coalition with two far more moderate partners. With the support of the Greens and the SPD, Ramelow’s government will have a one-vote margin in the Landtag. So even if it wanted to introduce radical far-left measures, the Left wouldn’t get very far.

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RELATED: Thuringia and Brandenburg results: Left & AfD on the rise

RELATED: Left hopes to make eastern breakthrough
in German state elections

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It’s not clear, however, that it wants to do so. Thuringia provides the party with the opportunity that it can govern responsibly, even with a different ideological perspective than Merkel’s prevailing CDU or the moderate SPD. While the Left is relatively pro-Russia, plenty of former chancellors, from Gerhard Schröder to Helmut Kohl, have struck more lenient views toward Russia than most European figures. While the Left is also anti-NATO, that’s because it’s on the more ultra-pacifist side of a political culture that for decades has been incredibly pacifist.

Ramelow, a Lutheran union leader born in West Germany, is hardly a flamethrower, and he’s an advocate of pro-growth, anti-austerity policies. He’s called for wider investment in education and wants to provide a free year of kindergarten to every child in the state.

Continue reading Germany’s Left Party comes of age with Ramelow victory →

Sweden

Löfven not to blame for (probable) early Swedish elections

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If you lose a budget vote three years into your mandate, the problem’s probably with you.Sweden

If you lose a budget vote on the two-month anniversary of taking office, and less than three months after winning a general election, the problem’s probably not.

So it goes in Sweden, where voters will head to the polls on March 22 after the government lost a tough budget vote.

It wasn’t entirely unpredictable that prime minister Stefan Löfven (pictured above with Hillary Clinton) would fail to pass his first budget because of the odd dynamics of Swedish politics after September’s general election, which broke the Riksdag, Sweden’s unicameral parliament, into three blocs: Continue reading Löfven not to blame for (probable) early Swedish elections →

Sweden

Three things you should know about Sweden’s new health minister

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wikstromPhoto credit to Philip Mauritzson.

Stand aside, Sebastian Kurz.Sweden

The competition for top heartthrob among Europe’s national government ministers just got a lot tougher with the October 3 appointment of Gabriel Wikström, the 29-year-old minister for public health, health care and sports in Sweden’s new center-left government, whose dimpled smile, steely blue eyes and blond hair are sending Turks (and others) swooning on Twitter, and the young Social Democrat is quickly becoming a sensation far beyond Sweden’s borders:

The good-looking Wikström has become something of a sensation among Turkish teens since he was named as a minister in the new Swedish government headed by Prime Minister Stefan Loefven.

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So who is Wikström? Why has he been appointed a minister? And beyond his smile and boyish good looks, what are the policy issues that he’ll face as a minister?

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Here are three points that tell you everything you need to know about Sweden’s newest export. Continue reading Three things you should know about Sweden’s new health minister →

Brandenburg, Germany, Thuringia

Thuringia and Brandenburg election results: Left, AfD on the rise

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Ramelow

With the world’s attention more focused on Scotland’s independence referendum this week — or even on Sweden’s national elections — it’s tempting to give short shrift to two state elections in eastern Germany last weekend. But, taken together, they portend major implications for the future of German politics.

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The first is the now undeniable rise of the conservative, eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany). Having narrowly missed the 5% threshold to win seats at the national level last September, the AfD won nearly 10% the August 31 elections in the eastern state of Saxony.

In the September 14 elections, the AfD blew past 10% in both states — winning 12.2% of the ‘list’ vote in Brandenburg and 10.6% of the vote in Thuringia. Not only has the AfD displaced the fast-withering Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), it now threatens to steal both social and economic conservative voters from the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Union) of three-term chancellor Angela Merkel. Years of Merkel’s cautious pragmatism and two ‘grand coalition’ governments may have caught up to the CDU, giving the AfD a wide berth on the German right.

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RELATED: CDU wins Saxony, but faces tougher road in two weeks’ time

RELATED: Left hopes to make eastern breakthrough in
German state elections

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Meanwhile, Germany’s socialist party,  Die Linke (Left Party), will continue as the junior partner to the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) in the Brandenburg state government. More extraordinarily, it has supplanted the SPD as the clear party of the left in Thuringia.

Its leader, Bodo Ramelow (pictured above) could become the state’s next minister-president, which would mark the first time that the  Left has controlled any state government in Germany. Established after reunification as the remnants of the former East German socialist party, it now also includes a significant band of former disaffected left-wing SPD members and supporters.

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Continue reading Thuringia and Brandenburg election results: Left, AfD on the rise →

Germany, Saxony

CDU wins Saxony, but faces tougher road in two weeks’ time

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It’s not necessarily that Saxony is shifting to the right, as The Economist wrote earlier this week about the results of last Sunday’s state elections in Saxony.Germany Flag Iconsaxony

It’s more that right-leaning voters are switching allegiances from one party to another, not unlike similar shifts in western Germany and at the federal level. 

Though the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Union) will have to find a new junior coalition partner, there’s no doubt that it will continue to govern under minister-president Stanislaw Tillich (pictured above with German’s chancellor Angela Merkel), who won his second reelection after assuming the office in May 2008. 

Neither its junior partner in the outgoing government, the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), nor the neo-Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD, National Democratic Party) met the 5% hurdle to return their legislators to  Saxony’s 126-seat state parliament, the Landtag.

Many of their voters appear to have supported the newly formed, anti-euro Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) instead, which won 9.7%, making them the fourth-largest party in the Landtag with 14 seats. 

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RELATED: Left hopes to make eastern breakthrough in German state elections

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None of this news, however, was unpredictable, because the results largely lined up with polls. 

The election was most disastrous for the Free Democrats, a party that, it’s not an exaggeration to say, faces political extinction.  Though the FDP made some of its strongest gains in its history in  2009 at both the federal and at state levels, it’s been facing backlash  for the past four years. In last September’s federal elections, it lost all 93 of its seats in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, shut out for the first time in postwar history. Now that it’s lost all of its seats in Saxony’s Landtag, it will no longer be a part of any state government, a massive turn for a party that just one year ago controlled the German foreign ministry, among other portfolios. It now holds seats in just eight of 16 state assemblies, a number that could drop to six if it wins less than 5% of the vote in upcoming September 14 elections in Brandenburg and Thuringia. 

The AfD, also a party with center-right tendencies, is best known for its relatively eurosceptic stand, even if its euroscepticism is muted by the standards of the United Kingdom, France and even The Netherlands. Continue reading CDU wins Saxony, but faces tougher road in two weeks’ time →

Slovenia

How Miro Cerar rose to the top of Slovenian politics in four weeks

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Slovenians on Sunday turned over their country’s government to Miro Cerar, a political neophyte that barely anyone outside (or even inside) Slovenia had ever heard of a year ago.slovenia

Cerar (pictured above), an attorney and law professor, and the son of an Olympic gymnast, formed the Stranka Mira Cerarja (SMC, Miro Cerar’s Party), barely a month ago. But that didn’t matter to Slovenians, and the SMC easily won the July 13 snap elections by a margin of 34.6% to 20.7% against the center-right center-right Slovenska demokratska stranka (SDS, Slovenian Democratic Party), whose leader, two-time prime minister Janez Janša, has been sentenced to two years in prison in relation to corruption charges. Cerar’s victory represents the strongest victory of any party in a Slovenian election since the return of Slovenian sovereignty in 1990.

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Sunday’s snap parliamentary elections follow the resignation two months ago of Alenka Bratušek, Slovenia’s first female prime minister, after just over a year in office. Bratušek’s center-left coalition government is the second government since Slovenia’s last elections in December 2011.

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RELATED: Bratušek, Slovenia’s first female prime minister, resigns

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Cerar will now likely command 36 seats in the 90-member, unicameral Državni zbor (National Assembly), forcing him to form a coalition government with any of a number of allies in a National Assembly that remains fragmented, despite the strength of Cerar’s  mandate.

Cerar’s success is in large part due to his novelty. He’s not tainted by the past six years of austerity or the past two decades of corruption that characterizes much of Slovenia’s political elite. He lies somewhat in the center or center-left of Slovenian politics, leaning right on the need for economic reform, but leaning left on the need for reconsidering some austerity-era policies that Cerar believes have harmed Slovenian growth. For example, he’s called into question several recent plans for privatizations, including the national telecommunications company and the corporation that run’s the national airport. Continue reading How Miro Cerar rose to the top of Slovenian politics in four weeks →

European Union

Here come the Spitzenkandidaten! But does anybody care?

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If you believe the hype, the contest between Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured above, right) and Germany’s Martin Schulz (pictured above, left) is the European equivalent to the American election of 1800.European_Union

Fully 214 years ago, American voters (or, more accurately, white, male American property-holders) went to the polls in what was just the second contested presidential election in US history, pitting the incumbent, John Adams of Massachusetts, against Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.

The aftermath of that election demonstrated flaws in the nascent American democracy’s constitution when Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, both received 73 votes in the US electoral college.  The clear intention was always that Burr was Jefferson’s running mate. Yet as a technical matter, the two candidates were tied in the only presidential vote that mattered in the electoral college. Jefferson ultimately prevailed, but only after 36 grueling ballots in the US House of Representatives. Four years later, the United States adopted the 12th amendment to its constitution, separating the electoral college vote for president and vice president.

Which is to say, new political systems often go through growing pains and their fair share of trial-and-error.

So it will be with the European Union. The Treaty of Lisbon, which came into effect in 2009, directs the European Council (the group of 28 European heads of state and/or government) to ‘propose’ a candidate for president of the European Commission (the European Union’s chief executive and regulatory body) to be ‘elected’ by the European Parliament.

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RELATED: In Depth: European parliamentary elections

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Each of Europe’s major families of political parties took the new treaty language as a sign to field Commission presidential candidates in advance of this weekend’s European elections. Though five groups ultimately selected candidates, the greatest attention has focused upon those of the two largest blocs in the European Parliament, Juncker’s center-right, Christian democratic European People’s Party (EPP) and Schulz’s center-left, social democratic Party of European Socialists (PES).

As the Europe-wide candidates of their respective parliamentary groups, Juncker and Schulz have become the standard-bearers of the most pan-European election campaign in history. They’ve traveled the breadth of the European Union, and they’ve faced off in debate after debate. The challengers have become delightfully known as the Spitzenkandidaten in Germany, a neologism that’s caught on throughout the European Union.

But beyond the symbolism and the novelty, does anyone in Europe care? Continue reading Here come the Spitzenkandidaten! But does anybody care? →

Lithuania

Grybauskaitė headed for easy reelection as Lithuania’s president

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Though the disputed independence referenda in Ukraine’s troubled eastern oblasts attracted considerably more international attention, Lithuania also went to the polls on May 11 to elect a president.Lithuania Flag Icon

Dalia Grybauskaitė, the incumbent since 2009, easily led the first round with 46.61% of the vote, just shy of an outright victory, and she is almost certain to win reelection in the May 25 runoff against Zigmantas Balčytis, a member of the European Parliament, a former finance minister and, briefly for a month in 2006, acting prime minster. Balčytis is the candidate of the governing center-left Lietuvos socialdemokratų partija (LSDP, Social Democratic Party of Lithuania).

The runoff will coincide with elections for the European Parliament, where Lithuania holds 11 of its 751 seats.

Balčytis, a relatively uncharismatic candidate, won just 13.84% of the vote, however, only narrowly edging out Artūras Paulauskas, the candidate of the Darbo Partija (DP, Labour Party), who 12.20%.

Grybauskaitė, who lists the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher among her political heroes, has been dubbed, somewhat unimaginatively, as Lithuania’s ‘Iron Lady,’ after amassing one of the most prolific political careers of any figure in post-Soviet Lithuania. A former finance official, Grybauskaitė served as Lithuania’s representative to the European Commission between 2004 and 2009, for much of that time as the commissioner for financial planning and the budget. As commissioner, Grybauskaitė worked to reduce agricultural subsidies from the European budget and she was responsible for passing the first such budget that held funding for the Common Agricultural Policy to below 50% of European funds for the first time in European Union history.

Upon returning to Lithuania, she easily won a first-round election running as a conservative independent against token opposition. Though Lithuania’s parliamentary government means that the prime minister is responsible for most of Lithuanian domestic policy,  Grybauskaitė holds a key role in setting foreign policy. She has championed Lithuania’s place in the heart of the European Union, the eurozone and in NATO, and she has fiercely resisted Russian designs on influencing its ‘near-abroad,’ especially during the most recent security crisis over the Russian annexation of Crimea and possible designs to influence eastern Ukraine.   Continue reading Grybauskaitė headed for easy reelection as Lithuania’s president →

Slovenia

Bratušek, Slovenia’s first female prime minister, resigns

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alenka

It’s been a busy season for politics in the Balkans this year — Croatia began the year for the first time as a member of the European Union, Serbia’s snap elections in March returned a resounding victory for Aleksandar Vučić and his center-right Progressives, protesters in Bosnia and Herzegovina are calling for new conditions to longtime economic and political stagnation, and Macedonia’s center-right government recently won a fourth consecutive term in power.slovenia

Now it’s Slovenia’s turn.

Alenka Bratušek, the country’s first female prime minister, resigned on Monday, calling into question whether the shaky Slovenian economy will avoid an international bailout that Bratušek worked to avoid in her 13-month government.

Bratušek’s resignation follows internal upheaval within her own party, Pozitivna Slovenija (Positive Slovenia), still a relatively new center-left political party. With voters fed up with the two dominant parties, Positive Slovenia burst onto the political scene in the most recent December 2011 parliamentary elections. It won the largest bloc of seats (28) in Slovenia’s 90-member, unicameral national assembly, the Državni zbor.

In the 29 months since the last election, Slovenia has now had both a center-right coalition government and a center-left coalition government, and both have fallen. That means that Slovenia likely faces snap elections this summer or early in the autumn, and Bratušek, 44, has suggested that she will form her a new party of her own to contest to them.

Bratušek (pictured above) was never the driving force within the party, however, whose founder is Zoran Janković, a former retail businessman who served as the mayor of Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, from 2006 until 2011, and against since 2012 following his failure to become Slovenia’s prime minister.

Janković returned to the leadership of Positive Slovenia late last month after engineering a putsch ousting Bratušek as leader. That, in turn, unraveled the coalition that Bratušek built in February 2013.  Continue reading Bratušek, Slovenia’s first female prime minister, resigns →

Germany, Russia

Gerhard Schröder: a wasted opportunity in the Ukraine crisis

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schroeder

If there’s anyone the European Union could have sent to Moscow on a quiet trip to de-escalate tensions with Russia in February, it was former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder.Germany Flag IconRussia Flag Icon

Schröder served as Germany’s chancellor between 1998 and 2005, when he led two consecutive governments led by his center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party).  As chancellor, Schröder cultivated strong economic ties with Russia, and in 2003, he led Europe’s opposition to he US invasion of Iraq, a cause that also found Schröder in alliance with Russia and its president Vladimir Putin, who Schröder once called a ‘flawless democrat.’

But Schröder’s comments about the growing crisis have been far from discreet, greatly angering his successor, Angela Merkel. He has criticized the European Union’s approach to Ukraine, defended Russia’s right to annex Crimea, and validated Putin’s view that the NATO military action during the 1999 Kosovo War (an action Schröder supported in his first term as chancellor):

Mr. Schroeder told a discussion forum hosted by Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper that as someone who was aware of history, Mr Putin had certain justifiable “ fears about being encircled” and that since the end of the Cold War there had been “ unhappy developments” on the fringes of what was once the Soviet Union. He also claimed that the European Union appeared not to have “the remotest idea” that the Ukraine was “culturally divided” and had made mistakes from the outset in its attempts to reach an association agreement with the country.

Mr. Schroeder accepted that Russia’s intervention was in breach of international law but compared the Kremlin’s action to his own government’s military support for the NATO bombardment of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis in 1999. “We sent our plans to Serbia and together with the rest of NATO they bombed a sovereign state without any UN security council backing,” Mr Schroeder insisted, adding that he had since become cautious in apportioning blame.

That puts his position almost entirely in line with Putin’s — and almost entirely at odds with the German government’s. Needless to say, that has also ruined whatever value Schröder may have had in soothing German and European relations with Russia.  Continue reading Gerhard Schröder: a wasted opportunity in the Ukraine crisis →

Denmark

How Goldman Sachs nearly collapsed Denmark’s government last week

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A crisis over whether to approve the sale of part of Denmark’s state energy company to Goldman Sachs divides the country’s beleaguered minority government, leaving the first female Danish prime minister and her administration in jeopardy. denmark flag

It sounds like an episode of Borgen, the acclaimed television show about Danish political intrigue and the human costs of public office.*

But it was real-life Danish politics last week, when Helle Thorning-Schmidt pushed through a controversial sale of stock amounting to 18% of DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas) Energy, the national energy company, to Goldman Sachs, even though nearly seven out of 10 Danish voters oppose the sale and worry that Goldman will hold too much power over management and other key decisions.

Thorning-Schmidt (pictured above) leads the Socialdemokraterne (Social Democrats), the largest center-left party in Denmark.  In the September 2011 parliamentary elections, the Social Democrats actually lost a seat.  The largest party today in the Danish parliament is Venstre (Liberals, literally the ‘Left’), Denmark’s primary center-right party.

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But the strength of other leftist parties in the 179-member Folketing, the Danish parliament, allowed Thorning-Schmidt to pull together a minority government with the coalition support of two additional parties.  The first is Det Radikale Venstre (Danish Social Liberal Party, literally the ‘Radical Left’), a centrist liberal party that gained eight seats in the 2011 election.  Its leader, Margrethe Vestager, currently serves as deputy prime minister and minister for economic and interior affairs.

The second is the Socialistisk Folkeparti (the Socialist People’s Party), a democratic socialist party that lost seven seats in 2011.  Accustomed to opposition, the party joined government only for the first time since 1959, and its leader Villy Søvndal became foreign minister.  But Søvndal stepped down in September 2012, due to criticism within the party about the 2011 losses and sniping that he was focusing more on government than on the party leadership.  and in the ensuing leadership contest in October 2012, Annette Vilhelmsen defeated Astrid Krag.  Though many party leaders supported Krag, Vilhelmsen’s victory represented a triumph for the party’s left wing, though the party never fully united behind Vilhelmsen’s leadership.  Vilhelmsen clashed often with her coalition partners over economic policy, and it was Vilhelmsen’s decision to pull the party out of Thorning-Schmidt’s coalition at the end of last week, declaring that it wouldn’t be a part of government ‘at all costs.’   Continue reading How Goldman Sachs nearly collapsed Denmark’s government last week →