Silly Little Country

Other Silly Countries

I have already posted on the wonderful silliness of recent German politics. After a bad provincial election result, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany engineered a vote of non-confidence in his own government (the lack of confidence largely coming from within the left wing of his own party). This I considered (and still do) as siller than any of the nonsense of our own parliamentary dance steps of roughly the same period. Schroeder did his usual magic and has now lost the resulting election by far less than anyone ever expected, with a result that creates a staggering number of options for possible coalition governments, not one of which seems likely to actually be able to formulate and promote any policy that could get full support within the coalition.
There are other complexities, and it will be interesting to see what comes of this. There are excellent discussions to be found already at David's Medienkritik, A Fistful of Euros, Dawson's Danube, Oxblog, and many other sites.
Perhaps a complete lack of new policy initiatives in Germany would be worth a try. Given what initiatives our minority government in Canada has generated in its lifetime, it seems an attractive alternative to me.

UPDATE: David's Medienkritik has this amazing graphic.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 7:53 PM