Issue No.
156 27th
November 2002
I. Electoral ructions in German-speaking Europe
The great winner
in Sunday’s general election in Austria has been the incumbent Chancellor,
Wolfgang Schüssel. His tactic of
embracing the Freedom Party in the hope that it would collapse – a tactic
similar to that employed by Franēois Mitterrand towards the Communist Party in
1981 – seems to have proved successful. Several leading members of the Freedom
Party, most notably the Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser, have defected to
Schüssel’s Christian Democratic Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). The ÖVP got some 42% of the vote, while the
FPÖ slumped from the 27% it got when Haider led the party to a whisker over 10%
this time. All coalition options are
now open for the ÖVP. It can ally with
the Social Democrats or the Greens (or, for that matter, with the FPÖ) to form
a government; by contrast, the other
parties cannot create a majority with each other. One factor influencing the creation of the government will be the
attitude of big business. The president
of the Chamber of Commerce, Christoph Leitl, was asked whether he thought that
there should be a continuation of the black-blue coalition between the ÖVP and
the FPÖ, which many business people might be thought to want because of the
free-market policies of the FPÖ. But
Leitl said, “When a person blows himself up, it is difficult to build up
trust.” He was referring to the
in-fighting which has caused the near-collapse of the Freedom Party and the
huge splits which have emerged between its main leaders. [Der Standard, 25th November 2002] Those splits emerged again
on Monday morning when the chairman of the Freedom Party’s parliamentary party,
Peter Westenthaler, called on Jörg Haider, the party’s former leader, to leave
politics altogether. Haider resigned in
2000 following the boycott of Austria by 14 EU states after the elections
brought his party to power. Westenthaler said, “Haider himself should realise
that his day has passed. The
post-Haider era must now begin.” [Handelsblatt, 25th
November 2002]
Westenthaler’s demand had hardly been made before Haider did indeed announce – for the umpteenth time – that he would withdraw from politics. He said that he would resign as governor of Carinthia. Even though he did not lead the party during these latest elections, Haider said he took responsibility for the collapse in its vote. “I see the election result as a sign of distrust in me and my policies,” he said. “Someone who has built something up over so many years and then gets this as a reward should know what is the right decision to take for himself,” Haider said, referring to his long period as leader of the Freedom Party.
But, as with all his previous resignations, Haider’s did not last long. No sooner had he made his announcement than he decided to stay in office as Governor of Carinthia after all. He said that numerous people asked him to stay on. He said that he still accepted responsibility for the electoral humiliation inflicted on his party, but that his party friends had opposed his resignation. Even in Carinthia, the FPÖ fell from first to third place in the polls. [Die Welt, 26th November 2002] By Wednesday, ten leading opponents of Haider within the party, including Grasser and Westenthaler, had been expelled.
It seems clear that the German Chancellor is about to renege on its electoral promise not to get involved in any attack on Iraq. Gerhard Schröder has said that Germany’s Nato bases would be available for a military campaign against Iraq; it is also clear that German tank units based in Kuwait would be used as well. These include six Fuchs APCs which serve as laboratories on wheels, i.e. which are involved in chemical warfare: Hans-Ulrich Klose, the chairman of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs committee said that they would be used to provide “emergency help if soldiers or Kuwaiti civilians face danger.” The German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, has also said that Germany would give consideration to any request for overflight rights by US aircraft and access to military bases. However, he repeated his government’s claim that Germany would not participate in any military operations against Iraq. But Germany has also signed up to the statement issued by Nato in Prague that the Alliance would “take effective action to assist and support the efforts of the UN to ensure full and immediate compliance by Iraq.” The opposition’s candidate for Chancellor, Edmund Stoiber, said that Schröder would now have to decide “whom to cheat – his allies or his voters”.
Although Berlin
is sticking to its official line that it will not participate in a US attack on
Iraq, it has confirmed that it will supply Patriot missiles to Israel. Gerhard Schröder confirmed on Tuesday that
Patriot missiles would be supplied to Israel.
Both Tel Aviv and Berlin have denied that this decision has anything to
do with the Iraq crisis. But, as the
German defence minister reminded the Bundestag, Germany had also supplied
Patriot missiles to Israel during the second Gulf War in 1991. [Die Welt, 26th November 2002] Peter Struck added
that a similar request from Israel had been generally approved two years
ago. The SPD and the Greens have
already stated their approval for the sale of these arms, as have the
opposition parties. But the opposition
has also sought to exploit the apparent contradiction between Gerhard Schröder’s
promise that Germany would not participate in any US-led attack on Iraq, since
Israel would almost certainly be party to such a war. [Handelsblatt,
26th November 2002]
The losing
candidate in last September’s legislative elections in Germany, Edmund Stoiber,
has delivered a fiery speech to his Christian Social Union party, the sister
party of the Christian Democrats in Bavaria.
With this speech, Stoiber wanted to consolidate and strengthen his
leadership over the CSU in particular and the CDU in general. Immediately after the election campaign,
Stoiber had predicted the rapid end of the red-green coalition; now the word is
that, if the SPD loses elections in Lower Saxony, where Gerhard Schröder
himself used to be minister-president, then Schröder might resign as Chancellor
and make way for Wolfgang Clement, the so-called “super-minister” who has the
economics and employment portfolios.
The CDU intends to pursue Schröder on the issue of tax hikes and false
promises made during the election campaign. In his speech, Stoiber repeatedly
accused Schröder and the Hans Eichel, his finance minister, of lying, both
about the true state of the economy and about their intentions. The CDU is openly calling these false
promises “electoral fraud”. It is also
alleged that the government lied about the state of the economy and about the
unemployment prospects. Stoiber intends
to create a parliamentary committee of enquiry into these lies, with the
express aim of forcing Schröder to resign.
[Hans-Jürgen Leersch, Die
Welt, 25th November 2002]
CDU wants border controls with Netherlands
In an
extraordinary departure from their usual dogmatic pro-Europeanism, politicians
from the CDU and CSU in Germany have called on the Netherlands to change their
liberal approach to drugs and said that, if they do not, then border controls
will have to be imposed between Germany and the Netherlands. The chairman of the opposition parliamentary
group, Wolfgang Bosbach and the Bavarian Interior Minister Günther Beckstein
said that Berlin had to negotiate with The Hague about measures to stop the flow of drugs into Germany. “If
necessary, we will have to reintroduce border controls,” he declared, adding
that even the Schengen agreement (which is now part of EU law) should not get
in the way of this measure. He called
Dutch drugs policy “totally irresponsible” and said that most of the drugs in
Germany were supplied through the Netherlands.
[Bild am Sonntag,
24th November 2002]
Switzerland, which per capita accepts the highest number of asylum seekers in Europe, has rejected by the tiniest of majorities (3,422 votes) a tightening of the asylum laws which had been proposed by Christoph Blocher’s Swiss People’s Party. As often happens, the Swiss voted according to linguistic divisions, with the German speakers voting for the proposal (with the exception of the cantons of Bern, Zug, Lucerne and Basel) and French speakers against it. [Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 25th November 2002]
II.
Other European News
Nato’s
plans for expansion do not stop at the seven new member states. The Prague summit also moved Nato closer to
co-operation with the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Nato experts are to visit Georgia in the
near future to work on the country’s accession. President Edward Shevardnadze told reporters in Prague that his
negotiations with Lord Robertson had been very fruitful and that a plan would
soon be developed for realising “Georgia’s ultimate goal of joining Nato”. Shevardnadze did not give a date for this
but said it would not be “very far away”.
[Civil Georgia, 23rd November 2002, www.civil.ge]
Shevardnadze praised Nato’s decision to admit Bulgaria and Romania by
saying that it “makes the Black Sea into Nato’s sphere of interest and adds a
new dimension to its security.” Georgia
is on the East Coast of the Black Sea, and Turkey, another Nato member,
obviously borders that sea to the South.
[Ceske Noviny, www.ceskenoviny.cz,
23rd November 2002; CTK Czech News Agency, 22nd November
2002] President Bush gave encouragement to
Georgia’s bid to join Nato and to the Georgian president Edward
Shevardnadze. Georgia’s National
Security chief, Tedo Dzhaparidze, told Imedi radio that the two presidents had
held an unplanned 10-minute meeting and that the US believed that “everything
was going well.” He said that Bush had
praised Georgia’s operations against “criminals” in the Pankisi Gorge, on the
border with Chechnya. [Interfax,
www.interfax.com, 22nd
November 2002]
Russia
happy with Nato enlargement
Russia has said that it has no problems with the admission of three former Soviet republics to Nato. Igor Ivanov, the Foreign Minister, said however that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had to sign the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. He said that this was the only way the security system agreed in 1990 could be preserved. Otherwise, he said, the admission of new members was “none of our business”. This attitude stands in marked contrast to Russia’s initial stated opposition to the admission of the Baltic states to Nato. But the General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, said the enlargement of Nato was “the greatest military threat against Russia since the attack by fascist Germany in 1941.” A speaker for the Russian foreign ministry said that the enlargement would not put back relations between Nato and the West to the period before May, when the two signed in Rome an agreement to create a common council. The spokesman added, however, that Russia would never join Nato, “whether by the back door nor the front.” [Interfax, 21st November 2002]
Speaking
in St. Petersburg where President Bush travelled immediately after the end of
the summit in Prague, President Putin confirmed that Russia and America are now
allies and that Russia has no objection to Nato enlargement. Mr. Putin said that energy had formed part
of their discussions: “We discussed our
cooperation in the energy sector, our energy dialogue.” Mr. Bush, for his part, said that many of
the leaders at the Nato summit had asked him to send their “personal regards”
to President Putin: maybe this was
because so many of them are old colleagues of Putin’s from Soviet days. [See transcript of press conference on White House web page, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/11/20021122-2.html]
A journalist from the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug has been detained by the United Nations authorities in Kosovo. Bojan Bo˛ović has been held since 22nd November on the charge of preventing a UN peacekeeper from carrying out his duties. The day before his detention, Bo˛ović went to a UN police station in the Northern Kosovo town of Kosovska Mitrovica where he told the Russian police commander that another policeman had been following him for days. [Tanjug, 21st and 23rd November 2002] Although the war in Kosovo was fought over human rights, the international institutions which govern the province, especially Kfor, are not subject to any form of judicial control.
EU and US act
together on Belarus
The United States
has said that it will follow the lead of 14 EU states which have announced a
visa ban on the president of Belarus and his top aides. The deputy spokesman at the State
Department, Philip Reeker, said that the US was pleased with the EU initiative
and that it would do the same. The
new ban is expected to come into force next week. Washington and its European allies dub President Lukashenko “the
last dictator in Europe” and relations between that country and the West have
gone from bad to worse even since the US masterminded an operation to overthrow
Lukashenko in last September’s presidential elections. Subsequent to this, Belarus refused to allow
the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to continue its
mission in the country, for it accuses the OSCE (rightly) of supporting the
opposition and thereby interfering in its sovereign domestic affairs. Last week, President Lukashenko suffered the
unprecedented humiliation of having his own visa application rejected for
travel to the Nato summit in Prague. In
a statement read out at Prague, the Belarusian delegate said, “Probably the
reason [for the denial of the visa to Lukashenko] is that for some politicians
the right of an independent, sovereign state to determine and pursue its own
policy is a priori unacceptable.”
The delegate added that Belarus helped Western security because “each and every day we
stop an unprecedented flow of drugs riding to the West at the crest of the
migration avalanche, and suppress the flow of arms and nuclear materials coming
the opposite way and destined to wind up in the hands of terrorists.” [Agence France Press, 22nd
November 2002; CTK Czech news agency,
22nd November 2002]
Prodi says Stability Pact must be respected
Romano Prodi,
the president of the European Commission and the man who said in October that a
strict application of the Stability Pact rules would be “stupid”, has now said
that the Pact must be respected. “All
rigidity is stupid by definition,” said Prodi. “The Stability Pact must be
respected in all its aspects but in such a way that economic recovery is
promoted. We can consolidate the pact by interpreting and implementing its
rules in an intelligent way.” He said
that the Pact had to apply to big countries as much as small ones – a reference
to the fact that Germany is about to break it, as much as Portugal – and that
the Commission would shortly be putting forward proposals for “better
co-ordination of economic policy and greater transparency and discipline in the
implementation of the Pact.” He said
that the Pact needed to be amended in one or two respects. Asked whether the euro would suffer if the
Finance Ministers rejected the “early warning” letter which the Commission
wants to send to France, Prodi replied, “The Commission will do its duty.” [Handelsblatt, 22nd November 2002]
Danger: left-wing extremism
For years now, various parts of the
German establishment have waged a battle against “right-wing extremism”. Newspapers, for instance, have joined a
“Network” against it – although they have abbreviated its name to “Network
against the Right”. The same is true of
the police, which has posters up, e.g. at Hamburg airport, encouraging people
to ring a special police number if they notice any dangerous “right-wing”
activity. The view that “the right” is
a danger was nourished by the strong showing by the French National Front in
the first round of the French presidential elections. The ephemeral electoral success of the List Pim Fortuyn in The
Netherlands was also cited as evidence of the rise of the Right. People never spoke, however, of the danger
of the extreme left when Fortuyn was murdered by a left-wing extremist in May;
when a member of the Green party shot dead eight people in the mairie of
Nanterre in March; or when an adviser to the Berlusconi government, Marco
Biagi, was shot dead in the streets of Rome by the Red Brigades, also in
March. Now a book has been published in
Germany which might redress the imbalance.
Hans-Helmut Knütter and Stefan Winckler have issued a “Handbook of
Left-wing extremism”. But, in a rather
sinister aside, a book reviewer in Die Welt concluded that the book
“lacked any treatment of the presence of extreme left-wingers among the
opponents of globalisation”. [Guido Heinen, Die Welt, 26th
November 2002]
Macedonia “mandate” extended
The intervention in Macedonia was to last 30 days: Nato troops have now been there since the summer of 2001. Moreover, they have just decided to stay for another six months. [Handelsblatt, 27th November 2002] The force, originally led by the United Kingdom, is currently led by the Netherlands, which took over from Germany in June. The decision to extend the “mandate” is explained, inter alia, by the fact that the EU wants to take over the control of the force from Nato, so that it too can have its own little colony run by the euro army.
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