The UK election and the EU – a stark choice

It’s really an incredible thing to witness – British elections apparently don’t slowly emerge and gather pace, but instead arrive with a loud thud. Last week Prime Minister Gordon Brown called an election, and on Monday the Queen ceremoniously dissolved parliament. Almost on cue, my Facebook feed suddenly lit up with status messages from Brits asking who they should vote for.

It’s strange, because it’s been known for months that the election would be at some point in May. it’s literally the last moment at which Gordon Brown could have called an election since the last one was 5 years ago. But I guess it isn’t ok to start thinking about how you will vote until the Queen tells you to!

This will be the first UK election I will have observed since moving there. The process is extremely different from that in the US. Once the parliament is dissolved, MPs have just a few weeks to rush home to their constituencies to campaign. On 6 May the Brits will go to the polls, and whichever party gets the most votes will be able to appoint the prime minister. But one part of this year’s election will be very American. For the first time ever, the leaders from the three main parties will take place in an American-style TV debate. The first one will air tonight.

What next for decapitated Poland?

I literally gasped this weekend when I turned on the TV in my hotel in Amsterdam and saw that a plane carrying the Polish president and 95 top officials in the Polish government had crashed in Russia. Before long the reports had been verified – the Polish government has been virtually decapitated by this mysterious crash.

It’s safe to say the notorious Polish president Lech Kaczynski was not much-loved in Brussels. His fierce Euroscepticism and opposition to climate change efforts had made him public enemy number one here for awhile. But you wouldn’t know that from the way the EU capital is reacting today. EU flags are flying at half mast, virtually every EU leader has issued statements of shock and sadness, and a moment of silence was observed during today’s midday press briefing. Whatever disagreements existed between Kaczynski and Brussels, it seems to have been forgotten in the face of this shocking event.

The Black Forest

This weekend I was able to see firsthand the effects of a number of European environmental policies I’ve been reporting on while taking a scenic drive through the Black Forest in Southwestern Germany.

I’ve lived in Europe four years now, yet every year I seem to forget that we get a 4-day weekend for Easter here. So every year I end up scrambling to find some impromptu thing to do, which usually ends with me heading down to my dad’s house in Zurich and we go on a road trip somewhere. One year in was Venice, another it was Geneva. This year we decided to drive up through the Black Forest in Germany to Baden-Baden and Freiburg.

The Black Forest, or “Schwarzwald” in German, is popular tourist destination known for its hiking and skiing. It gets its name from the closely-packed pattern of the trees, which makes the forest look very dark when you look into it. Because they get no sunlight in the interior, the trees have no leaves on them for most of the bark, creating this eery world within the forest. It sits on a low-level mountain range over the Rhine valley, so it also commands astounding views. The vast majority of the tourists who go there are German (though when we were there I overheard a lot of French Alsatians), and English was in short supply. I’ve heard from my German friends that they can’t understand any of the local Swabian dialect there, and they even have trouble understanding people in the forest when they speak high German because of their strong accents. Incidentally, the Black Forest is also the birthplace of the cuckoo clock, and of course, black forest cake.

The new power of the pink press? British, Czech conservatives fumble in gay interviews

Surely this is just a bizarre coincidence, but oddly enough two conservative politicians at opposite ends of Europe took major tumbles last week following misstatements in interviews in gay newspapers. Both David Cameron in the UK and Mirek Topolánek in the Czech Republic have run into trouble for ill-chosen words used in interviews they had clearly underprepared for. Does this mean the pink press has come of age?

Last week British Conservative leader David Cameron, who will be challenging Gordon Brown in next month’s general election in the UK, had a mini meltdown of sorts during a filmed interview with the Gay Times. The trouble started when the interviewer asked Cameron why his Tories in the European Parliament failed to support a recent vote criticising a Lithuanian law banning the “promotion of homosexuality” (The image below is an actual campaign flyer in Vilnius for the Lithuanian law). David Cameron seemed completely caught off guard, and could only respond that he didn’t know anything about the vote.

To IMF or not to IMF?

You were lucky yesterday if you caught a glimpse of Angela Merkel running around Brussels like a mad woman. The German chancellor was the center of attention during the spring summit of EU national leaders, as all of Europe looked to her to come to the rescue of Greece, and by extension, the Euro currency.

Merkel was going it alone in her unyielding objection to a bail-out for debt-ridden Greece, and she dug in her heels firmly. After much negotiation she relented and agreed to a bail-out, but on one condition – the American-controlled International Monetary Fund would have to be involved. European leaders are leaving Brussels today with a bailout plan in place, but only as an “emergency measure” to be triggered if Greece goes completely broke and cannot get any more credit.

Though it's stabilised the situation for the moment, the solution devised seems to have truly pleased no one. The euro rebounded from its long decline today in response to the news, but the markets did not reflect much confidence in the measure. Merkel is under tremendous pressure. The idea of a bail-out is extraordinarily unpopular in Germany, where many point out that such a bail-out is specifically forbiddon by the Maastricht Treaty. Many in Germany are saying that a core part of the eurozone agreement was that one state would never have to bail out another in the currency union. That, say some analysts, is why Merkel insisted on involving the IMF. Making the bail-out appear like an international effort will shield her from legal challenges that will surely be launched at home on the basis of the fund's violation of the Maastricht Treaty.

A Gallic Plot?

Yesterday there was an amusing story going around about how the French Europe minister has invited Catherine Ashton, the native Brit recently appointed as the EU’s first foreign minister, to learn “the language of diplomacy” at a school near Avignon.

It was more of a tongue-in-cheek jest than an actual offer for assistance, but Ashton has taken him up on it and will be spending a month this summer in the south of France taking French lessons. But of course France’s offer wasn’t really about language. It reflects the increasing French dissatisfaction with Ashton as she creates the new EU diplomatic corps, which they fear is going to be dominated by the English.

Ashton speaks only rusty French, and she will only take questions at press conferences in English – a fact which has deeply irritated the French media. The fact that Ashton does not speak fluent French has been continually pointed out by those who think she is not qualified for the job. This is particularly true in France, where the phrase “the language of diplomacy” is not used with a smirk or as an old-timey throwback, but as their actual understanding of the world. Of course the reality is that French ceased to be the language of diplomacy 70 years ago, but don’t tell that to the French. Even within the EU, English has largely replaced French as the lingua franca since the accession of the Eastern European member states in 2004.