Certainly not after the results were announced. Not even the little moustache someone painted above her upper lip seem to bother her. Stuff like that doesn’t bother people who have already discounted a clear-cut victory. However – losing bothers them. A lot. Return to this picture to see what I’m talking about when you’re watching the news these days.
Schlagwort-Archive: German Politics
They Could Not Get Enough…
votes to fulfil their most important campaign promis – turn the state’s campaign subsidies into a beer drinking orgy. Only 4220 people voted for the German Pogo Party, far too few to be entitled to state financing. But at least the guys put the pints down to put the posters up. I guess that’s democracy in action!
Too Much Red for a Brown Candidate
A cold shower before the photo shoot might have been helpful. Or Photoshop – edit, color balance. On the other hand, the worse the NPD’s posters look, the better.
Yes – to healthy food
This is one of the best campaign posters I have seen this year. The Greens definetely had the most creative advertisements, at least on the postters whithout candidates.
A Used Papamobil.
Netzeitung.de reports (in German) that 21 year-old Benjamin Halbe from Olpe, Germany, is selling his car on ebay. Not news, you think? Fair enough, but apparently, according to the car’s documentation, it previously belonged to Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger – although I’m not really sure about how Cardinals are supposed to handle personal property.
The new Pope supposedly used it to drive around incognito. I’m rather sure that will not be the reason for which the next owner will pay a significant premium for a used VW Golf.
The Bike is back.
When my sister moved to Hamburg last year, one of the first encouters with her new city of choice was that someone chose to steal her bike. As it was an unusual bike, maybe the thief was as confident as police were that they would find it and decided to take it back after sleeping over it.
The thief who stole Hans-Christian Stroebele’s bycicle last week apparently wasn’t quite as concerned about selling his booty. Via German MP Jakob-Maria Mierscheid’s blog I just learned that Hans-Christian has been united with his bike – a bycicle messenger recognized it on a local flee market and just bought it back for the rightful owner…
And the bottom line of this story? We don’t need increased electronic surveillance of public space. We need more cycling, attentive citizens. Sure, the former is a lot easier to achieve than the latter, but it’s also a lot less effective. QED.
Give him his bike back…
It may be a plot to demonstrate the inefficieny of the increasing closed circuit surveillance and increased policing of public space – or just C/conservative terror against one of the remaining true leftists in German politics.
Last Tuesday, German MP Hans-Christian Ströbele’s bycicle was stolen from the east entry of the Bundestag, despite the presence of security cameras and police.
As Ströbele mentions on his website that he needs his bike to execute his mandate, there’s a chance Friedrich Merz, the former CDU/CSU economic policy spokesperson saw an opportunity to beef up his “street cred” by finally really stealing a bike, and not just making it up, like he did in 2002…
In any case, if you want to help Mr Ströebele get his bike back, he’s posted a very detailed description with photo here (via German MP Jakob Mierscheid’s blog).
I’m leaving the country.
You know what? A sizeable portion of Germans are probably truly mad, after all. I have just learnt of a poll result indicating that a third of Germans would support a political comeback of Oskar Lafontaine, the loony left former chairman of the Social Democrats, who blocked each and every economic reform initiative in the 1990s. Yes, *that* Oskar. The “I’m against it, what are we talking about?” Lafontaine.
Frankly, if Lafontaine had been born in the US, he would be advocating Creationism and write op-eds about the failure of science to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the earth is not flat.
I mean, has anyone ever “really” seen the entire globe?
Shorter IG Metall.
“You can be as flexible as you want to, work as much as you want to, earn as much as you want to – but only if we allow it.”
In a move displaying the current hipocrisy of German trade unions in all its beauty, IG Metall, the poweful metal worker union, struck a deal with Siemens AG that will increase working hours in one plant to 40 hours a week – something the union previously claimed would be the end of the world as we know it.
Apparently it’s not – as long as the union’s officials get to decide instead of the people affected…
More via Deutsche Welle.
She Was Not Surprised?
I’m a little confused about a statement by the Chancellor’s spokesperson, Bela Anda, as reported by Netzeitung.
As you might have heard, yesterday, an unemployed teacher was able to approach Mr Schroeder during a campaign rally in Mannheim and slap him. The Chancellor was, according to Mr Anda, not seriously injured by the “attack” and the perpetrator, who, interestingly, is – and for technical reasons will remain – a candidate for the Social Democrats in next months local elections despite immediate cancellation of his party membership, was released from police custody later in the evening. He faces charges of assault and insult.
Physical attacks on politicians are, luckily, very rare in current German politics – so there it is always surprising to hear about them. Or maybe not – apparently, Mrs Schroeder has been expecting such reactions to her husband’s politics all along – or how else is one to interpret Mr Anda’s statement that she “had been startled but was not really surprised.”