One of the great things about the Twitter is that it allows you to be rather silly and flippant about serious topics – just look what we managed with @AtheistBus. But this post is about EU politics. For today, in a discussion with @JulienFrisch, @spiller2 and @kosmopolit, I managed to come up with a new EU political term: the Gabon Coalition.
So what, you ask, is the Gabon Coalition? It is not some sort of EU agreement signed in the central west African country, but instead the term for a proposed coalition in the European Parliament.
A discussion has been brewing about the potential coalitions in the European Parliament after the 4-7th June 2009 elections about how the political groups in the EP are going to cooperate, specifically about the nomination of the Commission President. It looks like a traffic light coalition of PES (Red), ALDE (Yellow) and Greens (Green – evidently) could back Verhofstadt over Barroso.
The traffic light coalition was last mentioned at 2006 German Federal Elections – a possible alliance of SPD (Red), FDP (Yellow) and Grüne (Green). An alternative at that time was the Jamaica Coalition comprising CDU (Black), FDP (Yellow) and Grüne (Green), the party colours making up the colour of the Jamaica flag.
So what’s the EU equivalent of the Jamaica Coalition? The conservatives at EU level – the EPP – are blue rather that black. Which leads us to Gabon – the national flag is blue, yellow and green. Simple, eh?
[UPDATE] @kosmopolit has pointed out the potential joys of Tanzania, Mauritius and Gambia coalitions. I am however yet to find a flag that has red, dark red, green and yellow in it… anyone know one?
Read the article – Gabon Coalition does not involve the PES. It’s a possible coalition of EPP (Blue), FDP (Yellow) and Green (Green) – the colours of the Gabon flag.
maybe I misunderstood, but the picture has the EPP instead of the PES
A Red-red-yellow-green flag with a communist feel? Welcome to Transnistria!
Grenada could do, too.
Interesting stuff. A Lithuania/Latvia combo perhaps?
Lithuania:
Yellow (ALDE)
Green (G-EFA)
Red (PES)
Latvia:
Dark(-ish) red (EUL-NGL)
White (err… the Pirate Party??)
So that would be the ‘Lathuania’, or the ‘Litvia’ coalition.