What is going on in German politics, just 7 months ahead of the 24th September Bundestag election? How can a party, the SPD – that was consistently 10 points behind the CDU in the polls – suddenly be running neck and neck with Angela Merkel’s party? This graph from Wikipedia...
From its headquarters at the southern end of Stresemanstrasse as far as Potsdamer Platz, the SPD has filled the street with huge election posters for the European Parliament election campaign… and they are awful. The five main posters are shown below. For me the main test for an election slogan...
A Twitter exchange this afternoon with @olafcramme and @anthonypainter (shown in the screenshot to the right) in light of both Thursday’s election in Denmark and today’s Berlin state election got me thinking: is Nordic bloc politics the solution to the fracturing of the left, the problem so compellingly highlighted by...
David Miliband set out his concerns about the predicament of the European left in a speech at LSE this evening. The full text of his speech is available at Labourlist here, and Next Left has a little post from earlier here. As you would expect from the elder Miliband, the...
Hoping for the continuation of the grand coalition was the best the SPD could hope for before yesterday’s Bundestagswahl. In the end the result was even worse than that: 23.1% and a historic low vote for the social democrats. Guido Westerwelle’s beaming grim was everywhere, the FDP the big winners...