Charlemagne

Our sister blog Pomegranate published a piece on the controversy about a gay mosque in Paris:

THE French are fairly relaxed when it comes to family matters and private choices. François Hollande, the Socialist president, is not married to Valérie Trierweiler, the "first girlfriend", nor was he to Ségolène Royal, the previous woman in his life and mother of their four children. His predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, divorced his second wife while in office, and married a third, Carla Bruni, without any fuss. The current mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, is openly gay.

Continue reading "Gay Paris" »

CALL it a silent bail-out. After several failed attempts, the euro zone's finance ministers finally agreed late on November 26^th partly to reschedule Greece's debt, and offer several other measures to alleviate the country’s financial burden. Taken together, this action should cut Greece's debt by up to 20 percentage points of GDP by 2020—with the promise of more to come if Greece keeps to its adjustment programme.

Continue reading "A bail-out by any other name" »

ITALY has seldom looked more like heading leftwards than on the morning after the first round of a primary election to choose the left’s candidate for prime minister.

More than three million people--more than half as many again as had been expected--cast ballots in an exemplary exercise in democracy that even drew expressions of admiration from some prominent centre-right politicians. Many of those who took part spoilt their Sundays to do so. Such was the turnout that queues were long. One of the leading contenders, the mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi (pictured above), had to wait two hours and forty minutes to cast his ballot.

The result was almost incidental.

Continue reading "Heading leftwards" »

WHAT is the price of liberty? Independence has a cost, as Catalans may appreciate following an election on November 25th that is seen as an unofficial vote on whether the region should separate from Spain.

One way to understand what is at stake is to consider what an independent Catalonia would mean in terms of its trade with its neighbors. Here, Pankaj Ghemawat, a business thinker at IESE Business School in Barcelona, has cleverly weighed in. He has produced proportional maps of the world, showing Catalonia's "exports" to other regions inside Spain, as if they were autonomous too, and to elsehwhere in Europe (see chart below).

Continue reading "The cost of freedom" »

(Note: this post has been updated since it was first published)

THE leaders have gone to bed, leaving the number-crunchers to digest Herman Van Rompuy’s latest compromise proposal for the EU’s seven year budget, before meeting again at noon (see my earlier post here). Mr Van Rompuy barely changes the headline figure that he had tabled earlier this month, but re-arranged the spending programmes (breakdown of figures below).

Few think a deal will be reached at this summit, even if it stretches into the weekend. More likely, leaders will be summoned back next spring to try to close the deal. If so, there will be much talk of failure. But there may be some hidden benefit.

Continue reading "A useful failure?" »

Charlemagne's tweets from the European summit will be gathered on this page.

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IN SOME ways, the decision late on November 19th by Moody’s, a credit-ratings agency, to strip France of its Triple A sovereign credit-rating was not unexpected. The agency put France on negative outlook back in February. Only a month later Standard & Poor’s, another ratings agency, downgraded France from the top rating.

For François Hollande (pictured above), the Socialist president elected six months ago, the timing is awkward. Over the past two weeks his government has begun for the first time to recognise the scale of the country’s economic difficulties and to start to do the right thing to deal with them.

Continue reading "Moody bleus" »