Dec 6th 2012, 17:25 by J.H. | ROME
THE latest political storm in Italy blew out of an apparently clear winter sky in considerably less than 24 hours. The first thing to be said about it, then, is that it shows Italian politics are volatile.
That may seem like a statement of the blindingly obvious but it had nevertheless been forgotten by the markets. Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PdL) movement withdrew its support from Mario Monti’s government just days after Italian sovereign bond yields fell to a level that implicitly dismissed as irrelevant all of the political and financial turmoil in Italy over the past two years.
Now those yields have abruptly changed direction. It may be a long time before they do so again.
Dec 5th 2012, 15:59 by S.P.
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.
Dec 3rd 2012, 17:00 by J.H. | ROME
IN the end, the Italian left opted for the ‘safe pair of hands’. And decisively so. In the final round of a primary election to choose its candidate for prime minister in the general election next year, the secretary general of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), Pier Luigi Bersani, romped home. Mr Bersani took 62% of the votes in a run-off with the young mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi.
If it was a triumph for Mr Bersani, it was not entirely a defeat for his opponent. In his victory speech, the leader of the PD promised to give more opportunities within the party to the younger generation, a central plank in the 37-year-old Mr Renzi’s platform.
Nov 27th 2012, 14:01 by Charlemagne | BRUSSELS
CALL it a silent bail-out. After several failed attempts, the euro zone's finance ministers finally agreed late on November 26th 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.
Nov 26th 2012, 16:55 by G.T. | MADRID
SO ARTUR MAS (pictured above), the Catalan nationalist president, was no Moses after all. His attempt at leading his people towards the promised land of a new nation state floundered at regional elections yesterday which saw his Convergence and Union (CiU) coalition lose a fifth of their seats.
The election result wasn’t a thumping victory for anti-separatists and for the centralising government of Mariano Rajoy either. The outright separatists of the Republican Catalan Left (ERC) took CiU's lost seats to become the second force in the 135-seat parliament, with 21 deputies. And a clear majority in parliament now wants Catalonia to have a formal right to self-determination.
Continue reading "A setback on the path to what seems the promised land" »
Nov 26th 2012, 15:29 by J.H. | ROME
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.
Nov 23rd 2012, 23:49 by Charlemagne | BRUSSELS
AFTER two days of bargaining and grandstanding, Europe's leaders could not agree on their next seven-year budget on November 23rd. It is a pity, though not unexpected, that there was no deal. The EU could do with a show of decisiveness for once. What is important, though, is all the other things that did not happen: there was no veto, no isolation of Britain, no bitter falling out. In short, no drama.
The 27 leaders of EU countries (plus Croatia, which joins the club next year) decided to come back to Brussels early next year to try again. That is probably good enough, as they have some more pressing business to deal with in the coming weeks—notably trying to stabilise the euro zone.
Nov 23rd 2012, 14:51 by K.N.C. | LONDON
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).
Nov 23rd 2012, 14:17 by Economist.com
OUR correspondents weigh the prospect of Catalan secession and assess the performance of Mariano Rajoy's government
Nov 23rd 2012, 2:48 by Charlemagne | BRUSSELS
(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.
Nov 22nd 2012, 22:44 by Charlemagne | BRUSSELS
THE leaders of the EU have been coming and going all day for their “confessionals” with the monk-like president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy (pictured in the middle). They have been telling him what they can and cannot concede in their latest contest over the EU’s trillion-euro budget for the next seven years.
After a long delay, the presidents and prime ministers finally sat down for their first full session close to midnight. Mr Van Rompuy told them: "Maybe this meeting will be long and complicated. Fortunately this issue only comes up every seven years!
Nov 22nd 2012, 18:22 by The Economist online
Charlemagne's tweets from the European summit will be gathered on this page.
Nov 22nd 2012, 11:50 by S.P. | PARIS
IT WAS supposed to be a leadership election to clear the air after the party’s 2012 defeats, and set it up for the next elections in five years’ time. Instead, the right-wing UMP’s internal election turned from farce to fiasco after the wafer-thin victory of Jean-François Copé (pictured on the left) by just 98 votes, was contested by the loser, François Fillon (pictured on the right). In an impasse, the party is now bitterly divided, with many deputies deeply worried about its future.
Nov 20th 2012, 10:28 by S.P. | PARIS
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.
Nov 15th 2012, 18:27 by The Economist online
FRANCE is slowly heading towards a crisis, says John Peet. Can the country be reformed before it is too late?
In this blog, our Charlemagne columnist and his colleagues consider the ideas and events that shape Europe, and explain the quirks of life in the Euro-bubble. An archive of print columns can be found here.
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