Frau Bundeskanzlerin!

It's finally done. Frau Merkel will be the next german chancellor. This is good news for german and european politics. After the last weeks, things start to improve. During the last weekend, the media were speculating about Schröder becoming foreign or even finance minister. This would have been the laughter of the year! Imagine Schröder the seducer, who let the german international position implode in 2002 - for the sole mean purpose of beeing relelected. This model hypocrite (ok, after Chirac), as the second representant of Germany? Would you see him conducting negociations with the crazy mollahs for example? Or how should transatlantic relations have improved with old Gerd as the responsible minister? Horribile dictu. Not to mention the horror of having this socialist technocrat as head of the german budget.... Happy he's gone! The best would be to offer him some place in the board of directors at VW - just to be sure he won't reappear in politics. I admit that I also feel lots of Schadenfreude over old fart president Chirac and dictator president Putin- they all lost an important ally in trying to build their fake "multilateral" word. Now, I just wonder who will be the other ministers. I guess the conservatives had to make a load of hard concessions. So we will still have members of the SPD in the governement. If it's Struck and Schily, why not? I hope at least that the conservative Schäuble and Merz will also make into the team. Merz is hard to tell since he had several rivalries with Frau Merkel, which she won. Schäuble would of course be predestinated as foreign minister. As far as I heard from him over the last years, he's a convinced Atlantist. By the way, one thing that struck me - where are all the feminists celebrating the victory of a woman in top level-politics?? If it had been the other way round, Herr Merkel vs. Frau Schröder, the conservataives would have been called machos and misogynic jerks and everybody would have said that it was time for a woman to take over the power - a better world is possible, after all. But since Frau Merkel represented conservative "social coldness", she was not considered a real woman (as if real women had to be "progressive") and the sex-topic was not an issue at all! Sometimes you could have the feeling that Frau Merkel was asexual... But she is neither asexual nor a leftist, und das ist gut so. For the upcoming months, I most of all wish her strength. I certainly don't envy her. She will have to fight the neo-communist labor unions and convince the german electors that reforms are inevitable and that reforms mean concessions by everybody - also by low income classes. Maybe some day, we will call her "Iron Angie". english / Politique