Political forces can sometimes bring and even force together people who might otherwise have very little in common - this could be the case with the German Chancellor Merkel and the French President Sarkozy.
” Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” is how William Shakespeare put it with a man who has been shipwrecked and finds himself seeking shelter beside a sleeping monster in his play ‘the Tempest’ – who is shipwrecked is probably Sarkozy, but no-one would in all fairnesss describe Ms Merkel as a monster!
Usually Germans do not interfere in political campaigns outside their borders. Germany’s CDU and CSU – the Christian Democrats – as well as the Social Democrats of the SPD all have sister parties in neighboring countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria and also France.
However we are not really living in ‘usual’ times and it has been announced that Angela Merkel will go to France to ‘actively support’ President Sarkozy’s re-election campaign which is a rarity for German political leaders.
He may well need all the underpinning and backing he get from outside France because it looks like Sarkozy’s Social Democrat opponent, Francois Hollande will win.
Hollande has sportingly already stated that he takes no offense to her participation for the incumbent and assures her that he will work well with her when elected in May! The first round of the French presidential elections will take place on April 22nd with a potential run-off then set for May 6th. An opinion poll this week said Hollande would win some 56 percent of the vote in a runoff against Sarkozy.
Sarkozy plans to reform stimulate France’s economy and promote a ‘social tax’ as in Germany, which would in effect shift some of the social security costs from employers to consumers – a so called ‘Robin Hood Tax’ or Tobin tax. This will be very popular during these financially trying times and would work better for Sarkozy if he himself could distance himself from these very same ‘big-money’ types who have always supported him and his party in France in the past..http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/30/france-tobin-tax-nicolas-sarkozy?INTCMP=SRCH
Francois Hollande, in turn has promised 20 billion Euro worth of in new spending by 2017 and the creation of 60,000 new teaching jobs.
and http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/29/nicolas-sarkozy-france-television-interview?INTCMP=SRCH
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French Elections – ‘Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows’: Chancellor Merkel to go out on a political limb & out of her way to support Sarkozy’s re-election – by OTA-Berlin Constituency blog contributor Emil Hoogensteyn from OTA Berlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License. If you use this article or parts of it, please refer to http://www.ota-berlin.de.
Tags: Chancellor Merkel goes out on a political limb, Francois Hollande, French Elections - Chancellor Merkel, Merkel to support Sarkozy’s re-election, politics makes strange bedfellows, robin hood tax sarkozy, Tobin tax
