Hollande’s plan to tackle soaring French unemployment by swelling the size of the public service is anathema to the thrifty chancellor, who is keen to see eurozone governments cut their spending. […] But even more worrying for Merkel is Hollande’s pledge to renegotiate her precious, prized treaty that will force all eurozone countries to follow a rigid budgetary discipline.
Karen Maley, Business Spectator
It’s an election year for France, and that’s proving to be bad news for Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel. Her current counterpart in the Élysée Palace, Nicolas Sarkozy, is largely in lock-step with the Germans. But Sarkozy is facing an uphill battle for re-election. He will likely be succeeded later this year by the socialist candidate, François Hollande. And Hollande is far less receptive than Sarkozy to the German push to reform Europe.
Of particular concern, as Karen Maley notes, is that Hollande will seek to renegotiate a new Eurozone fiscal pact — agreed only last month — that would, among other things, bind governments in the single currency union to budget deficit caps. Hollande wants to water down the treaty, which would essentially render it useless in promoting the kind of fiscal restraint that Berlin is seeking.
Unsurprisingly then, Merkel is hoping for a Sarkozy win. Indeed, she is effectively campaigning for her man in Paris. But with Hollande in such a commanding position in the polls, the risk is that Merkel will simply end up poisoning the future Franco-German relationship.
Have I got a Proposition for you
This week, California’s gays and lesbians had reason to celebrate. An appeals court upheld an earlier ruling that a controversial measure to ban same-sex marriage in the state was unconstitutional. The measure, ‘Proposition 8’, was a citizens-initiated referenda that passed in 2008. Religious and conservative groups had championed the measure as a means to overturn a ruling from the state’s Supreme Court that had opened the door to gay marriage in California less than a year earlier.
As legal scholar Noah Feldman writes, not all is good news for advocates of same-sex marriage. The appeals court’s ruling is narrowly defined: it doesn’t establish a right to gay marriage. Rather, it ruled Proposition 8 unconstitutional strictly on the basis that it took away from gays and lesbians what had previously (though only briefly) been an equal right to marriage. Hence, if the matter is appealed again to the federal Supreme Court, the justices there will not be asked to judge whether gay marriage is itself a constitutional right, but solely whether Proposition 8 introduced discrimination on the basis of sexual-orientation to something where an equal right had already been created.
Then again, there are no guarantees this matter will end up in the US Supreme Court. The Californian government was not a party to the appeal — the groups that brought the action may not be recognised by the Court. But in an election year, some conservative justices may be chomping at the bit to hear the case anyway.
Is the Labor leadership issue a bizarre beat-up entirely confected by the news media? Certainly not. Is it an unstable and shifting situation, which may lead to a challenge, and which is notoriously difficult to report? Absolutely.
Lenore Taylor, Sydney Morning Herald
In response to claims that the media is whipping up a frenzy over the Labor party’s leadership, some journalists have raised their heads above the parapet to defend their profession. Lenore Taylor of the Sydney Morning Herald is one, insisting that the seemingly basis speculation in fact reflects an inherently complex, fast-moving political situation. While Kevin Rudd doesn’t have the numbers for a challenge, Julia Gillard also can’t count on having a solid base of support either. There is a large bloc of potentially swinging MPs who are willing to consider alternatives — whether it is Rudd or somebody else.
Still, there’s something wrong with this picture. Taylor asserts that the rapid change in momentum in 2010, from Rudd to Gillard, made a coup inevitable. But momentum doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is fuelled by media coverage. That is precisely the intent of the Rudd camp — to use the media to create the appearance that Gillard is toast, and that Rudd in turn is the only viable option to succeed her. For journalists, there should be a difference between objectively reporting facts and allowing yourself to be a central tool that drives the story. Much of the recent coverage seems to be far closer to the latter than the former.
The unnamed sources briefing journalists may be senior, well-informed and largely reliable. It doesn’t mean they’re not playing the media for fools though.
While there is a recognition that it is important for Greek politicians to be seen by voters to be putting up a fight, there is a growing fear that all the political grandstanding could backfire, and plunge the country into bankruptcy.
Karen Maley, Business Spectator
The job of Greece’s prime minister, Lucas Papademos, is not a fun one. As a technocratic appointment, he has no political backing. Hence, passage of legislation requires the parties represented in the Greek parliament to agree with his proposals. Of course, if they were political winners, they’d probably fly through. But there is nothing palatable about the measures being imposed on Greece is exchange for ongoing financial assistance.
The current sticking point is enforcing cuts to wages — a strategy of internal devaluation to boost Greece’s competitiveness. Antonis Samaras, leader of the centre-right New Democracy party, has complained that the country’s creditors are ‘asking for more recession than the country can take’. If the leaders fail to agree, then there is a real prospect that further bailouts will be halted. That would almost certainly prompt a total Greek default by March.
The problem, as Business Spectator’s Karen Maley reports, is that Greece has consistently over-promised and under-delivered since it was first sucked into the current debt crisis. Greece has frequently failed to meet agreed deadlines, and targets for a variety of measures have slipped away. Even if the latest impasse is resolved, there will surely be another one soon enough. How long before the inevitable strikes, and Greece is rendered broke by its squabbling politicians?
Speculation falls short of facts
When I tuned into the ABC’s ‘Insiders’ programme on Sunday morning, I’m quite sure I could have been watching a replay of virtually any edition from last year. The dominant topic of conversation for the nation’s political journalists is leadership — specifically, the leadership of the governing Labor party. Report after report after report has told us that Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s position is terminal; that members of her party are agitating for a change of leaders; and that her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, is set to back a stunning comeback.
It would be nice if there were even a skerrick of evidence that any of this is true.
But as Ben Eltham writes, while there are myriad articles and commentaries on the topic, no one has gone on the record to say that leadership change is imminent. True, you can’t take a politician at their word at the best of times — by the time they publicly admit that a change of leader is being considered, the said leader is already lying on the floor in a pool of blood. However, after nearly a year of speculation about Gillard’s prospects from unnamed sources, Eltham argues that there’s surely a point at which journalists should question the merit of continuing to publish the same stories without any proof of their validity. Fiction can often be more interesting than facts — but that’s no grounds for the media to substitute the former for the latter.
