David Frum : Chirac and Schroeder Get Theirs

National Review ^ | May 24, 2005 | David Frum

[quidnunc]

George Bush: re-elected. Tony Blair: re-elected. John Howard: re-elected. Meanwhile the two outstanding opponents of the Anglo-American anti-terror alliance, Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac, are in the pangs of the most humiliating defeat and repudiation in recent European politics. Who says there's no justice in the universe?

Schroeder's Social Democratic party this weekend suffered a crushing defeat in the state of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany's biggest and for many years a Social Democratic bastion. Chirac meanwhile is confronting a likely defeat in the May 29 referendum on the European Constitution.

Schroeder had won his first election in 1998 as a Tony Blair-like reformer and modernizer, who could haul Germany's troubled economy into the Information Age while preserving Germany's treasured social insurance system. Six years later, the number of unemployed has risen from four million to five million, and year after year the German economy has performed worse than any other that uses the Euro currency.

As the German economic situation has worsened, Schroeder has responded by careening wildly from one policy idea to another.

First he tried to rescue the German economy by rededicating Germany to European integration. In 2002, Schroeder presided over the abolition of the Deutschemark and its replacement by a new currency, the Euro.

When the change of currency failed to yield results, Schroeder tried some market-oriented reforms, proposing reductions in pensions and welfare in 2003.

-snip-

[GVnana]

Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who often described himself as the "Thomas Jefferson of the European Constitution." (With fine French hauteur, Giscard never felt enough interest in the U.S. Constitution, the world's oldest continuous written constitution, to notice that Thomas Jefferson had nothing to do with the document: He'd been serving as ambassador to France during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.)

LOL! Gotta love that!

[paulcissa]

"Chirac and Schroeder - Two pukes in the same toilet"

There...fixed it for ya!

[Plutarch]

Germany's treasured social insurance system.

Why is it always socialist measures that are deemed, and here by a conservative writer, as cherished, treasured, and popular?

[GVnana]

failed to.. recognize.. Charles de Montesquieu

Good point.

[Ditto]

Thomas Jefferson had nothing to do with the document: He'd been serving as ambassador to France during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787

and opposed it's ratification as well.

That is funny, but not as funny as the Euro Constitution itself which is 265 pages long without amendments while the 220 year-old US Constitution, with all the amendments, is only 11 pages.