What the MSM in the US isn't saying: German bailout voting

[c1ue]

http://translate.google.com/translat...6081%2C00.html

The lower house (Bundestag) only passed with a margin of 7 - effectively a party line vote by Merkel's coalition.

Now the impact of the recent Merkel defeat comes into focus: Merkel's coalition does not have a majority in the upper house (Bundesrat).

What will they do?

[we_are_toast]

Re: What the MSM in the US isn't saying: German bailout voting

Sorry C1ue, how did you come up with 7?

319 deputies voted by roll call vote yes, 73 no, 195 is contained. A total of 587 were present. The coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) has 332 votes, the limit for so-called Chancellor's majority is 312 votes. SPD and Greens had already announced that he will abstain from voting when the Left would agree with no.

[c1ue]

Re: What the MSM in the US isn't saying: German bailout voting

Sorry C1ue, how did you come up with 7?


319 deputies voted by roll call vote yes, 73 no, 195 is contained. A total of 587 were present. The coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) has 332 votes, the limit for so-called Chancellor's majority is 312 votes. SPD and Greens had already announced that he will abstain from voting when the Left would agree with no.

312 votes are needed to pass. The 'against' votes and the abstentions (contained!) are not relevant otherwise.

UPDATE:

Bundesrat has passed the Euro-TARP.

Likely reason is the that newly overturned Northland Rhine Westphalia (NSW) region's recent overturning of Merkel also had not the time to reform a government.

So again, a party line pass.

Echoes of US-TARP...

[c1ue]

Re: What the MSM in the US isn't saying: German bailout voting

Indeed, the SPD's failure to form a new coalition government for NSW indeed allowed the Merkel incumbent to maintain the CDU coalition majority in the Bundesrat...for now

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...696255,00.html

After elections earlier this month, Germany's Social Democrats had hoped to move into the governor's office in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. But once again, it seems the SPD cannot find enough partners to govern with. It is a pattern that Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU continues to benefit from.
It would be difficult to argue that this week has been a good one for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Financial markets have blasted her leadership as a result of the new Berlin ban on naked short selling. Her efforts to get G-20 states to agree on far-reaching financial system reform appear stalled. And on Friday, her handling of the euro crisis was slammed by allies from within her own political camp.


There may, however, be a bit of good news from an unexpected quarter. Coalition negotiations in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, are continuing following elections there earlier this month. Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) did poorly in the vote, to the point that her ruling coalition lost a crucial majority in Germany's upper legislative chamber, the Bundesrat.

But with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) seemingly unable to put together a coalition of their own to lead the state, the CDU may move back into the Düsseldorf governor's office after all. And should they succeed, the path the party takes will be an instructive one for the current state of German politics.
On Thursday, it became clear that Hannelore Kraft, the SPD leader in North Rhine-Westphalia, will not be forming left-leaning governing coalition. Her party, which received 34.5 percent of the vote on May 9, spent Thursday in meetings with the Green Party, which received 12.1 percent, and the far-left Left Party (5.6 percent). But on Thursday evening, Kraft announced that she would not be joining forces with the Left Party.
'Unworthy of Governing'
"Our impression has been confirmed that the Left Party, in its current manifestation, is unworthy of governing or of being part of a coalition," Kraft told reporters.
Her decision, though, once again highlights a problem facing the SPD these days. Recent years have seen the Left Party gain in popularity, stealing votes from the SPD as it has grown. The SPD's wariness of the Left Party is partly based on the fact that it is essentially the result of a merger between the successor party to the communist SED, which ruled East Germany before the Wall came down, and western German hard-left fringe groups. This distrust means that fashioning a center-left governing coalition in western German states has become an almost insurmountable challenge.
The arm's length at which Kraft is keeping the Left Party is well founded. Earlier this week, it was reported that Ulla Jelpke, a Left Party politician from North Rhine-Westphalia who is a member of parliament in Berlin, recently praised former East German spies for their "courageous contributions to peace." She also called the German secret service "an aggressive, imperialist service built up by ex-Nazis" and complained that its members had never been punished for their "operations against Socialism."
Furthermore, though the Left Party is the junior coalition partner in both Berlin and the eastern German state of Brandenburg (where the party recently ran into trouble when several members of state parliament were outed for being former members of the East German secret police organization, the Stasi), the SPD has gotten burned by flirting with the Left Party in western states in the recent past.
Gaining Ground
Following elections in the state of Hesse in early 2008, the SPD stumbled badly after it tried and failed to put together a governing coalition with the support of the Left Party. Ultimately, new elections had to be held and the SPD, partly because of its flirtation with a party widely viewed with suspicion, was soundly defeated by the CDU. The debacle also contributed to the removal of Kurt Beck as head of the national SPD. It is only in recent weeks, as Merkel's popularity has taken a dive, that the SPD has finally begun regaining ground on the CDU in national polls.
The bitter aftertaste from that episode was no doubt a major factor in the SPD's decision to turn its back on the Left Party on Thursday. But with the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP), the junior partner in Merkel's national coalition, having ruled out joining an SPD-led government in North Rhine-Westphalia, Kraft may now be forced to abandon her ambition of becoming the state's governor entirely.
As has so often happened in German elections in recent years, the only option left to create a stable majority in North Rhine-Westphalia is to form a coalition between the SPD and the CDU, a so-called grand coalition. And because the CDU received 6,000 votes more than the SPD did, that party, led by long-time Governor Jürgen Rüttgers, is demanding the governorship.
The demand has not been well received. Kraft points to the fact that the SPD and CDU have equal number of seats in parliament. Furthermore, she says, Rüttgers' CDU lost fully 10.2 percentage points against state elections in 2005 -- a clear indication, she argues, that voters wanted to see the back of Rüttgers.
'A Very Simple Rule'


The SPD has come up short with similar arguments in recent years. And with Kraft now seemingly out of coalition arguments, Merkel's party may not completely lose North Rhine-Westphalia after all.

"There is a very simple rule that we and the SPD have both accepted for the past 60 years: namely that the party with the most votes fills the position of governor," said Andreas Krautscheid, general secretary of the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia, told German radio on Friday. "Rüttgers is, as far as we are concerned, the next governor."
And the SPD? The party could once again find itself missing out on the big prize.