Germany, India style

In the end, neither the ruling centre-left coalition of Social Democrats SPD and Greens nor the conservative Christian Democrats CDU and their pro-business allies, the Free Democrats FDP, managed a majority. In the end, as Berlin8217;s daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel put it: the best thing you could say about this election is that it was a very short one.

Was this, possibly, an affirmative vote for the German social model, even if in a prolonged economic rut? Or, a message from the voter that radical reforms need to be less aloof, more carefully crafted and properly explained? For now, there are no persuasive answers, only a palpable gloom. The Wall Street Journal was one of the many to intone that 8216;8216;the 8216;sick man of Europe8217; is likely to remain bedridden 8230;8217;8217;

A paralysis of government, in a nation that was once a shining model of stable parliamentary democracy. Indian conditions, in Germany? In the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash recalled the German TV reporter8217;s response redolent with 8216;8216;unconscious ethnic condescension8217;8217; when the Indian restaurant owner in Berlin told her that politicians would ultimately sort it out, like it happens back home. Garton Ash riposted with the respective growth rates: India8217;s over the past 12 months was 7 per cent, Germany8217;s was 0.6 per cent.

India8217;s newly-famous economic dynamism has certainly recast some of the terms in which such uncharitable comparisons used to be made.

The 8216;ice storm8217;?

Democratic elections may not have settled the big debate about the size and role of government in Germany. But in America, a section of the commentariat still hopes that a passing storm will revive the discussion in that country.

This week, in Katrina8217;s wake, Newsweek passionately asked the government what it can do for 8216;8216;The Other America8217;8217;. With graphs and maps and photos, the magazine8217;s cover story by Jonathan Alter sought to sketch a 8216;8216;Portrait of the Poor8217;8217;. Poverty, wrote Alter, was growing in America after a decade of improvement in the 1990s. But in the last decade, it had disappeared from public view because 8216;8216;TV dislikes poor people, not personally but because their appearance is a downer8230; it causes viewers to hit the remote.8217;8217; Now, Katrina gives Bush 8216;8216;an only-Nixon-could-go-to-China opportunity8217;8217;, urged the magazine.

The Economist was equally certain that Katrina was an 8216;8216;ice storm8217;8217;. It explained, 8216;8216;as far as politics is concerned, Katrina is an ice storm, not a hurricane 8212; freezing politics in pre-existing patterns, rather than tossing things into the air8217;8217;. The magazine firmly squelched the speculation of a philosophical revolution ahead.

India, US aur Woh

The draft resolution drawn up in Vienna does not immediately refer Iran to the UN Security Council for what the US alleges is a secret programme to develop nuclear weapons. It was a short honeymoon, concluded the Economist, between India and the US.

That suggestion has played insistently in the US media while the IAEA board of governors met this week in Vienna. The New York Times drew it into a larger picture. Bush, post-Iraq, was being rebuffed, it said, by new 8216;8216;coalitions of the unwilling, pursuing their own interests or pushing back American goals around the world, issue by issue, in search of oil or regional influence8217;8217;. The paper said that many in the Bush administration find it 8216;8216;stunning8217;8217; that Pakistan, a declared 8216;8216;major non-NATO ally8217;8217; and India, 8216;8216;which just struck a deal with Washington on cooperation in civilian nuclear technology8217;8217;, are together on Iran, opposing Bush.

In the NYT, again, a word about the likely consequences: 8216;8216;Administration officials have warned India that if it fails to cooperate on Iran, the civilian nuclear energy agreement negotiated last summer could be rejected by Congress.8217;8217;

Poll said it

In Lebanon8217;s The Daily Star, columnist Rami G. Khourie quoted the findings of a nationwide random sample poll of adults by the independent Jordan Centre for Social Research 8212; public opinion polling is one of the 8216;8216;truly historic recent developments8217;8217; in the Arab world, wrote Khourie 8212; to state this: Arabs and Muslims love freedom and justice, and hate being denied it in their own societies.

The poll showed that living in conditions of political unfreedom has not subdued the people into resignation. Huge majorities favour electing local officials, keeping and expanding the quota for women in Parliament, keeping the one-person, one-vote system, ensuring equal work opportunities for men and women and using peaceful political participation and protest as the way of changing the government.

Sometimes you need the authority of the poll survey to say it.

This is a fortnightly column