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As predicted yesterday, the nuclear disaster in Japan is having a profound impact on something as trivial as three state election campaigns in Germany, more than 9000 kilometres away. Roughly 70 per cent of the population believe that an incident on the scale of the Japanese catastrophe could happen in Germany, too. The Federal Government has declared a three-month “moratorium” on its controversial decision to extend the life-span of German nuclear plants, what ever that means. Meanwhile, they want to reconsider their position on the issue and to re-assess the status of the German plants. It makes you wonder if/why they have not assessed those plants in the first place.

Continue reading “Agenda Set, Japanese Style II” »

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It’s amazing: Just 36 hours after the horrible earth quake in Japan, 60000 people are demonstrating in Swabia – against nuclear energy. While we do not know whether the Japanese plants are actually in meltdown, for the German liberal-conservative coalition, this is certainly the Most Credible Accident.

Continue reading “Agenda Setting, Japanese Style” »

Colleagues Andrea Römmele and Thorsten Faas have set up a new blog that will cover the many German elections of 2009 (seats in the federal parliament, several state parliaments, local councils as well as the presidency are all up for grabs) and asked me to contribute. How could I resist them? “Wahlen nach Zahlen” (voting by numbers) is not yet public, but since it is already indexed by Google et al., why not spill the beans? There are already four posts (in German), and the list of (potential) contributors looks pretty good. And here is my inaugural post on right-wing extremism amongst German youngsters.