Archive for January 19th, 2009
Hesse
I haven’t had much time to follow the shenanigans in Hesse but the resurrection of Roland Koch must surely be one of the biggest and most surprising comebacks in politics. Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine have portraits of the intelligent, ambitious and socially awkward Koch. A sort of German Jens Otto Krag (in terms of personality, not politics)?
One question could be why the Hessian SPD didn’t – wasn’t able to – dispose of Andrea Ypsilanti when it turned out that she was neither able to enter a coalition with the CDU or create the basis for a coalition with the Green Party and (informally) the Left Party. Perhaps the party had suffered too much unrest and lost too many leaders on a national basis since 2005 so an electoral defeat looked the better alternative compared to entering the 2009 campaign with not only a new leading candidate but also a new party leader in Hesse.