Jacob Christensen

No iPhone but an iPod Touch. Clever little device, but maybe I should have gone for the Big Kahuna (64 GB)?

Assuming that the next government will be a coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP, we have an interesting situation because FDP is now much larger relative to the Union parties than between 1982 and 1998.

The situation is this:
CDU: 27,4% of the vote = 57% of votes for the coalition
CSU: 6,5% of the vote (living dangerously, are we?) = 13% of votes for the coalition
FDP: 14,5% of the vote = 30% of votes for the coalition

With 16 portfolios, this gives something like:
CDU: 9 or more likely 8 portfolios, allowing for the position of chancellor
CSU: 3
FDP: 5

Now if we look at the present portfolios we have (with my guesses included):

Chancellor – CDU
Minister of chancery – CDU
Foreign – FDP
Finance – CSU (question: Will the CSU like to lose Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg on Finance?)
Trade and Industry – FDP
Internal – CDU
Justice – FDP (alternatively: Internal: FDP, Justice: CDU)
Labour and Social Affairs – CDU
Consumer and Agriculture – CSU
Defence – CDU
Families, etc – CDU
Health – CSU (The reform of the sickness insurance is a bone of contention between the Union and FDP)
Transport and infrastructure – FDP
Environment – CDU
Education and research – FDP
Development – CDU

I don’t have Ian Budge and Hans Keman’s book on Parties and Democracy at hand, but I have used their arguments from memory. It will be fun to see how wrong or right I am.

Update: FAZ and Süddeutsche Zeitung speculate (in German).

1. Lowest turn-out since the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949.

2. Worst result for CDU/CSU since 1949.

3. Worst result for SPD in the history of the FRG.

4. Best result for all three minor parties since they were formed. Actually, “minor” may be the wrong description here.

5. Angela Merkel will be the first chancellor since Konrad Adenauer to survive a change in the composition in the federal government (save the representation of DSU for a short period in 1990-1991).

6. According to a snap poll for ARD, SPD’s main problem would be “economic competence”, but how does this square with the collapse of support for the SPD due to the Agenda 2010?

Historical results for the lazy.

Terence Kealey, chancellor of Buckingham University says that female students should be seen as a perk for (male) university lecturers. Comparing lecture halls to nightclubs adds an even more hilarious edge to the argument. The academic whorehouse, anybody?

Okay, I think we can understand a joke – and let me also note that beautiful women can in fact be intelligent. Potential female readers of this blog are welcome to inform me if handsome men can be equally intelligent.

But what about gay lecturers (I suspect that they should move into science and engineering), lesbians and, lest we forgot, ordinary heterosexual women (oh, wait: it’s science for them as well)? As they say on Facebook: It’s complicated.

I have a massive deadline in the too-near future, so blogging is very light this week and most likely also next week. Steam will be let out over at Twitter. And yes, it is 1.50 am.

Back in the days, the former Danish Foreign Minister and leader of the Liberal Party Uffe Ellemann-Jensen made much out of the fact that he was an avid angler while the former Conservative leader Bendt Bendtsen was known – some would say: best known – for his keen interest in hunting, which, by the way, could have sent his driver to jail, had the present arms legislation been in force.

Bendtsen’s hunting interest was not without a political aspect as hunting has a certain upper-class image in Denmark, so hunting is fitting for a Conservative leader, but a Social Democratic or Socialist leader might want to think twice before loading the rifles.

Sweden and Norway are different, which partly has to do with the absence of a traditional nobility in large parts of those countries. Sure, King Carl Gustaf and his entourage regularly enrage Swedish animal activists, but in Norrland hunting isn’t really linked with class. Farmers and workers go hunting and when a boy shoots his first bear it is headline news in local papers (no, really! And I strongly suspect that for Norrland boys shooting the first bear is one or two steps above having sex for the first time). If there is a problem, then it is that hunting is seen as a male (Swedes and gender!) and a rural sport. Recruiting new huntsmen is difficult and we risk that the moose and the bears take over Sweden in one or two generations.

I’m not quite sure what the situation is like in Norway, but will note that Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg could celebrate two great performances this week. Not only was he the first Norwegian PM to get reelected since 1993, he also shot his first reindeer this weekend.

By the way: The story may not be true, but it is funny, at least to Danes. When Jens Otto Krag was married with the Swedish author Birgit Tengroth, King Frederik IX presented the newlyweds with a buck he had shot with the words “it’s not meant as a hint”. (If my dictionary is to be believed, the other meaning of the Danish “buk” translates into English “goat”)

In lieu of a comment on Pia Kjærsgaard’s speech on the Danish People’s Party conference (okay, okay: When you consider the party’s approach to the environment – they are somewhat to the right of George W. Bush – then I have to say that all of Kjærsgaard’s talk about the true Danish nature and the faux camping site set up at the convention is as good a demonstration of DF’s chutzpah as anything¹).

And now for something completely different: My continued experiments with digital terrestial television. As mentioned in a previous post, I placed my order with Boxer on Wednesday and, boy were they fast. I received the decoder – or rather: Notification that I could pick up the decoder – on Friday. So off I went earlier today to pick up the parcel and see how things would work out.

Finding a space for the decoder (which technically speaking is a PVR, in case you are curious) and connecting it to the TV set was the easy bit.

And then the problems began. My old mpeg2-decoder generally picks up the signals without major problems. Occasionally, I have had to adjust the aereal (thanks, Chris! You Brits really have a way with letters…) for reasons not immediately obvious, but the new decoder looked completely dead. Okay, too bad. You have the right to return stuff.

Then accidents happened and so far, my reception problem has been solved. To make a long story short: If I turn the aereal and don’t power it, the signal is good and I can pick up the present five digital channels nicely. Actually, I suspect that the picture on the TV set is better because I now use a HDMI instead of a SCART cable to connect the decoder with the TV set. Recording also works without problems.

On the downside, the teletext on the TV set doesn’t work. I can access teletext via the decoder but for mysterious reasons, it does not hold a cache or memory of pages. Actually, it’s a bit like going back to the first TV set I bought. Twenty-five years of technology gone poof.

The next question is how reception of the new mpeg4 free-to-air and decoded channels will work where I live. Denmark has opted for the big bang transition here, so there is no way of telling before November.

1. A brief illustration of chutzpah: A boy, having just been convicted of murdering his parents, begs the judge for leniency because he is an orphan. [↩]

No politics today (not that the times don’t scream for satire), but I thought I would announce that I have made a decision in the TV subscription question. I decided to go for a Boxer subscription and throw in a PVR in the deal for good measure.

As it is, it is a bit of an experiment. My reception of the present digital signal is pretty much okay and I’m happy with the quality of pictures and sound, but there may be an issue with (encrypted) programmes that are broadcast on higher frequencies. In November, we will know much more.

Anyway, I won’t cheat you completely: Here’s a – completely unrelated – bit of the wonderful Kate Bush. Not Experiment IV (with the chorus “It’s a mistake that we’re making” – those Conservatives seem to pop up everywhere…) but King of the Mountain:

I haven’t followed the campaign in any detail so these are scattered observations:

1. This is the first time since 1993 that a Norwegian government has survived a general election. 86 seats (of 169) should be a comfortable majority.

2. Turn-out was down from 77,4 to 73,5 per cent. Norway and Finland generally have lower levels of turn-out than Denmark and Sweden.

3. Opinion polls seem to have missed a lot of developments: The Conservatives and the Social Democrats did better than expected, the Progress Party and the Socialists performed worse. Support for the Liberals took a dive and the party lost 8 out of 10 MPs.

4. And re: The Progress Party. It is still by far the largest right-wing party in Norway with 22,9 per cent of the vote against the Conservatives’ 17,2, but it may have reached the limits of its electoral capacities.

Official result page.

Gayl Murphy watches the candidates’ debate (without understanding a word of German) on behalf of Die Zeit:

Verstehen Sie es nun also bitte nicht als Ausdruck meiner Geringschätzung, aber die Debatte, die ich da gestern von den USA aus im Internet verfolgt habe, sah eher so aus, als würden zwei Autoren auf einer Bibliothekars-Tagung um einen Literaturpreis wetteifern, als dass zwei altgediente Politiker um das wichtigste politische Amt im Land kämpfen.

More on campaign styles in Germany.