Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2009 7:54 pm Post subject: Brown should drop his Obama pretensions and look to Germany |
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We should take more notice of this woman at the top
Interesting OP. Why is the British press more obsessed with silly Sarah Palin than Angela Merkel?
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Angela Merkel may have been crowned the most powerful woman in the world � and for the fourth year in succession too, according to the latest Forbes magazine list � but you would never know it, or understand why it is so, from the derisory level of interest that the British political class and our media take in either her or the great country she leads.
Yesterday I did an internet search of British coverage of next month's German general election. You didn't know there was one? You are in good company, because the German election on 27 September has barely received any coverage at all in the UK yet. My search produced embarrassingly slim pickings.
With depressing inevitability, just about the only German campaign story to have yet broken through the British indifference was about the Berlin candidate whose unauthorised election posters have featured Merkel's cleavage. This tells us more about Britain than about Germany. If it were not for the fact that the German chancellor has breasts, election interest here would have been even more vestigial.
Given that the German economy is the most important in Europe, emerging out of recession in a way that Britain can only envy, and given also that Germany is by some distance the largest and most powerful nation in the EU, you might just think that a German election would attract more coverage. Please be clear. I'm not asking for nightly campaign reports on the BBC news in the run-up to the vote, or daily spreads in every supposedly serious paper, or batteries of maps and charts on every website � though personally I would be like a pig in muck if they were on offer. But I do demand a bit more collective recognition that what happens in Germany is more inherently important � and more relevant to our own concerns � than most of the British political class can be bothered to grasp.
It is impossible not to contrast the political class's collective mental black-out about Germany with its seemingly insatiable appetite for the affairs of the US. I need to cover my back here. I'm not saying America is uninteresting � I have bought yet another two books on US politics this week � or that we need to have less focus on America. The US is both compellingly interesting and the paramount nation in our world. I do say, however, that the British need to accept that there are other compellingly interesting nations as well as, and a lot closer to home than, America � Germany prominent among them.
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