Word: bundestag
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vice Chancellor since 1998. The street-fighting iconoclast who settled happily into a role at the peak of the German establishment, and whose international fame and personal popularity always seemed out of kilter with the modest size of his Green party, has retired from frontline politics. He left the Bundestag, the seat of parliament in central Berlin, with a wave at waiting reporters and a typically informal salutation: "Ciao, ragazzi." That exit marked the end not only of Fischer's ministerial career but of the government in which his party served as junior partners to the Social Democrats...
...renowned for their fondness for Cuban cigars and a comfortable lifestyle. "Governing is fun!" Schröder quipped at the end of his first term, sending shock waves though Germany's conservative establishment. "They all wore suits and ties to the office," Lindner said of his colleagues in the Bundestag. But "in their heads they saw themselves as from another culture." "There was a feeling that they were on the same wavelength as you, that we had something in common," Stefan Hermes, 25, a Berlin student wrote recently in a tribute in Der Tagesspiegel. "The '68ers changed politics." They certainly...
...parties - Schröder of the Social Democrats (spd) and Merkel of the Christian Democrats (cdu) - both claimed victory, but the real winners were the smaller parties. The Left Party, made up of disaffected ex-spd members and former communists, won 54 seats in the Bundestag, leaching support from the spd. The probusiness Free Democratic Party achieved a personal best with 61 seats. The outcome left Schröder and Merkel racing to cobble together a coalition - and most Germans wondering what it all means for the country. One interpretation is that the results are a sign of a deepening...
...Schröder's idea of calling an early election is illogical. He hopes it will end the gridlock created by the opposition-controlled Bundesrat (upper house) and the government-controlled Bundestag (lower house). But if his Social Democrats win, the situation is likely to remain the same. What he should do is form a grand coalition with the opposition Christian Democrats until the constitutional end of the Social Democrats' term, in 2006. That would help break the gridlock. Alfred Jung Gau-Bischofsheim, Germany...
DIED. Eugen Gerstenmaier, 79, West German political leader who helped establish democratic reforms after World War II and served as President of the Bundestag from 1954 to 1969; of a stroke; in Bonn. Imprisoned by the Nazis for his involvement in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, Gerstenmaier in the 1950s vigorously supported reconciliation with Israel and negotiated reparation payments to help ease bitter feelings...