Word: left
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...Germany, the Social Democrats are battered by both the hard left - Die Linke - and the soft left, Merkel's Christian Democrats. At least they have a good chance of returning to government as the CDU's junior partner. Merkel might find it too onerous to link up with the FDP, which favors more market and less state. (Read about Merkel in the 2009 TIME...
...There is no such hope on the horizon for Italy's, France's and Britain's moderate left. They will have to reinvent themselves and recruit a wider clientele, as the Democrats in the U.S. did in 1992 and again in 2008. The Democrats put together a coalition not just of declining and disadvantaged groups - industrial workers and African Americans - but - also of rising forces like Hispanics, Asians, and well-to-do whites in the expanding service sector. But strategic repositioning - offering both honey and condensed milk - is easier in the Anglo-American two-party system that doesn't throw...
...economic powerhouse. But as Germany prepares for an election just a few weeks before the 20th anniversary of that magical night in 1989, the fall of the Wall has become not just a metaphor for what Europe's most populous nation can do - but also of what it has left undone, of opportunities missed. (Read: "It Happened One Night...
...German politics is to avoid big changes, to hold the country steady as she goes. The electoral system supports such an impulse by producing consensus-driven coalition governments. It's pretty safe to assume that whatever coalition emerges from the election, it will not include Die Linke, a hard-left party formed by Western socialists and remnants of the G.D.R. communists. But Die Linke's likely decent performance in the eastern states also speaks to promise unfulfilled. Ossis - Easterners - vote differently from Wessis - Westerners - because they still perceive their interests as being different. Ossis earn less, produce less and have...
...status jobs - sweeping streets, cleaning toilets - are Easterners or immigrants. Yet there's also been a striking geographical reversal. The poorly paid and the unemployed were shunted into the high-rises of Wedding, in the west, as rich Berliners swooped on the elegant 19th century housing of Prenzlauer Berg, left to crumble in the East during the Cold War era, now lavishly restored. It's similar along the edge of the neighboring district of Mitte, the focus of the city's bar and restaurant culture. West Berlin was catnip to avant-garde artists, musicians and filmmakers from all over...