Brussels blog round up 14 – 20 September: Germany heads to the polls, crisis in Syria, and who should you vote for in next year’s European elections?

EUROPP 2013-09-20

The EUROPP team take a look at the week in Brussels blogging

Across Europe

All eyes are on Germany this week, with the country holding federal elections on Sunday. Michael Miebach at Policy Network writes that despite the polls predicting a comfortable victory for Angela Merkel and the CDU/CSU, around a third of voters still remain undecided only a few days before the vote.

Reichstag, Credit: Luke Ratzlaff (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Elsewhere, Charlemagne’s notebook reviews last weekend’s elections in Bavaria, and the extremely poor performance of Angela Merkel’s coalition partner, the FDP, which received only 3.3 per cent of the vote. Ben Mason writes on the German Greens, who have also experienced a recent slump in support, arguing that a surprise coalition between the Greens and the CDU/CSU still remains a possibility.

Meanwhile, Open Europe raise the prospect that Germany’s anti-euro party, Alternative für Deutschland, could be polling much higher than previously thought. They argue that there may be a realistic chance the party could make the five per cent threshold needed to gain list seats in the Bundestag. On a lighter note, they also include a list of the ten ‘spiciest moments’ of the campaign.

The EU centre and the crisis

Michael Pettis at Strategic Europe assesses whether in the aftermath of the German elections the Eurozone will once again lapse into crisis. He argues that despite recent signs of recovery, the situation still remains highly volatile.

Looking ahead to the European Parliament elections in 2014, Encarna Hernández at More Europe assesses the significance of the elections, and whether they can rightly be called the most important in the EU’s history.

Meanwhile Javier Solana, writing at Project Syndicate, discusses the need to ‘pivot’ Europe’s economic interests toward Asia, noting that Europe has some key advantages over the United States in how it does business with Asian countries.

The European neighbourhood

With tensions still escalating in Syria, Louis René Beres at the OUP blog argues that the crisis is serving as a distraction from the real danger in the Middle East: Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. Taking a slightly different angle, Wyn Bowen at the Conversation looks at the exact process through which Syria’s chemical weapons will be destroyed, following Bashar al-Assad’s decision to sign the country up to the Chemical Weapons Convention last week.

On a broader topic, James Ker-Lindsay writes at E-International Relations on the political processes behind granting official recognition to contested states, such as Kosovo and South Ossetia.

And finally…

Jon Worth draws attention to the launch of ‘MyVote2014’, a new voting tool which calculates the party you should vote for in the 2014 European Parliament elections.

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Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.

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