According to the Reuters report (Reuters: One man's newspaper is another man's birdcage liner), the people of Germany are calling for Arnold-like straight talk from their politicians. Of course Germany being Germany and Reuters being clueless, they couldn't avoid bringing up past ghosts.
"My first thought was 'Oh my God, not another Austrian emigrant -- the first one caused enough damage"' wrote Peter Boenisch, a former government spokesman and newspaper editor, in an analysis on Schwarzenegger for the tabloid Bild.
"But Germany urgently needs something Schwarzenegger-like: a can-do spirit, unconventional thinking, courage, strength and vision. We're facing the worst crisis since the war," he wrote.
Manfred Guellner, managing director of the Forsa polling institute, said there is widespread discontent with politicians.
"The dissatisfaction is growing every day," he told Reuters. "Germany and Europe are ripe for the same sort of phenomenon. People feel they're being messed with. They want simple language and simple remedies."
But I suppose this was in many ways what the Euro-philes feared most. A show of democracy and voter dissatisfaction at the most primal level. As Steven Den Beste put it...
Were California an independent nation, it would have the fifth largest economy on the planet. Its economy is larger than that of France, and its population is comparable to Canada (a member of the G7). Yesterday its citizens ousted their leader, and he meekly accepted the result. They selected a political outsider to become their new leader, and he will become their new leader. Almost anywhere else in the world a change like that would have required bloody revolution, if the citizens could rouse themselves enough from cynical apathy and resignation to even make the attempt. In France, about the only way this kind of voter unrest manifests is in things like the first-round protest votes which put Le Pen into the runoff for President against Chirac. Ultimately that made no difference, nor did French voters really expect that it would.
Yesterday's recall demonstrated that the citizens are more powerful than the governments of this nation, and that in the final reckoning our government serves us, but does not rule us. It is our government; it belongs to us. We do not belong to it.
I have lately been getting the feeling that the leaders of Europe and especially the EU politicians like the idea of democracy, as long as the peasents know their place in the grand scheme of things. Californias popular uprising seems to have facsinated the average European and the politicians are not happy with that. And as always, the world media will try to continue making this out as a circus atmosphere and continue trying to paint Arnold as inept and as "dumb" and even as a "cowboy". Where have I heard that litany of whining voices before?
