The European Council on Foreign Relations

ECFR this week: 20th April 2012

Date: 20th April 2012  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

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We are keeping a close eye on France over the coming weekend, as that country votes in the first round of its presidential election. Ulrike Guerot has previewed the election from a German point of view in this blog post – ‘Should Merkel be scared of Hollande’ – asking whether German unease over a socialist victory is justified. In this article Thomas Klau argues that France deserves better than the campaign it has been given.

We’ll have more on the election as events unfold – and it sounds as though Thomas has already been kept very busy giving analysis to the French and European media.

Meanwhile, several other things have been keeping us busy:

• Our Madrid office recorded this Spanish language podcast with Ana Palacio, covering everything from the World Bank to the euro crisis and the performance of Mariano Rajoy.

• Sebastian Dullien wrote his latest € View blog post looking at current account imbalances across Europe, coming to both encouraging and worrying conclusions.

• We published this article by the Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, arguing that the imperative for closer cooperation within the euro zone should not lead to a two speed Europe.

• Following on from his paper on Jordan, Julien Barnes-Dacey writes that the visit of the Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah, to Brussels and Strasbourg, gives the EU another opportunity to push for reform in the Hashemite Kingdom.

• Jonas Parello-Plesner, who recently wrote this ECFR report about how Europe could help consolidate reform in Burma, co-authored this piece on how to extend Burma’s Spring with Lykke Friis.

• Jonas is currently working on another paper, with Hans Kundnani, that looks at the burgeoning relationship between China and Germany – both authors are available for media comment on Wen Jiabao’s visit to Germany, Poland, Sweden and Iceland (contact details are on our website).

• In the latest edition of China Analysis, we examine the debate over relations between China and Taiwan, after recent elections in the latter.

• In this blog post Nicu Popescu argues that the EU’s diplomatic service, the EEAS, is starting to show real signs that it may be growing into a genuinely effective body.

In other news both Sebastian Dullien’s € View blog posts and our ‘Ten Trends for 2012’ article were highly commended by the jury in Thomson Reuter’s ‘Reporting Europe’ competition.