Politics

Yesterday was the big German parliamentary decision on aid for Cyprus, and the burning question was whether Chancellor Angela Merkel would hold her coalition together or, as in past Bundestag crisis-management moments, rely on opposition votes to pass the package....

Margaret Thatcher spoke about Europe mainly in terms of what she didn’t want: neither a “narrow-minded, inward-looking club” that is “ossified by endless regulation,” nor “an institutional device to be constantly modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual...

Bailed-out and bankingly challenged Cyprus is a “unique case,” the entire European policy establishment tells us. One under-reported way in which Cyprus is unique is that chatter about eventually leaving the euro isn’t limited to the fringes. It’s part of...

The euro area has just come as close as it ever has to learning that what the European Central Bank gives, it can also take away. Before euro-area ministers agreed a last-ditch bailout in the small hours of Monday morning,...

Draft rules to scale back banker bonuses were enough to prompt a public spat yesterday between Deutsche Bank co-Chief Executive Officer Juergen Fitschen and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble as the two men sat side-by-side on a panel discussing finance...

The revolution begins in Valletta — that’s the European center-left’s rallying cry after a longtime conservative bastion, Malta, fell to the Labour Party over the weekend. Never mind that with growth last year of 1 percent and a jobless rate...

For once, Mario Monti had a sympathetic audience — dozens of European officials he mingled with and presided over during a 10-year European Commission career that, by the looks of it, he will remember more fondly than the 15 months...

The Italian elections were his to lose, and Democratic Party leader Pier Luigi Bersani did a really good job of almost doing just that. Bersani, a former communist who backed Prime Minister Mario Monti’s technical government, squandered a 15-point poll...

Peer Steinbrueck made a German campaign cameo in Brussels today and left everyone wondering how he would manage the crisis differently than the woman he is trying to oust in next fall’s German federal election, Chancellor Angela Merkel. Steinbrueck made...

Pope Benedict XVI’s surprise resignation and the popular San Remo music festival may have clipped some of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s momentum in the campaign for Italy’s end-of-month election amid a blackout on opinion polls. Pope Benedict’s Feb. 11...