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38 Europe The Economist January 2nd 2010
2 recovery phase of her second term, of
which tax cuts are a big part, to sustainability,
her label for various initiatives
ranging from promotion of green industry
to more investment in education. This last
includes more money for education in early
childhood, especially for immigrants,
and expanding university scholarships. A
greying population will also be encouraged
to save more for long-term care. There
are ambitious if vague plans to sharpen
competition in health care and shift some
of the costs from employers to the insured.
Yet the sustainability agenda may not
advance much more smoothly than the recovery
one. The FDP and CSU disagree
over health-care reforms. Ms Merkel has
yielded to a CSU demand for a subsidy to
mothers who stay at home, to go with an
expansion of state-nanced child-care.
Critics, including some in the FDP, worry
that stay-at-home children will be those
who most need to get out of the house.
More tax cuts are also promised for 2011,
which may also mean more internal
squabbling. Nobody knows how to reconcile
them not only with higher spending
on education but also with a new constitutional
obligation to cut the federal government’s
budget decit almost to zero by
2016. Wolfgang Schäuble, the steely nance
minister, promises to raise taxes or
cut other spending if need be.
He is unlikely to be more specic until
after a state election in North Rhine-Westphalia,
Germany’s most populous state, in
May. Its black-yellow coalition is up for reelection.
If it loses, the government would
surrender its majority in the upper-house,
the Bundesrat. But if it wins, that could give
Ms Merkel a new zing and greater room for
manoeuvre in Berlin. She has not veered
wholly o-courseyet. 7
Turkey and its generals
These cursed plots
ISTANBUL
The latest episodes in various alleged
conspiracies against the government
IT HAS been a rotten year for Turkey’s generals.
A series of leaked documents,
tapped phone calls and sometimes plain
accidents have exposed enough instances
of shenanigans and mischief to shake the
faith of even the most hard-core secularist.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister,
has spoken of historic changes. The days
when civilians took their orders from generals
in Turkey may be gone for good.
The most recent scandal concerns two
ocers from Turkey’s special forces who
were arrested just before Christmas on suspicion
of trying to assassinate Bulent
Keep out, investigators about
Arinc, the (overtly pious) former speaker
of parliament who is now a deputy prime
minister. One of them apparently tried to
eat the piece of paper on which Mr Arinc’s
address was written when they were arrested
near his Ankara home. The army’s
explanation that the ocers were spying
on a colleague after an anonymous tip-o
that he was passing secrets on to Mr Arinc
failed to impress prosecutors: several other
ocers were briey detained in connection
with the alleged murder attempt.
Against sti initial resistance, investigators
combed the special forces’ once-impregnable
Ankara headquarters over several
days for evidence of other plots to
destabilise the country and unseat Mr Erdogan’s
ruling Justice and Development
(AK) government. They may have found
some old dastardly plans. The Tactical Mobilisation
Group of the Special Forces
Command is believed, among other
things, to have orchestrated the provocations
that led to the mass exodus of ethnic
Greeks from Istanbul in 1955.
The latest operation marks perhaps the
rst time that civilian ocials have carried
out such an action against the army. Their
ability to do so was enshrined in a landmark
law, passed by the AK government in
June 2009, that allows men in uniform to
be tried in civilian courts. After some wobbling,
Mr Erdogan now seems ready to take
the army on. Many ocers, including several
retired generals, are languishing in jail
in connection with the so-called Ergenekon
trial of a group of would-be coup plotters.
With each new revelation that taints
the armed forces, ever more Turks fret that
the army may be undermining the state.
This week General Ilker Basbug, the
chief of the general sta, admitted that the
raids on the Special Forces Command
were carried out within the law. Despite
occasional growls about unnamed enemies
blackening the army’s name, General
Basbug seems quietly to be co-operating
with the government in its investigation.
Over the years the army, which has toppled
four governments since 1960, has
been among the biggest obstacles to a stable
democracy in Turkey. But the squabbling
politicians are little better. The main
opposition leader, Deniz Baykal, has at
times seemed even keener on a coup than
are the generals themselves. More than
seven years after AK was rst elected to
government, laws restricting free speech
remain. The most heartening aspect of the
recent scandals may be that so many were
revealed by ocers who exposed rogues
within their own ranks. 7
The Balkans and the European Union
Lightening gloom?
BELGRADE
A somewhat more optimistic start to the
new year in the western Balkans
ONLY a few months ago a deep gloom
hung over the western Balkans. Both
Croatia and Serbia had been stopped in
their separate tracks towards the European
Union. Foreign investment had dried up
during the recession. There was even
doom-laden talk of a renewed conict in
Bosnia. But now the atmosphere has generally
improved; maybe not everywhere,
but particularly so in Serbia.
Serbia had been blocked by the Dutch,
who wanted it to arrest Ratko Mladic, the
fugitive Bosnian Serb general indicted by
The Hague war-crimes tribunal on charges
of genocide. But, satised that the authorities
are genuinely looking for General
Mladic (a Serbian minister has just resigned
for failing to catch him), the Dutch
have for now lifted their veto. Just before
Christmas, Serbia’s government applied 1