Conservative leader Angela Merkel took a last step toward becoming Germany's first female chancellor when she and other party officials signed a hard-won agreement to form a left-right coalition government.
A smiling Merkel put her signature on the blue-bound, 143-page document that spells out everything from an increase in value-added tax to targets for renewable energy supplies.
"It is our job is to make sure that the paper doesn't remain just paper, but that in the coming days, weeks and years we bring it to life," said Merkel, the head of the Christian Democratic Union.
Merkel joined with Edmund Stoiber, leader of the Christian Democrat's Bavaria-only sister party, the Christian Social Union, and Social Democratic Party chairman Matthias Platzeck in putting their names to the deal in a ceremony on Friday before hundreds of journalists and public officials in a parliamentary office building in Berlin.
The signing, largely a formality after congresses from each party voted overwhelmingly to support the agreement last week, is the final hurdle before parliament meets on Tuesday to elect 51-year-old Merkel as the country's eighth post-World War II chancellor -- and first woman to hold the office.
The former scientist would in addition be the first chancellor to have grown up under communism in the former East Germany.
The accord, titled "Together for Germany -- with courage and humanity," was concluded on Nov. 11 after weeks of negotiations between politicians who have spent the past few years criticizing each other's policies as partisan opponents.
The alliance of former rivals emerged after an inconclusive Sept. 18 election in which voters ousted the government of Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, but left neither side with a parliamentary majority to govern with their preferred small partners.
The new government, however, should be able to count on a crushing parliamentary majority, with the coalition partners holding 448 of the 614 seats in the lower house. The new government's difficulty will instead be in forging internal unity as it confronts the country's thorny issues.
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
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FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
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