BERLIN, May 14 (Reuters) – Angela Merkel is looking increasingly isolated at home and in Europe after what she called a “bitter, painful defeat” for her party in a weekend election in Germany’s most populous state.

The German chancellor said the vote did not change her view that fiscal rigour was the best path for Europe, although it highlighted resistance among Germans to enduring the kind of austerity she has forced on debt-laden southern nations.

Merkel will have to contend with a more aggressive opposition and less compliant allies with the setback for her Christian Democrats (CDU) in North Rhine-Westphalia on Sunday at the hands of the centre left Social Democrats (SPD).

And France’s new Socialist President Francois Hollande is expected to press for new steps to boost growth in Europe, where many countries are struggling with recession and rising unemployment, when he meets Merkel in Berlin for the first time on Tuesday.

“It does not affect the work we have to do in Europe,” Merkel said on Monday when asked about the impact of the NRW vote on her policies.

Nobody in her government opposed growth, she said, but the question was the impact of stimulus measures on the budget.

The CDU’s campaign for the state vote focused on cutting the state’s 180 billion euro debt mountain against Social Democrat plans for a slower approach to budget consolidation, but it was also a personality battle that the CDU lost.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany told Greece on Friday that staying in the euro zone was its own choice and that it must not stray from austerity if it expects to get international cash.

It also laid out its support for a European ‘growth pact’ in an attempt to deflect criticism that its insistence on austerity has exacerbated Athens’ debt woes.

In a speech to parliament, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Germany wanted to help Greece stay in the euro zone but made clear the EU-IMF loans needed to stave off bankruptcy hinged on continued spending cuts and tax hikes.

With a nod to France’s Socialist President-elect Francois Hollande and other European critics of Berlin’s drive for budget discipline, Westerwelle said Germany too wanted more growth but not if it meant more spending.

“The future of Greece in the euro zone lies in the hands of Greece,” Westerwelle told the Bundestag lower chamber.

“We want to help and we will help Greece, but Greece has to be ready to accept help. If Greece strays from the agreed reform path, then the payment of further aid tranches won’t be possible. Solidarity is not a one way street,” he said.

The leaders of Greece’s two mainstream pro-bailout parties were making a last-ditch bid on Friday to forge a new government after last Sunday’s election deprived them of a parliamentary majority and boosted radical anti-bailout parties.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s Social Democrats, emboldened by a victory for the left in France, attacked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s austerity drive in Europe on Wednesday, accusing her of boosting the far-right in Greece and raising the risk of it exiting the euro zone.

The opposition SPD has so far been reluctant to openly challenge Merkel’s insistence on fiscal discipline, which German voters broadly support, but events in France and Greece have opened up a flank they are keen to attack, especially ahead of an election this weekend in Germany’s most populous state.

SPD leaders hardened their opposition on Wednesday to Merkel’s plans to win quick parliamentary approval of tough new European budget rules, in what could develop into a major showdown between the chancellor and the party she ruled in coalition with between 2005 and 2009.

SPD chairman Sigmar Gabriel said in an interview to be published on Thursday that Merkel’s single-minded focus on balancing the books had increased the danger of chaos in Greece and of an eventual euro breakup.

“We are seeing the result of this policy in Greece where the radical right and enemies of Europe are entering parliament,” he told the weekly Die Zeit newspaper.

“Almost all economists have long shared (our) criticism of Merkel’s unimaginative imposition of austerity,” he added.

Greece on Wednesday moved closer to a second snap poll after a backlash against austerity bolstered extremist parties in Sunday’s election, robbing mainstream parties that support the terms of the country’s EU/IMF bailout of their parliamentary majority.

BERLIN, May 9 (Reuters) – German exports and imports both leapt to record monthly levels in March, bolstering hopes that Europe’s largest economy has escaped recession and highlighting the country’s resilience to the euro zone’s deepening debt crisis.

Wednesday’s data confirmed booming sales of high-quality German products to non-European markets in Asia and elsewhere but economists said the jump in imports also provided crumbs of comfort to Germany’s struggling peers in the euro zone.

Trade figures from France, the euro zone’s second biggest economy, showed its exports to Germany and other northern European countries increasing in March even as its sales to the crisis-stricken Mediterranean region tumbled.

German exports rose a seasonally adjusted 0.9 percent and imports were up 1.2 percent, the Federal Statistics Office data showed. The seasonally adjusted value of exports rose to 91.8 billion euros in March and imports to 78.1 billion euros, both record levels.

The seasonally-adjusted trade surplus remained flat at 13.7 billion euros from a revised 13.7 billion in February, beating the consensus forecast for 13.5 billion.

Coming on the heels of strong German industrial output and orders for March on Tuesday, the trade data underscored the success of the world’s second biggest exporter in tapping into fast-growing emerging markets as demand closer to home wilts.

Exports to non-EU countries jumped 11.2 percent in the first quarter but rose only 2.3 percent to the European Union, the data showed.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Britain urged Germany on Wednesday to beef up its contribution to European defence and security, in line with its economic might, as the United States focuses increasingly on the Asia-Pacific region.

British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said he did not expect Germany, Europe’s largest economy, to spend more money in a time of general belt-tightening but said there was ample scope to improve the effectiveness of its forces.

“Due to Germany’s historic reluctance to deploy and operate overseas, I think it is self-evident that there is still huge potential in German defence structures to deliver more usable firepower to the (NATO) alliance,” he told reporters.

Speaking after talks in Berlin with German Defence Minister Thomas de Maiziere, Hammond said Germany spent only a little less on defence in absolute terms than France and Britain but that the amount was much smaller in proportion to its economy.

“(It is about) a willingness to pick up the burdens that go with having a globally important economy… Germany recognising that it can’t continue to be the dominant economy in Europe without also significantly increasing its military capability.”

“This is not about the budget but about turning the forces it is already paying for into a more deployable, more usable force,” Hammond said.

The United States has long complained that most European allies, including Germany, fail to spend the two percent of economic output required by NATO on defence. In Europe, only Britain, France, Greece and Albania meet the target.

BERLIN (Reuters) – A prominent member of Germany’s Pirates, a new party now ranking third in opinion polls and set to enter parliament next year, has compared his group’s meteoric rise to that of Adolf Hitler before 1933, sparking protests across the political spectrum.

“The ascent of the Pirate Party is proceeding as swiftly as the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis) between 1928 and 1933,” Martin Delius told Monday’s edition of the weekly news magazine Spiegel. He then tweeted his remark.

The 29-year-old former software designer later apologised and withdrew from an election for the Pirates’ executive board, but resisted calls to quit his post in the Berlin city assembly.

The Pirates, whose platform is based on internet freedom and more direct participation in politics, came out of nowhere last September to win seats in the city government of the capital. They are due to hold a national conference this weekend.

An offshoot of a party founded in Sweden, they have tapped into a rich vein of discontent with established parties. Recent opinion polls suggest the Pirates have now overtaken the Greens to become the third biggest party with about 13 percent support, behind only Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling conservatives and the main opposition Social Democrats.

But the Pirates, who are mostly made up of young men with a keen interest in computing, lack tact and experience and have been accused by other parties of misogyny because of their lack of women members, as well as being devoid of political content.

Worse still, in a country whose history means there is no tolerance in mainstream politics of neo-Nazi sympathies or anti-Semitism, they have suffered the embarrassment of having two members outed as former members of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD).

BERLIN, April 19 (Reuters) – President Goodluck Jonathan insisted on Thursday Nigeria was safe for foreign investors, while calling for Western logistical help to combat the radical Islamist group Boko Haram.

The group, which wants Sharia (Islamic) law more widely applied across Africa’s most populous nation, has killed hundreds in gun and bomb attacks this year.

This week, the U.S. embassy in Nigeria warned its citizens that the group might be planning attacks on the capital Abuja.

“We are building up our security infrastructure… I can say we are on top of this problem,” Jonathan told a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin after talks that focused on trade, energy and security issues.

Asked what kind of assistance Germany could provide, he said: “In areas of training manpower and modern equipment… You need superior technology to fight terrorists and we think Germany and others can help us in such areas.”

Boko Haram usually targets police, authority figures and churches in the mostly Muslim north, although there have been a handful of deadly attacks in and around Abuja, which is home to ministries and foreign embassies.

Jonathan, who is a Christian from the southern, oil-producing Niger Delta, has been criticised by Nigerians and foreign diplomats for not curbing violence in the north.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass has attacked Israel as a threat to world peace and said it must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran, in a poem that one German newspaper branded “anti-Semitic”.

Grass, 84, a seasoned campaigner for left-wing causes and a critic of Western military interventions such as Iraq, also condemned German arms sales to Israel in his poem “What must be said”, published in several newspapers on Wednesday.

His words were criticized in Germany, where any strong condemnation of Israel is taboo because of the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. Grass’s own moral authority has never fully recovered from his 2006 admission that he once served in Hitler’s Waffen SS.

“Why do I say only now … that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace? Because that must be said which may already be too late to say tomorrow,” Grass wrote in the poem, published in German in Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

“Also because we – as Germans burdened enough – may become a subcontractor to a crime that is foreseeable,” he wrote, adding that Germany’s Nazi past and the Holocaust were no excuse for remaining silent now about Israel’s nuclear capability.

“I will not remain silent because I am weary of the West’s hypocrisy,” wrote Grass, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 for novels such as “The Tin Drum” chronicling the horrors of 20th century German history.

Israel is widely assumed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear weapons, which it neither confirms nor denies. These could be carried by Dolphin submarines it has bought from Germany.

BERLIN, March 28 (Reuters) – The German government dug in its heels on Wednesday over the timing of a parliamentary vote on a new fiscal discipline pact for Europe, saying it wanted the legislation approved by the summer despite rising calls from opposition parties for a delay.

The pact, which aims to enshrine German-style fiscal rules across 25 EU countries, requires a two-thirds majority in parliament to pass, meaning Chancellor Angela Merkel is dependent on the opposition.

The Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens, with an eye to national elections next year, want to complement the pact with new growth-boosting policies to help struggling countries such as Greece out of deep recession.

On Wednesday, the head of the SPD, Sigmar Gabriel, suggested that the vote on the fiscal pact could be delayed until September, when French lawmakers are expected to endorse it.

But Merkel’s centre-right coalition wants to complete ratification of the pact in tandem with Europe’s new bailout facility, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), in June and rejected talk of a delay.

“In the view of the government, the fiscal pact and the ESM will be decided before the summer break,” government spokesman Steffen Seibert told a regular news briefing.

The SPD’s refusal to tow Merkel’s line may herald a more assertive approach in the run-up to two key state elections in May and the federal vote next year, in which Merkel is widely expected to seek a third term.