For years Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and outgoing head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, has warned the United States and other Western powers against jumping to conclusions about Iran’s nuclear program. While Washington, Israel and their allies see increasing indications that Tehran’s secretive nuclear program is aimed at developing weapons, ElBaradei told an audience of academics, politicians and diplomats at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City that his agency has “no concrete evidence” that Tehran is pursuing an atom bomb.

So is Iran’s nuclear program intended solely for lighting light bulbs in the world’s fourth biggest oil producer as Tehran insists? According to ElBaradei, its purpose is something completely different.

“Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end, it wants to be recognized as a regional power,” the outspoken Egyptian lawyer and diplomat said. “They believe that the nuclear know-how brings prestige, brings power, and they would like to see the U.S. engaging them. Unfortunately that holds some truth. Iran has been taken seriously since they have developed their program.”

In other words: Don’t mess with us. We can enrich uranium.

U.N. officials who know ElBaradei have told Reuters for years that the IAEA director-general is convinced that Iran is pursuing what is often called the “break-out option” — the capability to produce nuclear weapons should it ever decide it needed them. He is not convinced, they say, that Iran has taken a decision to follow North Korea’s example and build an actual weapon.

But Western diplomats who follow the Iranian issue say that it is doubtful Iran would choose to hover on the threshold of the nuclear club without entering the door. A more likely scenario, they argue, is that the Islamic Republic would secure its place at the table of world powers by developing and possibly even testing a nuclear device. They also say the impact on the Middle East would be the same whether Iran has the “break-out option” in the drawer or a live bomb in its basement. In either case the result would be a nuclear weapons race across the already unstable Middle East.

ElBaradei has spent six of his 12 years at the helm of the IAEA neogotiating with Iran to get access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, many of which were hidden from U.N. inspectors for decades before their existence was revealed by Iranian exiles or Western intelligence agencies.

The IAEA chief chastised the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush and the European Union’s three biggest powers — Britain, France and Germany — for failing to seize what he said was an opportunity they had years ago to persuade the Iranians to suspend their uranium enrichment program.

“They were ready to stop at an R&D (research and development) level … that could have not have created any concern for the international community,” he said.

Making matters worse, the European and U.S. demands that Iran cease all enrichment activity before negotiations on a package of economic and political incentives could begin was among the conditions imposed on Tehran that ElBaradei described as “impossible to accept.”

Western diplomats, however, have said that it would be naive to think that the Iranians were ever truly prepared to suspend their enrichment program after the EU trio launched negotiations with Tehran in the fall of 2003. They have defied three rounds of U.N. sanctions for refusing to stop enriching.  Bush’s successor Barack Obama has reversed the U.S. position by offering to engage Iran’s leaders, but they have reacted coolly so far.

ElBaradei, who opposed the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, said Bush’s refusal to negotiate directly with North Korea and Iran was a colossal policy failure that had created “a total mess.” (North Korea tested nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.)

ElBaradei added that if Israel, which neither confirms nor denies having a sizable nuclear arsenal of its own, follows through on threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities it would backfire. He said Tehran would simply launch a “crash course” to get an atom bomb and “would turn the Middle East into a ball of fire.”

Want to know how it feels to be George Mitchell, President Obama's special envoy to the Middle East? Try getting from Jerusalem to Ramallah on a typical weekday at the rush hour. And experience stalemate, frustration, competitive selfishness, blind fury and an absence of movement that even the most stubborn and blinkered of West Bank bus drivers might see as a metaphor for the peace process that is going nowhere fast right now.

It took me 2 full hours to drive the 100 metres (yards) or so from the Israeli military checkpoint in the West Bank barrier around Jerusalem to reach the relatively open main street through Qalandiya refugee camp, the gateway to Ramallah. The reason? Well, at its simplest it's traffic chaos caused by anarchy, a vacuum of law and order. Look further, as with much else in the Middle East, and you get a conflicting and contrasting range of explanations.

Traffic coming through the Israeli checkpoint must merge with that arriving on a main road that follows the West Bank barrier on the Palestinian side. Just beyond the checkpoint, where these two flows merge, they must also cross with traffic going in the opposite direction, from Ramallah, either into the checkpoint or along the barrier. The snag? No traffic lights, no traffic police, no nothing (barely smooth tarmac and certainly no painted junction lines) at the crossroads. The result? Check out the picture above.

Why does it happen? For many Palestinians, the cause as in so many other respects is Israel. Take away the checkpoint and the Jewish settlements protected by further military posts and traffic would circulate much more easily. For Israelis, the checkpoints, barrier and so on are the result of Palestinian violence during the Intifada of the first part of this decade. Bad traffic is the price ordinary Palestinians are paying. Dig further, and each side will come up with a long line of causes and counter-causes going back many decades, if not millennia. Stuck in a jam at Qalandiya checkpoint, you have time to muse on all of them, believe me.

There are a few nuances. Palestinians point out that the violence of the Intifada has died away. But Israelis note that a security guard was wounded in a stabbing at Qalandiya only on Sunday.  As I sat imprisoned in a car on Monday, boys aged 14 or less took advantage of the inability of Israeli jeeps to drive out and grab them to lob stones into the checkpoint.  Palestinians complain that Israeli troops have authority over the roads around the checkpoint under the Olso accords of the 1990s, but in fact show little or no interest in managing traffic beyond the confines of the checkpoints search bays. Palestinians argue that they manage traffic pretty well in Ramallah itself. A minor economic upswing in the past few months in the West Bank, grudgingly attributed at least in part to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policy of easing security roadblocks, seems to have contributed to bringing more cars onto the roads. Traffic lights and traffic cops keep reasonable order in the Palestinian cities. But out in the no man's land close to the Israeli barrier, they are not allowed to operate.

What else can you learn sitting tight for a couple of hours breathing other people's exhaust fumes? 1. Yasser Arafat is still popular, as attested to by some nifty graffiti art on the wall itself. 2. It's an ill wind that blows no good in the Middle East - enterprising young men were hawking gum, cigarettes and sunglasses with rather more success than usual to the stranded motorists. 3. Brutally selfish pig-headedness seems to pay, after a fashion, in these parts. The guys with the baddest attitude and least regard for their fellow man or woman, seem to get to the front of the queue, and no one seems able to stop them.

That's a pretty sad lesson to take away, but one that Mr Mitchell may be becoming familiar with as he struggles to coax anything looking like compromise from any of his interlocutors. However, if one can find any positives, perhaps it is this. I did eventually get across the crossroads, even if it did take a big chunk of my afternoon. And I did so quicker than I might have done if total anarchy had prevailed. For, in time, at least, in this small, ugly, scarred spot of the Middle East, ordinary people did come to the rescue. Groups of men from the refugee camp, with no obvious authority but the odd chequered headscarf, leather jacket or a don't-mess-with-me moustache, started directing the traffic, blocking everything from cheeky Suzukis to belching 16-wheelers with their bodies and forcing apart the gridlocked mess to start the process of clearing the backlog. A few thousand years after Moses and the Red Sea, another miracle in the Middle East. Mr Mitchell may have to hope for one. But at least the good folk of Qalandiya camp showed that, just maybe, such things really can happen around here.

I wouldn't bet on it. But thanks anyway, guys.

The surprise award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama just nine months into his presidency on Friday may put pressure on him to visit a 190-nation meeting on a new U.N. climate treaty in Copenhagen.

The prize will be handed over in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of the award's founder Alfred Nobel, and the U.N. talks will run in Copenhagen from Dec. 7-18. It takes about an hour to fly between the two Scandinavian capitals.

And the Norwegian Nobel Committee heaped praise on Obama, including his climate policies, in its citation.

"Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting," the secretive five-member committee said.

 Some Norwegian politicians said they hoped the award would stiffen Obama's resolve to push the U.S. Senate to pass early legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the years to 2020.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush dropped efforts to get the Senate to ratify the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, a pact adopted by all other industrialised nations for curbing greenhouse gas emissions until 2012. Obama wants the United States to have a bigger role in a new global treaty to be agreed in Copenhagen.

Environmental group Greenpeace said Obama should visit Copenhagen.

"In accepting the award in Oslo on 10th December President Obama has an incredible opportunity, and responsibility, to then travel to the UN Copenhagen Climate Summit to help avert climate chaos and conflict," Greenpeace's International Executive Director Gerd Leipold said in a statement.

And Denmark's Climate Minister Connie Hedegaard also expressed hopes that Obama would come to Copenhagen: "It's hard to imagine that he will be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Dec. 10th and then come empty-handed to Copenhagen a week later." 

And what a difference a week makes -- the award of one of the world's top accolades in Oslo is a stunning turnaround just a week after Obama went to Copenhagen and suffered a defeat by unsuccessfully lobbying for Chicago to get the 2016 Olympic Games.

But a problem is that the first week of the Copenhagen talks will be run only by senior government bureaucrats -- environment ministers from around the world are due to turn up only from Dec. 16 to decide on a new pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. 

So, to have the most impact on the negotiations, should Obama go for a few days' vacation skiing in Scandinavia after collecting the Nobel Prize before travelling to Copenhagen?

(Picture credits: top - U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and first lady Michelle Obama arrive for an event to look at the stars with local middle school students and astronomers from across the country on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, October 7, 2009. REUTERS/Jim Young. Right: The Nobel Peace Prize medal awarded to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu)

U.S. President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said Obama had been awarded the prize for his calls to reduce the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons and work towards restarting the stalled Middle East peace process.

The committee praised Obama for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

“Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

The laureate wins a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish crowns (1.4 million dollars or 878,000 pounds).

Obama was one of a record 205 nominees for this year’s prize and the decision has come as a surprise to many. Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, had been tipped as one of the favourites.

Despite his ambitious international agenda, Obama is yet to make a significant breakthrough in the Middle East or effectively deal with the threat of Iran’s nuclear programme and his country is currently fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Has Obama done enough to justify winning the Nobel Peace Prize? If not, who do you think should have won?

President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain have deliberately raised the stakes in the confrontation over Iran's nuclear programme by dramatising the disclosure that it is building a second uranium enrichment plant. Their shoulder-to-shoulder statements of resolve, less than a week before Iran opens talks with six major powers in Geneva, raised more questions than they answer.

It turns out that the United States has known for a long time (how long?) that Iran had been building the still incomplete plant near Qom. Did it share that intelligence with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, and if not, why not? Why did it wait until now, in the middle of a G20 summit in Pittsburgh, to make the announcement -- after Iran had notified the International Atomic Energy Authority of the plant's existence on Monday, after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had delivered a defiant speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday and after the Security Council had adopted a unanimous resolution calling for an end to the spread of nuclear weapons on Thursday?

Is this all part of Obama's choreography to  build international pressure on Iran by getting Russia, in return for the dropping of plans to put a U.S. missile shield in Poland the Czech Republic, to threaten more sanctions against Tehran? A U.S. official says Obama shared the intelligence with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev at the United Nations this week and China had only just been informed. Did Obama try and fail to get Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao -- both in Pittsburgh -- to join the three Western leaders on the podium? Or was his hand forced on timing by the fact that the New York Times had got wind of the Iranian nuclear plant and was set to publish the news on Friday?

The division of labour between Obama, Sarkozy and Brown was striking. The U.S. president sounded stern but his tone was measured. He stressed his commitment to dialogue and negotiation with Iran and to Tehran's right to peaceful nuclear energy. He did not mention sanctions, let alone the possibility of military action. It fell to the Europeans to inject a tone of menace.

Sarkozy accused Iran of defying the international community and taking the world on a dangerous path, and said that unless Tehran changed course by December, there would be tougher sanctions. Brown charged the Islamic Republic with deception and said the international community had no choice but "to draw a line in the sand", and that he did not rule out anything although sanctions were the preferred route. 

Will the latest disclosure on what Iran insists is a peaceful nuclear programme persuade Russia to renounce the sale of advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Tehran? Will it persuade China, which reaffirmed its scepticism about more sanctions this week and has begun supplying gasoline to Iran, to change its mind? The West sees Iran's dependency on imported fuel as a key vulnerability.

Friday's dramatic announcement was a clear effort to appeal to the world court of public opinion and maximise pressure on Tehran before the Oct. 1 talks, but there is no sign that the Islamic Republic's leaders are even considering yielding on their nuclear ambitions. On the contrary, they seem convinced that the nuclear standoff will enable them to patch over deep internal divisions over the disputed June presidential election by playing the patriotic card.

U.S. President Barack Obama says he wants a world without nuclear weapons. But will that ever happen?
    
Obama showed he’s serious this week. He chaired a historic summit meeting of the U.N. Security Council which unanimously passed a U.S.-drafted resolution that envisages “a world without nuclear weapons”.
    
It was the first time a U.S. president chaired a meeting of the Security Council since it was established in 1946.
 
John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, an advocacy group, identified serious weaknesses in the resolution, including the absence of mandatory disarmament steps for the world’s five official nuclear powers — the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia.
    
Some diplomats from countries without nuclear weapons said the lack of mandatory disarmament moves is not just a weakness, but a loophole the five big powers — which have permanent seats and vetoes on the Security Council — deliberately inserted into the resolution so that they wouldn’t have to scrap their beloved nuclear arsenals.
 
An official from one of the five big powers appeared to confirm this in an “off-record” email to Reuters explaining the language in the resolution: “I would underline that creating the conditions for a world free of nuclear weapons is not the same as calling for a world free of nuclear weapons.” He added that “the spirit of the resolution is much more about non-proliferation than disarmament.”
    
A diplomat and disarmament expert from a European country with no nuclear weapons said this was typical of the “cynicism” of some permanent Security Council members. He added that the U.S. delegation had made very clear that the use of the word “disarmament” meant total nuclear disarmament — perhaps not today, but someday. 
    
China’s President Hu Jintao said China was not planning to get rid of its nuclear arsenal anytime soon. So did French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
    
The resolution didn’t name Iran and North Korea. However, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Sarkozy filled in the blanks and called for tougher sanctions against Iran for defying U.N. demands to halt sensitive nuclear work.
 
The resolution didn’t mention Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea, the four others known or assumed to have nuclear weapons. But it did politely ask “other states” to sign the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and get rid of their atom bombs.
 
Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was the only leader of a council member state that stayed away from the meeting. Several council diplomats expressed relief at his absence, saying they had been afraid the long-winded Gaddafi would have exceeded the five-minute limit for statements.

(Photos by Mike Segar/REUTERS)

As the U.S. Congress roils over use of the word “liar” against President Barack Obama, Australia
is in uproar over the prime minister’s use of the F-word.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, once a diplomat, was this week forced to defend his “robust” language used against a group of unhappy junior lawmakers in his own centre-left Labor Party while slashing back their official pay entitlements.

“I don’t care what you f**kers think!” Rudd told the backbench group, which included three women, in a private conversation later leaked widely to newspapers.

Rudd, talking to reporters ahead of a meeting of G-20 group leaders in the United States, said he had only been making his point clear to members of his own union-based party.

“I think it’s fair to say that consistent with the traditions of the Australian Labor Party, we’re given to robust conversations,” he said. “I make no apology for either the content of my conversation or the robustness with which I expressed my views.”

Unlike in Washington, where standards of political behaviour are closely entwined with ideas of respect, Australia’s parliament functions with a rough-and-tumble unthinkable in the
United States, but which can still raise eyebrows.

Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, was notorious for the parliamentary vitriol he unleashed, famously describing the upper house Senate, now frustrating Rudd’s climate change agenda, as “unrepresentative swill”.

Keating, once dubbed the “lizard of Oz” by British tabloids after touching the Queen, lashed various opponents as “a shiver waiting for a spine”, “brain-damaged” or “a dead carcass, swinging in the breeze”.

The Europhile leader sparked an international incident when he called then-Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad “recalcitrant”, refusing to apologise even when faced with trade sanctions.

But even Keating could not compete with the brief but spectacular opposition leadership of Labor’s Mark Latham, who called the ruling conservative government of John Howard a “conga
line of suckholes” when it came to close ally the United States.

In a shock jibe aimed at Howard’s immigration minister Philip Ruddock, a member of rights group Amnesty International but tough enforcer of border protection laws, the fiery Latham sparked
outrage shouting “Hand in your badge, Adolf”.

Political watchers are divided over whether Rudd’s outburst will impact on his near-record opinion survey approval levels ahead of elections due next year.

Newspaper cartoons showed Rudd as a “F bomb” being dropped on colleagues, while the country’s Families Association said his comments were reprehensible, accusing him of hypocrisy running
counter to his preferred “angelic” image.

But in a country largely innoculated against blunt language, despite the increasing sophistication of its cities, most agree it won’t.

“The truth is that politics, whether it’s on our side or the other side, is a robust business where exchanges of views can sometimes be laced with less than polite descriptions. That’s life,” said Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.

What do you think? Should politicians try to maintain a higher standard of behaviour, or is it okay to slip into the language of the street?

By Tim Gaynor

President Barack Obama’s signature battle to overhaul the United States’ $2.5 trillion healthcare industry to extend coverage and lower costs for Americans has met fierce opposition from Republicans.

But a move by Democrat backers to exclude 12 million illegal immigrants from buying health coverage and restrict the participation of authorized migrants has drawn the ire of U.S. Hispanics — a bloc that overwhelmingly turned out to vote for Obama in last year’s election.

Hispanic lawmakers and activists are riled by the bill pushed in the U.S. Senate by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, which denies illegal immigrants the option to buy health insurance and places a five-year wait period on legal immigrants before they can access health benefits.

“When we effectively bar the immigrant community from buying private insurance, we force them further into the shadows of our society, and we relegate them to emergency room care ­at the highest cost to taxpayers,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, told a conference call with reporters this week.

Obama has so far been popular with U.S. Hispanics. His backing for comprehensive immigration reform, which seeks to allow millions of illegal immigrants in good standing a chance to pay fines and become citizens, helped win him two-thirds of the Latino vote in last November’s election.

But activists say the push to exclude undocumented workers from paying for healthcare — even for their U.S. born children — is testing support for Obama among Latinos, who make up 15 percent of the population and 9 percent of the electorate.

“The Latino vote was based on promises that a new administration would lead us out of the darkness and finally bring about immigration reform,” said Lorena Colin of the Mexican American Coalition for Immigration Reform, a Chicago-based pro-immigrant grassroots group.

“Instead, we are seeing the administration allowing undocumented immigrants to become scapegoats and the targets of widespread derision and hate in the healthcare debate,” she added.

Reverend Luis Cortés, Jr., meanwhile, the president of a prominent Hispanic evangelical network Esperanza said he was disillusioned with the Democrats, and warned that Hispanics voters would punish lawmakers who denied immigrants care in the midterm Congressional elections in 2010.

“All we can do at this point is look at each local election, one by one, and punish those individuals-regardless of their party-who deny rights to legal immigrants and children, as well as the poorest in our nation, the undocumented,” he said.

After just six weeks as NATO secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen has his first crisis. The alliance may be slowly bleeding in an intractable war in Afghanistan, but the immediate cause is the U.S. administration's decision to shelve a planned missile shield due to have been built in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The shield, energetically promoted by former President George W. Bush, was designed to intercept a small number of missiles fired by Iran or some other "rogue state". But Russia saw it as a threat to its own nuclear deterrent and NATO's new east European members saw it as a useful deterrent against Russian bullying, by putting U.S. strategic assets on their soil.

President Barack Obama's decision to drop plans to install it on Polish and Czech territory leaves those former Soviet satellites feeling betrayed -- because they expended political capital to win parliamentary support -- and more exposed to a resurgent Russia, especially after its use of force against Georgia last year.

Obama's move is clearly part of a warming of U.S. relations with Moscow from which Washington hopes to gain help in return on supply routes to Afghanistan, pressure on Iran to rein in its nuclear programme, and an agreement on radical cuts in nuclear arsenals. But this "reset" of U.S.-Russian relations has only exacerbated the rift within NATO over Russia.

The three Baltic states and Poland were particularly critical of NATO's low-key response to Moscow's military action in Georgia. Some said the refusal of west European allies led by Germany and France to agree at a NATO summit last year to putting Georgia and Ukraine on a path to NATO membership emboldened the Kremlin to act. President Dimitry Medvedev's harsh attack on Ukraine's leader in an open letter last month fanned their fears of Russian bullying of its neighbours.

East European officials cite Moscow's playing with the gas taps and trade disputes, and its apparent determination to keep its Black Sea fleet in the Crimean port of Odessa Sevastopol beyond a 2017 deadline agreed with Ukraine as part of a strategy of tension intended to reverse the "colour revolutions" in Kiev and Tbilisi, and bring other former Soviet republics to heel.

All that makes it a particularly awkward moment for Rasmussen to deliver his inaugural keynote speech on NATO-Russia relations on Friday in Brussels. The former Danish prime minister has put a few noses out of joint in his first weeks by making clear he intends to run NATO in a more results-oriented way, leaving less room and time for ambassadors in the North Atlantic Council to debate any idea to a standstill. He has set strict time-limits on council meetings, streamlined flabby agendas and outsourced the drafting of a new Strategic Concept to a group of 12 experts led by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on which not all allies are represented.

His personal management style and high media profile (monthly news conferences, a blog and Twitter chatter) has sharpened the traditional Kabuki dance in which a new boss and the old board flex their muscles at each other in mutual suspicion, insiders say. It is the first time a former prime minister, used to running a government and to talking to fellow national leaders, has been picked for the job. Previous secretaries-general were former defence or foreign ministers, more accustomed to being servants of the member nations.

Both camps within NATO (which privately brand each other the "Friends of Russia", and the "Cold Warriors") will be watching every word of Rasmussen's Russia speech to ensure he does not depart from alliance policy. The fact is that NATO has been unable to agree on an overall policy towards Russia since the 1990s, when it declared that Moscow was no longer an adversary.

Rasmussen hopes to launch NATO's own modest "reset" of ties with Russia, offering closer cooperation on Afghanistan, a joint threat assessment and work on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. NATO officials have received assurances that Moscow will respond positively and breathe new life into the NATO-Russia Council.

None of that will assuage NATO's east European members, who are likely to press harder now for practical steps to give credibility to the alliance's Article V mutual defence commitment. That could involve drafting military plans to reinforce the Baltic republics and Poland, and holding joint military exercises on those countries' territory. The French and Germans have resisted such ideas in the past as unnecessarily provocative to Moscow. If NATO cannot agree to such moves, the United States may have to do more on its own to compensate its jilted friends.

(note: corrects Odessa to Sevastopol in 6th paragraph)

Barack Obama might have unrivalled expertise about the U.S. electorate. But the American president showed he’s something of a fish out of water when it comes to the complex world of German politics — where the seeming winners sometimes end up losing and the losers can end up in power with the right alliance.

Obama recently told Germany’s conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel to stop worrying about the Sept. 27 election: “Ah, you’ve already won. I don’t know what you always worry about,” Obama told her in comments captured by a German TV camera at the White House as the two were on their way to a joint news conference.

Merkel looked surprised by his comments — she knows that she doesn’t have anything in the bag yet — even with what might appear to outsiders to be a comfortable 12- to 17-point lead in opinion polls over her main rivals, the Social Democrats, with just 7 weeks left before the election.

Why is that?

Because under Germany’s “fiendishly complex proportional system” , Merkel’s conservatives could beat her rival Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s SPD and still end up without the centre-right coalition they want — or even more dramatically they could win the vote but end up losing power completely.

(more…)