After spending the last four years trapped in a loveless grand coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats, Germany’s conservative chancellor Angela Merkel is looking forward to happier, more productive days in a cosy new centre-right coalition with her preferred partners, the pro-business Free Democrats.

However, rather than smooth sailing with her new, more like-minded coalition partners, it’s turned out to be one turf battle after another between Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, on the one side and the Free Democrats on the other.

Weeks of unseemly arguing over tax cuts, healthcare, conscription and other issues in coalition talks has earned the new coalition the nickname Fehlstart” (false start) in the German media.

That awkward beginning was confirmed in a most embarrassing fashion for Merkel on Wednesday when at least nine deputies in her own coalition withheld their support.

Merkel was easily re-elected chancellor with 323 votes in the 622-seat parliament, 11 more than she needed. The nine deputies who either abstained or voted against her in the secret ballot served as a tangible reminder that the CDU/CSU and FDP might not be the marriage made in heaven some had expected. It was a political kick in the shins that Merkel did not need.

Four years ago she got 397 of the 612 votes, 51 less than the CDU/CSU and SPD had together. That, however, was not surprising because the grand coalition had an enormous majority in parliament and because the two camps had long been such arch enemies. This time around it was nine deputies in her own preferred coalition who stabbed her in the back. Is that a harbinger of things to come?

“Let’s try forget about this,” said Volker Kauder, CDU parliamentary floor leader. Several conservatives are already picking holes in the coalition deal, which is only a few days old. Kauder said he was sure all the CDU/CSU deputies voted for Merkel. The FDP’s parliamentary floor leader, Birgit Homburger, said the same of her party.

At least one of them was wrong. 

PHOTO: Merkel reacts after her re-election on Wednesday by a narrower than expected margin in parliament. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

Climate health costs: bug-borne ills, killer heat
Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health. These pests and others are expanding their ranges in a warming world, which means people who never had to worry about them will have to start.

Spain rearranges furniture as economy sinks

Moving a 17-metre high monument to Christopher Columbus 100 metres down the road is how the Spanish government is interpreting the advice of John Maynard Keynes. The economist once argued it would be preferable to pay workers to dig holes and fill them in again, rather than allowing them to stand idle and deprive the economy of the multiplier effect of their wages.

Picking up the pieces from Afghanistan’s war

U.S. gunners scanned a lush Afghan valley from their helicopter, as a  white van containing a badly burned baby inched toward another Black Hawk waiting at the army outpost. Eight soldiers had flown into the heart of hostile eastern Afghanistan, in a convoy of one air ambulance and one “chase” helicopter for protection, to collect 18-month-old Amanullah who knocked a pot of scalding water over his legs, penis and scrotum.

In Brazil, extreme weather stokes climate worries

No one could say they hadn’t seen it coming. The sand dunes had been advancing for decades before they swallowed the houses of families in Ilha Grande, an island in Brazil’s Parnaiba river delta. Standing on a dune that covers his old home, one man describes the landscape of his childhood — cashew trees as far as he could see. Not a dune in sight.

Angola’s hard-hitting beat electrifies the poor

It’s not break-dance, it isn’t rap either. The name is kuduro and its beat is electrifying dancers from Luanda to Lisbon and New York City. In Angola’s capital city, men and women are often seen performing robotic moves, bouncing off walls or pretending to drop dead once kuduro’s hard-hitting beat stops. The creator of kuduro, which means “hard-ass” in Portuguese, said he came up with the sound while watching martial arts expert Jean Claude Van Damme dance in a 1994 movie.

Cattle rustling on the rise as U.S. recession bites

Cattle theft is a growing problem as thieves realize that stealing cows is a relatively easy way to raise a quick buck. Stolen cattle are often taken straight from their farm or ranch to auction at a stockyard.  “When people think cattle rustling they think John Wayne. But it’s not like that. Cattle thieves are … technologically savvy. “

Fiat expansion stirs resentment in Italy’s south

Staring at the locked gates of a Fiat car factory, Mimmo Vacchiano says many families in this poor corner of southern Italy face a stark choice unless its turnstiles reopen. “If they close this plant, there’s nothing else here, only unemployment or the mafia.” Pomigliano d’Arco, a town of 40,000 people in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, relies on Fiat for its lifeblood. Residents now fear they may pay the price for cash-strapped Fiat’s high-stakes strategy to survive the recession by expanding to become the world’s second largest car maker.

Signs of recovery appear in Zimbabwe hospitals

The odors of death and decay are gone from the corridors of Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital, replaced by the smells of medicines and food for the patients who are once again coming for treatment. Nowhere is the change in Zimbabwe more evident than in the hospitals that just months ago failed so woefully to cope with a cholera epidemic that killed more than 4,000 people. Doctors and nurses have returned to Harare’s Parirenyatwa General Hospital. UNICEF has been helping to pay allowances to some doctors and nurses while the government is now paying them $100 a month like other state employees.

Boom-and-bust corner of California sees new hope

If the U.S. recession has an epicenter in California, it may be the  working-class neighborhoods called the “Inland Empire,” full of boarded-up homes, vacant storefronts, jobless workers. It faces years coping with foreclosed homes, jobless rates over 10 percent, a poorly educated workforce and empty warehouses.

Slain leaders’ heirs vie for Lebanon votes

The memory of assassinated Lebanese leaders lives in symbols and slogans of their heirs who are battling for Christian votes crucial to deciding the parliamentary election. Nayla Tueni and Nadim Gemayel are young, even by the standards of Lebanon’s dynastic politics. Running as allies in the June election, both evoke memories of fathers killed for their views.

Everglades swamped with invading pythons

The population of Burmese pythons in Florida’s Everglades may have grown to as many as 150,000 as the non-native snakes breed in the fragile wetlands. Wildlife biologists say they have been dumped by  owners who no longer want them and pose a threat to endangered species like the wood stork and Key Largo woodrat. “They eat things that we care about,” said an Everglades National Park biologist.

America caught a cold and now China has one too. 

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Monday that the Fund could cut its forecast for China’s economic growth in 2009 to around  5 percent. To think that only last year China was galloping at a double-digit clip. It’s staggering, and it’s worrying.

Worrying, for one thing, because  - as the Heritage Foundation’s Derek Scissors puts it - ”the American economic slump is running into the Chinese economic slump, creating the conditions for a face-off between Beijing and the U.S. Congress, possibly leading to destabilization of the world’s most important bilateral economic relationship”. 

He argues that the new U.S. administration, confronted with a record-breaking bilateral deficit and soaring unemployment, could impose prohibitive tariffs or erect other barriers to Chinese goods. The EU, Japan and others would then be permitted by WTO rules to raise barriers against a diversion of Chinese goods to protect their markets, and “some form of Chinese retaliation is certain”.

“If intemperate, such retaliation will prompt further action by the U.S. and perhaps other countries, threatening the global nature of the trading system,” Scissors concludes.

Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University, blogged on the same theme last month, warning that Smoot Hawley, the notorious U.S. tariff act that contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s, could return in a different guise.

Pettis says that while everyone is watching to see if Washington re-enacts new versions of Smoot-Hawley, the real threat may come from current-account-surplus countries which seek to support their export sectors.  There are indeed signs that China is looking to export its way back to vigorous growth through subsidies, raising import tariffs and perhaps currency depreciation (see the grumbling from France’s Anne-Marie Idrac only yesterday on the yuan). 

The bitter lesson from the 1930s is that not all countries can export their way back to economic health at the same time. And if they try, there will be a fight.

First on Zimbabwe, now on Darfur, Western countries have lost out at the U.N. Security Council to African states backed by China and Russia.

A Western attempt to get sanctions imposed on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s government flopped on July 11. Three weeks later, when it came to renewing the mandate of peacekeepers in Darfur, Western countries bowed to demands to include wording that made clear the council would be ready to freeze any International Criminal Court indictment of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide. The United States abstained, but that made no difference to the vote.

The question had long come up in Western countries as to how much Africa mattered to them given what often seemed intractable wars, famine, disease and poverty. From an African perspective, Western countries - often former colonial powers - have sometimes been accused of arrogance, meddling and ignorance of the continent’s realities.

But while Africa’s economies were once dependent on aid and finance from the West, it is China and other Asian countries that are now rushing to invest, helping to drive unprecedented growth. How Africa will deal with the new investment was a key topic at this week’s meeting in Mauritania with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. G8 countries, meanwhile, appear to be falling short on their promises of aid.

Investment from China comes without the conditions that Western countries or institutions might insist on. Meanwhile, China has been very ready to back African friends in diplomatic forums such as the United Nations. Russia is less important as an investor, but has taken a similar diplomatic line.

So how relevant does the West remain in Africa? And if its influence is waning then will that give African countries a chance to do a better job of solving problems their own way? Will it give a freer hand to leaders with little concern for democracy, human rights and government accountability?

What do you think?