LEIPZIG, Germany, Nov 14 (Reuters) – Delegates to a congress of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) got an orange at the door — her party’s campaign colour — but security men inside confiscated them, saying they could be used as projectiles against the chancellor.

There was no fruit-throwing at the meeting in Leipzig in the former east Germany, but neither did the chancellor get the kind of enthusiastic response she needs from her party to ensure continued German commitment to tackling the euro zone debt crisis.

Merkel ratcheted up the rhetoric to the Churchillian level she usually avoids, calling it Europe’s “toughest hour since World War Two”.

But as is often the case when Merkel talks about the euro outside the Bundestag (lower house of parliament) in Berlin – where her leadership of Germany survived a vote on the bailout schemes in September — grassroots conservatives at the Leipzig congress did not appear to share her sense of urgency.

Many of the delegates at the annual meeting appeared at best resigned to Germany continuing to bail out euro zone partners that keep backsliding on their public debt, and at worst indifferent to the fate of Germany’s European partners.

While Merkel and her europhile finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, reiterated their calls for “more Europe” via deeper political unity and institutional reforms to strengthen the 17-nation currency reforms, the abstract terms left many of the Leipzig congress-goers cold.

“Europe policy is not so exciting for lots of people here,” said Klaus Essliger from Vechta in Lower Saxony, eating a warm pretzel at the “Senior CDU” bar in a foyer thronged with congress-goers drinking white wine and ignoring the speeches.

LEIPZIG, Germany (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that Europe could be living through its toughest hour since World War Two as new leaders in Italy and Greece rushed to form governments and limit the damage from the euro zone debt crisis.

A rally on financial markets sparked by the appointment of respected European technocrats in Rome and Athens soon stalled. Analysts warned that daunting obstacles could hinder decisive action needed to breathe new life into their ailing economies.

Italy had to pay a euro-lifetime record yield of 6.3 percent to sell five-year bonds with investors wary of buying its debt until prime minister-designate Mario Monti can undertake profound economic reforms.

In a first sign of trouble for new Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, the leader of the main conservative party rejected any toughening of austerity and refused to sign a letter sought by European authorities pledging support for a new 130 billion euro bailout.

Merkel dramatized the situation facing the euro zone in an attempt to rally her conservative party behind the government at a congress in Leipzig.

“Europe is in one of its toughest, perhaps the toughest hour since World War Two,” she told her Christian Democrats (CDU), saying she feared Europe would fail if the euro failed and vowing to do anything to stop this from happening.

In a one-hour address, Merkel called for closer European political union but offered no new ideas for resolving the crisis that has forced bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, raising fears about the survival of the 17-state currency zone.

LEIPZIG, Germany (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that Europe must move step-by-step toward political union, calling the euro zone debt crisis the continent’s “toughest hour since World War Two”.

In a one-hour address to thousands of delegates from her Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel offered no new ideas for resolving the crisis that has forced bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and has stirred worries about the survival of the 17-state currency zone.

But she made clear that Germany will have to make more sacrifices.

“The challenge of our generation is to finish what we started in Europe, and that is to bring about, step by step, a political union,” Merkel told the party congress in the east German city of Leipzig.

“Europe is in one of its toughest, perhaps the toughest hour since World War Two,” she said.

The two-day party meeting was supposed to focus on education policy but was dominated from the outset by the euro zone’s debt crisis, which showed no signs of abating despite the naming of new technocrat governments in Greece and Italy.

Merkel, who came to power in 2005, does not face an election until 2013, but knows she could easily become another victim of euro turmoil unless she plays her cards right.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that Europe must move step-by-step towards political union, calling the euro zone debt crisis the continent’s “toughest hour since World War Two.”

In a one-hour address to thousands of delegates from her Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel offered no new ideas for resolving the crisis that has forced bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and has stirred worries about the survival of the 17-state currency zone.

But she made clear that Germany will have to make more sacrifices.

“The challenge of our generation is to finish what we started in Europe, and that is to bring about, step by step, a political union,” Merkel told the party congress in the east German city of Leipzig.

“Europe is in one of its toughest, perhaps the toughest hour since World War Two,” she said.

The two-day party meeting was supposed to focus on education policy but was dominated from the outset by the euro zone’s debt crisis, which showed no signs of abating despite the naming of new technocrat governments in Greece and Italy.

Merkel, who came to power in 2005, does not face an election until 2013, but knows she could easily become another victim of euro turmoil unless she plays her cards right.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that Europe must move step-by-step toward political union, calling the euro zone debt crisis the continent’s “toughest hour since World War Two”.

In a one-hour address to thousands of delegates from her Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel offered no new ideas for resolving the crisis that has forced bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and has stirred worries about the survival of the 17-state currency zone.

But she made clear that Germany will have to make more sacrifices.

“The challenge of our generation is to finish what we started in Europe, and that is to bring about, step by step, a political union,” Merkel told the party congress in the east German city of Leipzig.

“Europe is in one of its toughest, perhaps the toughest hour since World War Two,” she said.

The two-day party meeting was supposed to focus on education policy but was dominated from the outset by the euro zone’s debt crisis, which showed no signs of abating despite the naming of new technocrat governments in Greece and Italy.

Merkel, who came to power in 2005, does not face an election until 2013, but knows she could easily become another victim of euro turmoil unless she plays her cards right.

BERLIN, Nov 10 (Reuters) – Anyone old enough to remember the Weimar Republic would only have been a child when hyperinflation wiped away savings in 1921-24, but the calamity is so ingrained in Germany’s collective memory that it still shapes its thinking on the euro.

Foreign leaders urging Germany to relax its resistance to the European Central Bank becoming a “lender of last resort” and printing money to solve the sovereign debt crisis can save their breath: Germany won’t budge.

Chancellor Angela Merkel may have ceded once non-negotiable positions on many of the hurdles in the sovereign debt crisis, but unless she is politically suicidal, there is one line she will not cross: the independent role of the central bank.

“We mustn’t forget the German government has elections in 2013 and Mrs Merkel has to consider this,” said economist Manfred Neumann. “She cannot win if she looks too weak in the euro context, and she has made a lot of concessions already.”

To understand why this would be one concession too far, you can rifle through the numismatic counters at flea markets and tourist stalls in Berlin, where curious bank notes from the 1920s in denominations of hundreds of billions and even trillions of marks go for a few euros.

Such galloping inflation, when prices doubled every day, resulted from the efforts of the Reichsbank, Germany’s central bank until 1945, to ‘monetise’ government debts swollen by reparations for World War I by creating money to buy them up.

By late 1923, a litre of milk cost some 26 billion marks and a loaf of bread 105 billion. Shopping involved carting piles of cash around in barrows and baskets in such quantities that it had to be weighed on scales rather than counted by shop tellers.

BERLIN, Nov 7 (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel has ruled out using gold and currency reserves or IMF special drawing rights to boost the euro zone bailout fund for fear of violating the independence of Germany’s central bank, which opposes such use of reserves.

German sources said these proposals caused tension between Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on the one hand, and the European Central Bank on the other, during last week’s G20 summit in Cannes.

The issue came up because Europe is worried that, with its partners in the Group of 20 wary of investing in European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) instruments, it needs other ways to boost the 440 billion-euro fund without compromising the triple-A investment grade of member states like France.

When word got out that the ECB had been asked to look into how euro zone countries’ reserves or SDRs (special drawing rights at the International Monetary Fund) could be pooled to leverage the EFSF, the Bundesbank reacted angrily, German sources said.

This was depicted in the German media as an attempt to use “German gold” held by the Bundesbank, whose independence is sacrosanct, to further fund bailouts which are already a source of growing impatience among the German public and politicians.

“German gold reserves must remain untouchable,” said German Economy Minister Philipp Roesler, head of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the junior partner in Merkel’s coalition who are already under pressure from eurosceptics in the party and could not afford any more euro zone demands on German public coffers.

“We know this plan and we reject it,” said a spokesman for the Bundesbank at the weekend.

BERLIN, Nov 7 (Reuters) – The Greens have grown out of their woolly jumpers and sandals and turned enough fellow Germans on to environmentalism to make the party — already the world’s most successful green movement — the possible kingmakers in the 2013 elections.

Founded three decades ago by rebels from the 1968 student movement, ‘ban-the-bomb’ peaceniks, ecologists and feminists, the Greens got their first taste of power from 1998 to 2005 under Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats (SPD).

But they have come into their own in the past year. A strong run of local elections gave them a presence in all 16 regional assemblies for the first time as well as their first state premier, Winfried Kretschmann, who ousted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in conservative Baden-Wuerttemberg.

The progressive “greening” of German politics, with even Merkel converted to the anti-nuclear cause after the disaster at Fukushima and now in a hurry to shut down atomic power plants, has given the party broad appeal in the mainstream.

“We have shown that economics and ecology don’t contradict each other — which is a quantitative leap forward,” said party co-leader Claudia Roth in an interview.

“People used to say ‘we can afford the Greens when times are good, but when it’s a matter of jobs of growth, it’s not the Greens you need’,” said Roth.

The party has climbed to historic highs in opinion polls in the past year of 15-20 percent, from 10.7 percent in the last elections in 2009.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s finance minister and other senior officials urged Greece on Wednesday to stick to the aid plan agreed with the euro zone and IMF and to avoid the dangerous instability posed by the prospect of a referendum on the latest bailout deal.

“It would be helpful if clarity is achieved as soon as possible on which path Greece wants to take,” Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper.

After EU leaders agreed last week on measures to help Greece and stabilize the 17-member currency union, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou stunned his euro zone partners and shook financial markets by calling a referendum on the planned 130 billion euro bailout package.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have summoned Papandreou to crisis talks in Cannes on Wednesday before a summit of G20 world economies.

German European Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Papandreou’s actions had “made the situation considerably worse for countries which don’t have the highest credit rating, and the danger of further setbacks is rising.”

He told the daily Die Welt that the Greek leader should have given European leaders advance warning of his referendum plans at their twin summits last week. The mass-circulation Bild daily said “even the chancellor was taken by surprise.”

CRISIS WEIGHS ON MERKEL

BERLIN (Reuters) – Chinese and Russian firms are the most likely to pay bribes while operating abroad, and the most corrupt sectors are public works contracts and construction, according to Transparency International’s latest “Bribe Payers’ index”.

China and Russia rank bottom, in 27th and 28th place respectively, in the 2011 index released on Wednesday, while the Dutch, Swiss, Belgians, Germans and Japanese get the top scores. Britain and the United States rank eighth and ninth.

But the Berlin-based anti-corruption campaigners said not one of the 28 countries surveyed — which include all of the G20 — was perceived as “wholly clean of bribery” and few had made a major improvement since the last bribery index in 2008.

“India’s score improved the most, with an increase of 0.7, but it still remains near the bottom of the table. Canada and the United Kingdom saw the most significant deterioration in their scores with a drop of -0.3,” read the report.

The group asked 3,016 business executives in 30 countries — selected by the value of their foreign direct investments and exports, plus their regional significance — how often companies based in countries in the survey engaged in bribery.

Transparency urged countries to ratify conventions against bribery under the auspices of the United Nations, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union.

“In their meeting in Cannes this week, G20 governments must tackle foreign bribery as a matter of urgency,” said Huguette Labelle of Transparency International in a statement.