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Tuesday, April 29, 2003

When the Going Gets Tough



Schroder is waving what he probably considers to be his trump card: he is threatening resignation. Now the difficulty with this strategy is if they decide to call your bluff. Or maybe it isn't a bluff. Maybe he really wants out. In which case......

Gerhard Schröder issued a thinly veiled threat to resign as German chancellor on Monday if his Social Democratic party blocked controversial social and economic reforms.Speaking to leading party members in Berlin, Mr Schröder insisted on the need for urgent action to boost the ailing German economy and tackle stagnant growth and rising unemployment."Whoever wants to decide or implement anything else must realise they are stripping away the fundamentals of my work and forcing me to draw the consequences," he said. The chancellor accepted that plans to ease job protection rules and curb unemployment benefits had raised hackles in the party. But he said his proposals were necessary to reduce Germany's non-wage labour costs, seen by business as cripplingly high.



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