Actually, Mr. Schröder's room for maneuver is limited by recalcitrant trade unions and leftists on the one hand, and by the fact that Germany's budget deficit has ballooned above permitted levels on the other.
After all, in France reliance on an intervening state is as much a rightist reflex as a leftist one: witness Mr Chirac's support for a woolly proposal to give workers extra protection against redundancies.Peut-il faire boum?Yet Mr Mer does have some real advantages.
"Mel wasn't rich — his family's money was mostly gone — and he was certainly never a leftist," one told me.
The consensus in 1973 was a leftist one: public ownership, planning and progressive taxation were in; privatisation, deregulation and other "free market" solutions were considered (rightly) as the policies of Powellite extremists.
They are eminently political, depicting, first from a rightwing perspective, then, increasingly, a leftist one, a 20th century characterised, just like the present era, by conflict over Middle Eastern oil, the perpetually unsettled Balkans, galloping technological progress, profiteering multinationals and arms traders who have one foot in the president's office.
It's not an extreme idea, as some would have us believe, or even a particularly "leftist" one.
Moscow recently has relied on paid agents instead of leftist ones, so if Trump is driven by profit, this would not leave him an outlier among Moscow's Western assets.
One, the Reut Institute, proposes establishing a pro-Israel network, for instance involving evangelical churches, to counter Islamist and leftist ones, and rebranding Israel with liberal images such as gay-pride pageants.
"The moderate votes are in play, not the leftist ones".
But its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, created an essentially leftist, one-party state.
