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It’s football season in Europe again. Not american football, it’s the real football (some people call it “soccer” and think it’s a sport only played by women such as Mia Hamm). Two days ago the European Championship Euro 2008 in Switzerland and Austria began.

Football is the most political game in Europe. If you think of matches like Netherlands - Germany with the dutch player (and now famous coach) Frank Rijkaard spitting on Rudi Völler, matches between Ireland, Scotland or Wales and England, Italy and France or Croatia and it’s neighbours. And of course there is Germany - Poland. Yesterday, in the evening, Germany shot two goals against a not bad but very defensive playing polish squad. It’s hard to imagine what this match means to germans and polish people, since the polish are the underdogs (in the long history of results, there is no win for the polish team against germany yet) but always capable to beat the germans.

There are many ties between both countries. One of the strongest is the german team: 3 out of 23 german players have polish roots (and I guess it’s about half of the team with some kind of ‘international background’). And it was one of them, Lukas Podolski, netting twice against the neighbours squad last evening.

Before the match some yellow press papers on both sides of the river Oder/Odra were trying to fuel the flames a little bit. But in fact, the stereotypes begin to disappear. Poland and Germany are neither rivals (even though some in Poland would like to see it that way) nor is Poland just a minor partner of the economic strong central european hegemon. Even though there are many cultural differences besides language, i. e. the german way of being liberal-antinationalists without caring much about sovereignity on the surface, which differs a lot to the polish proudness of being a real sovereign state for the first time in many years, it’s interesting to see what happens.

Poland is still transforming quite fast. After decades of being deterred behind the iron curtain, of anti-soviet-communism mainly organised in, by or around the influential catholic church, polish youth is leaving it’s country in masses. Personally, I don’t know any other countries young population to travel around that much, to learn so many languages, to be so straight forward looking to job and business opportunities. Unlinke the saturated german young population, many polish are studying or working abroad, and when/if they return some day, it’s effects on polish society will be much larger than having once again lost against Germany in a football match.

I’m working on eCampaigning related stuff since 2002. This was the time when - during the Federal Election in Germany - many people believed we would see the internet to be the revolutionary power of campaigning. At that time, this was nonsense, of course. And it still is, since european politicians in general are offliners - mainly because of their age.

There is not much good literature on eCampaigning in a political context in Europe. At least, I do not know it and I strongly believe to be quite good informed on that. We have to read books like »Blog Wars«, like »The Revolution will not be televised« and to compare it to our political system and the background patterns of a very specific political culture in every single european country. To get a general understanding of what’s going on in terms of politica science, I usually recommend Pippa Norris «A Virtuous Circle», a truely great book on the change of campaign mechanism. Even though it’s not covering the last years of evolution of internet based political campaigning, it’s worth reading.

Commentaries on the german Social Democrats Party (SPD) are going nuts these days. Since losing the majority in the 2005 federal election, the oldest german party with more than 140 years of history is troubled. Most elections went down the drain, and the last one the SPD can claim to have won in the state of Hessen (Hesse) is leading into new trouble.

The former state party of the German Democratic Republic SED, later called PDS, has survived and can rely on some kind of trust especially of older people in the five eastern german states which formerly were the GDR. The SPD and the Green Party are more or less center-leftist parties, with a clear attitude towards the center of the system and partly even conservative. When some unionists and left wing politicians of the SPD left the party in 2005 to form a new party called WASG, the SPD was in deep trouble: the WASG was going to breed the ground in the western states of Germany. When former-communists of PDS and the still post-natal WASG joined forces and renamed to “The Left”, they clearly targeted at the west german parliaments: with 5%+ of the popular vote, you grab seats there

The voting in Hesse set up a new scenario for the SPD: before the election, they strictly denied the possibility of a coalition with the Leftists. After the vote turned out to be not very helping in setting up a ruling coalition, the party faced a public and internal discussion on how to deal with the Leftists. In eastern states, coalitions of both parties are nothing special. But the western states always were kind of taboo.

After some discussion, the leader of the Hesse SPD  Andrea Ypsilanti and the chairman of the federal party Kurt Beck agreed to some strange appearing model: the “Linke” should not be included in a coalition. But tolerating an SPD-led government built on a coalition with the Green party.

But despite all power games on highter party levels, some elected member of the parliament of Hesse is not willing to follow the party leaders choice, as turned out in the last days. Now Andrea Ypsilanti will not try to become elected in the beginning of April, the federal chairman of the SPD Kurt Beck is facing loads of criticism (he is said to have influenced the Hamburg elections in a very unprofessional way when announcing the then-expected Hesse deal).

So the oldest german party is in very troubled times now, behaving like a pile of chicken when facing a fox. Probably Kurt Beck will have to go, the foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is one of the speculated successors. But what’s already obvious now: bringing the SPD back on the right (or maybe left or centrist) track won’t be easy. And the former mighty working class partys influence will further decline.