Tension between the army and the government may promote reforms

COULD it be Turkish democracy’s great leap forward? On June 26th Turkey’s parliament, dominated by the Justice and Development (AK) Party, passed a groundbreaking law allowing civilian courts to prosecute army officials. Four days later a civilian prosecutor charged and briefly arrested a serving colonel for his alleged involvement in a plan to overthrow AK.

Colonel Dogan Cicek is at the centre of an alleged conspiracy that has rocked the political establishment since it was exposed by a Turkish newspaper last month. The army has ordered an investigation. But it has just as promptly declared the colonel to be innocent and the document, entitled “The Plan to Combat Islamic Fundamentalism”, a fake. In the old days, the army’s growls would have cowed the civilians into silence. But contrary to speculation that he would retreat, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, appears this time to be holding his ground. ...

A new festival marks the maturing of a gritty musical form

SUMMER is the season of arts festivals in France: opera in Aix-en-Provence, theatre in Avignon, jazz in Vienne. But one festival will have the purists frowning into their opera glasses: the Paris Hip-Hop Fortnight, which runs until July 5th. The French are better known for high culture, but the American-inspired street arts of rap, hip-hop and graffiti have become so vibrant in France that even officialdom has taken note.

The Paris Hip-Hop Fortnight is sponsored by the town hall and by the national government. More than 300 artists, from breakdancers to rappers, are taking part, at 18 venues. Highlights have included a concert by IAM, a hip-hop band from Marseilles, and an appearance by Grandmaster Flash, a pioneer of American rap. Even as French hip-hop flourished, official policy treated it as “a fashion, a sport, or an adolescent activity”, as a 2005 report put it. “Now we’re finally getting official recognition,” says Bruno Laforestrie, who runs a hip-hop radio station and is director of the festival. ...

Because of an editing error, Charlemagne on June 27th referred to the Czech prime minister as Ivan not Jan Fischer; and on June 20th described a bidder for the carmaker Opel as an Austro-Russian not a Canadian-Austrian-Russian consortium. Sorry. These mistakes have been corrected online.

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Why Sweden usually makes a good president of the European Union

HERE are three Europeans, talking about the best way to help car workers in the recession. For the first, the state must use “all means necessary” to preserve key industries: ie, give carmakers billions of euros. In return, it is “quite normal” to ask them to halt lay-offs, to keep existing factories open and if possible to “bring production home” from lower-cost countries.

A second European says that governments should focus on ensuring individual workers are employable, not propping up uncompetitive firms. For him, the problem with the car industry lies in “the overproduction of cars that nobody wants to buy.” That leads him to a blunt conclusion: save the workers, not the factories that turn out such clunkers. In his words, “when a ship is sinking my main aim is to save the sailors, not the ship.” ...

Political bigwigs in Kosovo harass its brave free media

EXACTLY 20 years ago Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s leader, spoke to Serbs at Gazimestan, the site of the Battle of Kosovo on June 28th 1389. The speech came to be seen as a significant step on the path to war in the former Yugoslavia. This year thousands of Serbs turned up for the battle’s commemoration, including several Serbian ministers. They were escorted by police from Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in February last year.

The escort and the arrival of so many Serbs are signs of the times. Serbia continues to reject Kosovo’s independence. The Serb-dominated north of the country is under de facto Serbian control. And yet tensions between Serbs and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority are low. This week most of Kosovo’s Serb policemen, who were pressed by Serbia to resign on independence, returned to work. ...

A draw in Albania means horse-trading and perhaps a new election

FOR months the opinion polls suggested that Albania’s election would be close. Most pundits said they were wrong, because respondents were giving unreliable answers. Now Albanian opinion polling has come of age. So close was the June 28th election that, four days later, the result was still unclear. Albania faces weeks of election challenges and political horse-trading—and perhaps even a fresh election in the autumn.

The poll pitted the prime minister, Sali Berisha, who has dominated Albanian politics ever since 1990, against the mayor of Tirana, Edi Rama. Both Mr Berisha’s centre-right Democratic Party and Mr Rama’s Socialists have alliances with smaller parties. With almost all votes counted, Mr Berisha was claiming 71 seats in the 140-seat parliament, but Mr Rama’s party hotly disputed this. ...

The host of the G8 summit, Silvio Berlusconi, faces many lurid scandals at home. But the biggest should be his refusal to accept the extent of Italy’s economic woes

WHEN the leaders of the world’s largest economies meet on July 8th near the Italian city of L’Aquila for this year’s G8 summit, they will find themselves in an apposite setting. Three months ago L’Aquila was hit by an earthquake that left 300 people dead and much of the city centre in ruins. The area is still experiencing powerful aftershocks: on June 22nd there was yet another one.

It might be imagined that none of the assembled leaders would deny that their economies have also been shaken to their foundations. But one does: the host. Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has from the outset insisted that in Italy the recession will be neither as severe nor as prolonged as elsewhere. ...

Efforts to extort money to avoid another gas cut-off come to nothing

IN BLACKMAIL timing can be everything. The governments of Russia and Ukraine have cause to ponder this after failing to extract billions of euros from the European Union in the name of keeping Russian gas flowing to Europe next winter.

Thanks to recession and competition from cheaper suppliers, European demand for Russian gas has fallen. It is also summer. So right now governments and gas companies are unusually brave over threats to cut off the gas. They have resisted pressure to give Ukraine a huge loan that both the Russians and Ukraine’s squabbling leaders say is needed to avoid another dispute like the one that blocked Russian gas in January, affecting 18 of the 27 EU countries. Whether Europe’s nerve will hold as winter approaches remains to be seen. Russia supplies 42% of all EU gas imports, and its share is rising. ...