Editorial - Everything for the dachshund

This article is provided to you free of charge. If you want to support our team, subscribe now.

When Christmas draws near in Luxembourg, and it does so more and more by the day, our elected representatives are seized by a kind of closing-time panic every year. To somehow get through the monster workload that traditionally piles up at the end of the year, they usually have to hole up in parliament from morning to night, to carry out their legislative duties in a slightly plush and therefore rather soporific environment.

Malicious tongues claim in this context that the Chamber of Deputies is just a kind of voting machine for the government anyway, which brings us back to the topic.

The latter has recently celebrated its cotton wedding anniversary (that's the technical term for two years of marriage), although there is really nothing to celebrate, unless you consider it an achievement that the two life partners of convenience, CSV and DP, are still together.

From the outset, this was not a marriage of love, as was the case with the first edition of the three-party coalition, but rather a marriage of convenience. Two years ago, the CSV and DP exchanged vows without any cooi and in a fast-track mode, since Luc Frieden, as we know, could not wait to finally start governing. Coalition negotiations began just three days after the elections on 8 October, and five weeks later, the black-blue roadmap to 2028 was signed without much ado by the formateur, Frieden, and the two delegation chairmen Xavier Bettel (DP) and Claude Wiseler (CSV).

A lot has happened since then, including the large trade union demonstration on 28 June, the miserable failure of the social rounds, the absence of social dialogue, the government's suboptimal communication strategy and the persistent rumours of a government reshuffle.