GERMANY: Two million Germans have flocked to cinemas recently to see Goodbye Lenin!, an affectionate look at the last days of East Germany.
This morning, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder delivers the most important speech of his career, charting a route out of Germany's most serious economic crisis in decades. The speech, expected to make swingeing cuts to Germany's generous social welfare system, could be titled Goodbye Bismarck! It was Germany's Iron Chancellor who introduced the welfare state in the 1880s, a model of social welfare, pensions and health insurance that was copied across Europe.
But today it is creaking under the weight of soaring costs and a greying population.
Suspense has been building since the Chancellor announced his speech two weeks ago, telling the country's powerful unions that it would cause them "much wailing and gnashing of teeth". This morning the country will find out how Mr Schröder plans to resuscitate the country that was once an economic powerhouse but is now the sick man of Europe.
It seems like an opportune time to introduce unpopular reforms. Six months after beginning his second term, and five years after becoming Chancellor, Mr Schröder has never been less popular. Over two-thirds of voters are unhappy with his work and it doesn't take long to find out why.
The economy is barely expected to grow at all this year while unemployment has soared to 4.7 million, the third-highest level since reunification, with over 11 per cent of the workforce without jobs.
Those with jobs have watched their take-home pay sink as a result of rising contributions to the overburdened pension and health insurance systems. Meanwhile, costly state bureaucracy has reached a level where, for example, there are more civil servants working in state employment offices today then there were unemployed people 30 years ago. Adding further pressure to an already unbearable situation is the promise Berlin has made to Brussels to drastically reduce its national debt after shattering last year the deficit ceiling imposed to keep the euro stable. Mr Schröder has gone to great lengths to keep his resuscitation recipe under wraps and only a few details have leaked out.
One of the key aspects is likely to be a loosening of Germany's hire-and-fire regulations which, employers say, make it expensive and difficult to let employees go. They have argued for years that looser laws would make German companies more competitive and would stimulate the economy.
The country's powerful unions, however, firmly oppose any attempts to change the law, as do more than half of Germans questioned in a recent survey. Mr Schröder is expected to propose a compromise that would free small companies with up to five employees from the hire-fire regulations that would allow them to take on extra staff on limited contracts.
Other anticipated reforms include combining social welfare and unemployment benefit payments and cutting entitlements as a way of slashing the €14 billion bill for dole payments alone last year.
"We are the most important market for our European neighbours," said Mr Martin Wansleber, chief executive of the German Chamber of Commerce. "We are confident that Mr Schröder knows what needs to be done - we are less confident his party does."
Leading left-wingers from the Bavarian Social Democrats (SPD) launched a pre-emptive strike on the proposals, saying they attack the inviolability of human dignity enshrined in the German constitution.
"It is a violation because employees will no longer have to be told why they are being fired," said Mr Hans Bürthner, head of the SPD. "This goes to the basis of our democracy and our society." Mr Schröder has bet his career on today's speech and his ability to end Germany's Reformstau, the reform standstill of the last 16 years. But some observers doubt the ability of the pragmatic Chancellor to see through a wide-ranging and unpopular programme of reform.
