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Last week’s story on drug use in the former Czechoslovakia incorrectly conflated the velvet revolution and the velvet divorce. The country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, not 1989. Our apologies for the error, which has been corrected online.

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What looks obvious to outsiders is not clear to France’s Socialists

FRANCE’S opposition Socialist Party should be building up for its best crack at the French presidency in over a decade. The incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, is unpopular. Polls find that a majority of the French want the left to return to power. And, in Dominique Strauss-Kahn (pictured), the boss of the IMF in Washington, DC, the Socialists have a potential candidate with a real chance of victory in 2012. One new poll finds that, if a presidential election were to take place today, Mr Strauss-Kahn would beat Mr Sarkozy in a second-round run-off by a crushing 59% to 41%.

If only it were that simple. After its summer conference at the Atlantic resort of La Rochelle last weekend, where delegates discussed socialism over platters of fruits de mer, the party is certainly feeling upbeat. It put on a show of unity, with rival grandees posing together for the cameras in studious harmony. Yet Mr Strauss-Kahn, the party’s best potential candidate, may not get the nomination. ...

Scapegoated abroad and the victims of prejudice at home, eastern Europe’s Roma are the problem no politician wants to solve

SLOVAKIA is in shock; France in uproar. The cause of both nations’ turmoil is the Roma (gypsies), or, rather, what is being done to them. This week a gunman in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, killed seven people and injured 14, before shooting himself dead. Six of the victims were a Roma family, killed inside their apartment; they appear to have been deliberately targeted.

In France the expulsion of hundreds of Roma immigrants, whom Nicolas Sarkozy’s government says were in the country illegally, has galvanised opposition from the pope, French churches, a UN committee and even several ministers in Mr Sarkozy’s own government. Yet further tough legislation is promised. ...

The emperor Charlemagne is the wrong father-figure for Europe

BEYOND the octagon of Aachen cathedral lies the golden shrine of St Mary, holding ancient relics that are displayed every seven years: the cloak of the Virgin, the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the loincloth of the Saviour on the Cross and the cloth that held the severed head of John the Baptist. Such wonders made Aachen one of the great pilgrimage sites of medieval Europe. In these more sceptical times, it is the other golden casket here that commands the visitor’s attention: the one bearing the remains of Charlemagne.

The Frankish warrior-king, crowned as heir of the Roman emperors by Pope Leo III in 800, is still revered locally as a saint. More importantly, he is the icon of Europe’s newer, secular faith: political and economic integration. Since 1950 Aachen has bestowed a yearly Charlemagne prize on the figure deemed to have done most to promote European unity. The winners are mostly a predictable cast of grandees. In 2002 the prize was awarded not to a person but to the euro. And in 2004 the judges conferred the prize on Pope John Paul II; a reversal, perhaps, of Leo’s coronation of Charlemagne. ...

Angela Merkel agonises over a planned phase-out of Germany’s nuclear capacity

WHEN Angela Merkel cares about an issue she does not give a speech. Instead, she hits the road. Lately Germany’s chancellor has travelled to a wind park in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, a nuclear reactor in Lower Saxony, and an energy-generating house in Hesse. Aiming to draw attention to Germany’s dilemmas in deciding how much and what sort of power to produce and consume in the coming decades, Mrs Merkel will bundle her answers into a comprehensive “energy concept”, to be unveiled at the end of September.

This is like coming up with a menu that pleases both carnivores and herbivores. Much of the debate revolves around whether to scrap a plan devised by an earlier government to cease nuclear-power generation by 2022. The decision will affect Mrs Merkel’s political standing and the public finances, as well as Germany’s energy future. With roughly a quarter of generation capacity due to reach retirement age by 2020, decisions made now will shape the energy profile of Europe’s biggest economy for years. There is “a window of opportunity for good changes or for messing up the situation for the next 50 years,” says Olav Hohmeyer, an economist at the University of Flensburg. ...