Berlin - In a desperate bid to relaunch her dramatic slide in the opinion polls, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has indicated that she would be pressing for the restitution of Germany's lost territories at the end of the last World War.
This demand would be made at next month's UN meeting in New York.
Mrs. Merkel further suggested that discrete talks have been underway for some time with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosova, Macedonia, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Libya, Egypt and the Channel Islands about possible land exchanges.
German diplomats have confidentially told reporters that they expect full co-operation from these countries, "...or else..." Further clarifications of this last sentence could not be obtained from the German Foreign Office.
It is as yet not clear which borders Germany would be seeking to set, but the talks held with the different States listed above would seem to suggest that Mrs. Merkel and her staff have taken the situation in 1943 as a benchmark.
The Japanese government has meanwhile issued a communiqué stating that they are "watching the situation very carefully."
