Weekly Review - May 12, 2007

This post is part of of a series of weekly posts that summarize the highlights of the past week, give our analysis of general trends, and identifies important announcements that we feel can be expected in the upcoming weeks.

This past week was another relatively quiet one, as far a worldwide public holidays news is concerned. It was marked by the tail end of the May Day Golden Week in China, the results of the second round of the presidential elections in France, and the end of World War 2 public holidays in most of Europe, either on Tuesday May 8, or Wednesday May 9. Some of the highlights:

• China: The week was filled with reactions to the recent Golden Week public holiday of May 1 to May 7. For those interested in the future of these extended public holidays in China, we have posted a detailed status report on China's Golden Week public holidays, earlier today.
• Brazil: After weeks of back and forth between the senate and the assembly, it had seemed that the issue of the status of May 11, the date of the canonization of Frey Galvão, had been settled once and for all (as a non-holiday homage). And yet, at the eleventh hour, on the evening of the 9th of May, the senate, decided to vote the original motion making May 11, 2007 a full public holiday in Brazil.
• France: The center-right presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, won the second round of the French presidential elections, thus making it highly unlikely that the Whit Monday public holiday, abolished in 2005, would be re-instated, as the socialist had promised to do if they won the presidential elections.
• Germany: A major poll in Germany showed that an overwhelming majority of Germans did not think it was a good idea to remove of one of Germany's public holidays, to help fund State pension plans.
• Malawi: As the week ended, the May 14 new annual public holiday in honour of of the country’s first president Ngwazi Kamuzu Banda, which had passed unanimously during the last sitting of Parliament, had not yet been signed into law by the executive.
• Thailand held its annual Royal Ploughing Ceremony, during which the sacred oxes predicted that the upcoming crop year would be plentiful. However, at around the same time, Cambodia also held a Royal Ploughing Ceremony, whose conclusions were quite different.

A few stories came to the fore this past week, relating to possible future changes of public holidays:

• Ghana is expected to declare a lieu day on Monday July 2, as compensation for the July 1st public holiday occurring on a Sunday in 2007.
• Wallis and Futuna will observe a six month mourning period, before replacing the recently deceased king Tomasi Kulimoetoke. As that mourning period will end around Christmas, it is conceivable that a one-off public holiday may be declared in December 2007.
• Papua New Guinea will soon be holding election, a potential cause for a one-off public holiday in that country.
• Saipan (also known as the Northern Mariana Islands) introduced legislation that proposes unpaid holidays to replace the biweekly austerity holidays beginning this October. If the bill is enacted it would essentially mean that most government services would be shut down every other Friday.

We will report on these and other stories as they develop.