Tony Blair went to Washington on Wednesday. He was hoping to get a few concessions from George W. Bush, the American president he backed during the Iraq war and generously lent thousands of troops in order to depose Saddam Hussein. During recent months, Blair has made fighting abject poverty in Africa and stemming emissions that threaten to transform our planet into a malaria-plagued swamp, his main rally cries.

In Washington, he was hoping to get his close friend to join a pledge to double development aid to Africa and to pull him a little closer to the Kyoto protocol on global warming. Blair got part of his wish: the US is giving the thumb's up to a debt relief package for Africa. As for climate change? Don't expect Bush to turn granola anytime soon.

German papers on Thursday ask why the return on investment in Blair's relationship with Bush remains so low?

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung writes that Blair has good reason to make Africa the dominant issue of his G8 presidency. "But so far, it doesn't look like he will go down in history as Africa's saviour," the center-left paper writes. Why? In order to achieve anything significant in development policy, you need the United States with its financial power. Washington's priorities, however, lie in the Middle East and Asia, not Africa. And this, the paper suggests, is a lost opportunity. "After the Iraq stick, Bush and Blair could have pulled out the carrots and shown that they are prepared to support the transition to democracy in developing countries." Instead, Bush pulled a PR stunt. He did promise additional support for Africa, but he took from the already existing US budget for development aid - in other words, Bush just shifted previously allocated development funds from one account to the other. Knowing this, one has to infer that the debt cancellation that Bush and Blair want to push through in the G8 won't account for much. The paper argues that the biggest concession Blair was able to get out of Bush was, if anything, that Bush might not pull out of international relief organizations and focus American development policies even more on bilateral aid than it has till now.

However, the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung sees a gain here for Blair. The prime minister "can count as a plus point the fact that he has got Bush's agreement on debt remission," it writes. "And the fact that this is tied to conditions is not to be judged as immoral." The paper argues that it is correct that the rule of law and good governance be the preconditions for successful development aid. Still, Blair was unable to get Washington to budge even an inch on the other major issue he holds near and dear to his heart: climate change. "All in all, the impression is that Blair is presumably investing a lot more into his relationship with Bush than the other way around," it assesses.

Even the conservative Die Welt, which often reads like a love sonnet in its adoration of Bush, has criticism for the US's stingy purse strings. "Bush's gesture has given his government positive headlines around the world, and it really needs them," the editorialist writes. "But it would be wrong to interpret this as a turnaround in US development policy. " Washington, the paper notes, still spends only 0.16 percent of its gross domestic product on international aid, "by far the lowest of aid" provided by any industrial nation (editor's note: this is not entirely true: Washington falls just behind Rome in terms of being cheapo with the Third World). To finance the debt relief, the British have proposed selling some of the International Monetary Fund's gold reserves, a plan opposed by Washington, which instead wants to reduce the World Bank's direct loan program. But if this happened, the paper says, the World Bank would progressively lose its power and developing countries, in turn, would have to rely more heavily on even more complicated bilateral aid. "But that doesn't mean that everything at the World Bank should stay as it is now," the paper concludes. After all, even today the institution still lacks a good plan for controlling the development investments it makes.

Over at the leftish Berliner Zeitung, the editors sense a bit of hypocrisy in criticism here in Germany over the Blair-Bush plan. But, feisty as ever, the paper first takes some broad swipes at Washington. "The promises are not nearly enough to fulfil what heads of states pledged three years ago in the so-called United Nations Millennium Project" - to increase their development aid to 0.7 percent of GDP. What the paper doesn't note, however, is that the UN has been calling for that level of development aid from industrial states since 1970. "But there's no justification here to criticize the Anglo-American initiative," it opines. After all, "German development aid is only just above 0.2 percent of GDP."

Many German papers also look at statements made on Wednesday by Angela Merkel, the conservative Christian Democratic candidate for the German chancellery, on her post-election energy policies. Merkel, whose party is leading by a dramatic margin in all polls, says the CDU, if elected, will halt Germany's planned closure of all the country's nuclear power plants in order to help the country meet the emissions reductions targeted for it by the Kyoto protocol. One of the main achievements of the Greens, who are part of the government, was to pass legislation ordering the phase-out of nuclear energy by 2020. Given Germany's reliance on other countries for natural gas and other resources, Merkel said she doubted the country could fill the hole in energy production left after the nuclear plants close with renewable energies.