Beneath a statue of his predecessor Willy Brandt, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaks after the Nov. 25 meeting of his Social Democrat party in Berlin, where they confirmed him as the candidate in snap elections scheduled for February.Sean Gallup/Getty Images
On the evening of Nov. 6, while the rest of the world was still adjusting to the news that Donald Trump was once more bound for the White House, a second, much quieter, political earthquake occurred in Berlin.
Hours after Kamala Harris acknowledged that Mr. Trump had won the U.S. election, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government collapsed. Suddenly, not only was U.S. President Joe Biden a lame duck leader running out the clock until Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, the leader of the world’s third-largest economy – and the fourth-largest military in NATO – was also entering what look likely to be his last weeks in office.
Mr. Trump rattled Europe during his first term by speaking admiringly of Russian President Vladimir Putin and by repeatedly threatening to pull the U.S. out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization unless other members spent more on defence. His looming return has again sparked a conversation in Europe about the need to stand more independently from the U.S. on security matters, particularly when it comes to supporting Ukraine against the almost three-year-old Russian invasion.
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Europe’s support for Ukraine and its President, Volodymyr Zelensky – who met Mr. Scholz in Berlin in October – now figures prominently in German domestic politics.JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images
It’s not a conversation that analysts believe Mr. Scholz – who seems headed for almost certain defeat in an election expected to be held in February – can credibly lead.
“The timing is terrible – just when the situation is increasingly difficult in Ukraine, Europe’s most important country is paralyzed at the same time as Donald Trump is on his way to the White House,” said Marcel Dirsus, a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. “You’d like to have a functioning government to deal with Donald Trump.”
Mr. Scholz brought about the collapse of his coalition by firing his finance minister, Christian Lindner, on Nov. 6. Mr. Lindner leads the centre-right Free Democratic Party, which for the past three years had sat in awkward coalition with Mr. Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party, as well as the left-wing Greens. Mr. Lindner had earlier presented Mr. Scholz with a budget proposal that called for tax and spending cuts, as well as backing away from some government efforts to combat climate change.
Mr. Scholz’s government – which was wildly unpopular even before the coalition split up – is now expected to fall in a parliamentary confidence vote scheduled for Dec. 16, triggering an election that will likely be held on Feb. 23. The key issues are expected to be Germany’s stagnant economy, which is expected to contract by 0.1 per cent this year, and the country’s debt brake, introduced by former chancellor Angela Merkel, which caps new government borrowing at 0.35 per cent of gross domestic product, but which even Ms. Merkel now favours relaxing.
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Friedrich Merz leads the opposition Christian Democrats, which has been outperforming Mr. Scholz’s party in public opinion polls.Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press
German elections are usually followed by months of negotiations between potential coalition partners, meaning it could be April or May before the shape ofthe country’s next government is known.
The centre-right Christian Democratic Union with leader Friedrich Merz looks almost certain to emerge as the senior partner in the next government. Opinion polls suggest the CDU has around 33 per cent support, roughly double the proportion who say they’ll vote for Mr. Scholz’s SPD.
Mr. Merz, who lost an internal CDU power struggle to Ms. Merkel 20 years ago, is a known quantity in German politics. He’s been more hawkish than Mr. Scholz on the need to support Ukraine and stand up to Russia, saying he would give Mr. Putin “24 hours” to end the invasion before sending German-made long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine, a step Mr. Scholz has opposed.
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Recent electoral gains by the right-wing AfD have sparked protest across Germany, like this one in Ulm in October.Christoph Schmidt/dpa via AP
But the centre-right versus centre-left debate that has dominated German politics since the country’s 1990 reunification received a jolt in September when the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a regional election in the state of Thuringia and came a close second to the CDU in the larger state of Saxony.
The Thuringia and Saxony elections both also saw a surge in support for the far-left Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, with the upstart party finishing third – and ahead of Mr. Scholz’s SPD – in both regions. Both the AfD and Ms. Wagenknecht’s party are pro-Russian and critical of German military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Germany has provided €37-billion worth of assistance to Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion in February, 2022.
Both the CDU and SPD have said they will not enter any coalition government that includes the AfD.
More worrisome than the outcome of the Feb. 23 vote is what could happen between now and then, as Russian troops push forward in eastern Ukraine and Mr. Trump threatens, once more, to shake up the established world order.
In response to Mr. Biden’s decision to authorize the use of Army Tactical Missile Systems to strike Russia, Mr. Putin lowered his country’s threshold for using nuclear weapons, and then fired an experimental hypersonic missile at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
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In Berlin, supporters of Russia’s exiled opposition march in support of Ukraine on Nov. 17, two days after President Vladimir Putin spoke on the phone with Mr. Scholz for the first time in two years.RALF HIRSCHBERGER/AFP via Getty Images
Rather than looking like the steady leader the West needs for the months ahead, Mr. Scholz rattled some of Germany’s allies by holding an hour-long phone call with Mr. Putin on Nov. 15.
Mr. Scholz said he called Mr. Putin for the first time in two years to urge the Russian leader to make peace. The call, however, was criticized by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as opening a “Pandora’s box” and paving the way for other leaders to call Mr. Putin, thus ending Western efforts to isolate the Russian leader. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said Mr. Scholz’s unilateral decision to call Mr. Putin was “really strange strategy.”
Many in Germany believe it was electioneering, rather than calculations about war and peace, that drove Mr. Scholz’s decision to dial the Kremlin.
“It was ‘I’m still Chancellor, I’m still here,’” said Benjamin Tallis, director of the Democratic Strategy Initiative, a Berlin-based think tank. “And to signal to the left-wing of his party, the pacifist wing, that he’s the one trying to make negotiations, and thus cut off the electoral threat, as they see it from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.”
Those who study Mr. Putin say the Kremlin boss is likely revelling in the upheaval taking place in both Washington and Berlin.
“The Russian authorities of today consider themselves to be the beneficiaries of chaos – not of any particular government coming to power or some particular party failing,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “They think that they would benefit from chaos because the order is unjust to them and unfair to them.”
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Publish date : 2024-11-29 08:10:00
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