New Statesman: The Fateful Chancellor: What the end of the Merkel era means for the world

 Yet Merkel is also fiendishly hard to define. She is a Protestant woman scientist from the former East Germany in a political family (the CDU and its Bavarian ally the Christian Social Union or CSU) dominated by male Catholic lawyers from West Germany. She has been hailed as a progressive icon and defender of liberal democracy, yet is also a paragon of small-c conservatism and has been frustratingly reluctant to stand up to autocracy. She is a global power broker in an age of swaggering strongmen, yet is unflashy in her personality and habits; she lives in a modest flat and can be seen doing her own grocery shopping in a central Berlin supermarket. She has called multiculturalism “a grand delusion” yet is perhaps best known for admitting one million mostly Middle Eastern migrants at the peak of the migration crisis in 2015. She is profoundly interested in history yet travels light, ideologically and strategically, in her own style of leadership. [...]

Merkel is also fascinated by the 19th century and how a seemingly sophisticated world collapsed into the carnage of the First World War. The 60th birthday lecture was delivered by Jürgen Osterhammel, author of The Transformation of the World (2009), a history of that first age of globalisation and the uncontrollable, disruptive effects it unleashed. In 2018 she urged her ministers to read The Sleepwalkers (2012), Christopher Clark’s account of what Merkel herself called “the violent juggernaut of 1914”. “I am afraid that open societies in the post-Cold War world are more in danger than we realise,” she once said. [...]

That method has three main elements. The first is strategic inoffensiveness. Though wryly funny in private (her impressions of other world leaders are the stuff of Berlin political legend), Merkel’s public demeanour is usually bland to a fault. Where others lead from the podium, with soaring rhetoric and sharp dividing lines, her hedged and vague use of language can verge on the anaesthetic. Critics have called this “asymmetrical demobilisation”, the practice of diffusing conflicts and denying opponents substantial grievances with which to mobilise their voters. Merkel herself has acknowledged the advantages of avoiding drama (“in calmness lies power” is one of her mantras) and has achieved a sort of apolitical status. “She’s a bit like the Queen of England,” says Khuê Pham, an essayist for Die Zeit newspaper: “Her political style is ‘you know me, you can trust that I am going to do the right thing’, not a discussion about what she wants to do.” [...]

“Her biggest single historical failure was the eurozone crisis in 2010,” says Garton Ash. “She had the chance to convince Germans of the case to make the eurozone fit for the 21st century, but she did not use it. It was one of those moments where the chancellor has an extraordinary power to lead and she missed that chance and let the narrative of the idle, corrupt south preying on the virtuous north become established in German public opinion and politics. It took ten years and a pandemic to overcome that.” When bailouts became imperative to pull the eurozone back from the brink she presented them not so much as desirable but merely alternativlos (“without alternative”), a term with which she has become associated.

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New Statesman: With Germany’s political future in the balance, centrist “Merkel voters” will be crucial

 To understand the political dynamics, contemplate the historical choice at the heart of Merkelism. Between 1998 and 2005 a “red-green” coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens modernised the recently reunified country: liberalising the old federal republic’s conservative social policies; paving the way for a multi-ethnic conception of German identity; deploying troops into combat abroad for the first time since 1945; prodding industries towards a greener future; and introducing welfare cuts purporting to adapt the economy to globalisation. The fundamental choice made by Merkel’s four governments from 2005 has been to continue the country on that trajectory, rather than to deviate from it.

That explains Merkelism’s strengths: its moderation, the stability of its course and the cautiously progressive measures often purloined from the SPD (modern family policies, the minimum wage) and Green traditions (ending nuclear power, admitting over one million refugees). It also explains Merkelism’s weaknesses: its reactiveness and preference for the more comfortable work of bedding in previous reforms over developing new ones for the future. [...]

Merkel’s gambit will loom over the aftermath too, by shaping the range of possible coalition governments. First, the electoral cost of nabbing red-green “Merkel voters” has been the transfer of some right-wing voters to a party, the AfD, that is too toxic to include in coalition calculations. Second, the socio-economic shifts of the past two decades, expanding the pool of economically centrist but socially liberal voters, have benefited the Greens most of all. Both of these trends give the left, and especially the Greens, more paths to power and make the most likely outcome a mould-breaking CDU/CSU-Green coalition. An apt legacy for Angela Merkel.

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Vox: The 4 simple reasons Germany is managing Covid-19 better than its neighbors

 Germany gets a lot of favorable Covid-19 press — and for good reason. Its daily new cases per million people have been persistently lower than any of its Western European neighbors, and its death rate, from the beginning of the outbreak, has been among the lowest in Western Europe: currently 0.15 deaths per million people, compared to France’s 1.15 and Spain’s 2.19. [...]

What’s often cited is an effective deployment of technology, such as a contact tracing app, to fight the pandemic. There’s the frequently praised mass testing program, which rivals South Korea’s, and the oversupply of ICU beds — controversial before the coronavirus, now lauded. It also helps that Angela Merkel has a PhD in quantum chemistry and heads a country that treats scientists, like the Berlin-based virologist and podcaster Christian Drosten, like superstars. [...]

It wasn’t just Munich that had tests ready. In Berlin, scientists created the test kit the World Health Organization and many countries ended up using even before China released the sequence of the virus. But Fröschl points out that if that first patient had shown up in a less prepared part of the country, the outcome may have been different — perhaps something more like what happened in Italy, where cases went undetected for weeks and then overwhelmed the health system. “I’m always emphasizing,” Fröschl says, “we were just lucky.” [...]

There was also learning from other countries. “We tried to take the strategy of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan — all good examples of how a quick and fast response can reduce the number of positive cases,” said Nicolai Savaskan, the chief medical officer of a local health department in Berlin. One part of that fast response: Germany’s mass testing program. While Germany was quick to lock down, it also scaled up testing from the start of the pandemic, and then repeatedly adapted the program to respond to changes in the epidemic dynamics.

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The Guardian: How Angela Merkel’s great migrant gamble paid off

 But Hallak is not a complete outlier either. More than 10,000 people who arrived in Germany as refugees since 2015 have mastered the language sufficiently to enrol at a German university. More than half of those who came are in work and pay taxes. Among refugee children and teenagers, more than 80% say they have a strong sense of belonging to their German schools and feel liked by their peers. [...]

The German phrase Merkel used, Wir schaffen das, became so memorable mainly because it would in the weeks and months that followed be endlessly quoted back at her by those who believed that the German chancellor’s optimistic message had encouraged millions more migrants to embark on a dangerous odyssey across the Med. “Merkel’s actions, now, will be hard to correct: her words cannot be unsaid,” wrote the Spectator. “She has exacerbated a problem that will be with us for years, perhaps decades.” [...]

Yet today Merkel still sits at the top of Europe’s largest economy, her personal approval ratings back to where they were at the start of 2015 and the polling of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), buoyed to record levels by the global pandemic. When Merkel steps down ahead of federal elections in 2021, as is expected, her party’s successor currently looks more likely to be a centrist in her mould than a hardliner promising a symbolic break with her stance on immigration. [...]

Many experts think that the integration classes that have been mandatory for refugees in Germany since 2005 are no longer fit for purpose, holding back those with academic qualifications while failing to offer real help for those who arrive without being able to read or write. The percentage of those failing the all-important B1 language test has risen rather than fallen over the last five years. And yet, Niewiedzial is optimistic. “Germany can be a very sluggish country, full of tiresome bureaucracy,” she says. “But it’s also able to learn from its mistakes and draw consequences from them.”

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The Guardian: Why the Germans Do It Better by John Kampfner review – notes from a grown-up country

 Like so much British writing on Germany, this is also a book about Britain. We need to see, in effect, post-Brexit Britain in a German mirror, not in a fantasy global one. This mirror does not flatter: Kampfner sees a Britain “mired in monolingual mediocrity, its reference points extending to the US and not much further”. It borrows and it shops, and lives in a nostalgic dreamworld. [...]

Kampfner tells us that in an interview shortly before becoming chancellor, Angela Merkel was asked what Germany meant to her. She replied: “I am thinking of airtight windows. No other country can build such airtight and beautiful windows.” German windows are indeed something to be proud of. This telling detail speaks to the reality that Germany is richer than the UK. This requires a little more spelling out than Kampfner gives it. Its income per head is substantially higher. It is a far larger global player: it has more than 6% of the world’s manufacturing, compared with 2% for the UK. As an exporter it is also in a different class from the “world-beating”, “global Britain”. [...]

Germany has had some deindustrialisation, particularly in the old German Democratic Republic, which had a transition to capitalism more brutal in terms of industry destroyed and jobs lost than British industry in the Thatcher years. Yet, as Kampfner notes, despite continued criticism in Germany of the lack of progress in levelling up, trillions of euros were spent and the GDP per capita of the east is now 80% of that of the west. That is, incidentally, a smaller difference than there is between the GDP per capita of the English north (which has about the same population as the former East Germany) and the rest of England. Large parts of England and Wales and Northern Ireland now have a GDP per capita lower than the old East Germany.

Kampfner’s Germany doesn’t do everything right. It has its scandals such as the new Berlin airport which cannot yet be used, and the unfinished and over-budget Stuttgart railway station. The train system no longer runs on time as it once did, one sign of a general neglect of infrastructure. Its environmentalism (it has a notably strong Green party) is tarnished by keeping coal-burning power stations going. It did not cover itself in glory when, through the EU and other agencies, it bailed out its banks and crashed the economies of Greece and others. Its deep conservatism means Germany has remarkably low rates of employment of women with children, in contrast to the old GDR.

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The Guardian: Bild, Merkel and the culture wars: the inside story of Germany’s biggest tabloid

 Today Bild is paradoxically less influential than it was in the 60s, but more politically important. “I read it first in the morning because it is the agenda-setter,” says Josef Joffe, the publisher-editor of the liberal weekly, Die Zeit. “Politicos in Berlin probably read it first in the morning as well.” The paper enjoys a close relationship with the German political elite. The former German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was one of the best men at the wedding of former Bild editor, Kai Diekmann, and in 2008, Diekmann performed the same role for Kohl at his wedding. “Kohl rules with Bild,” the Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll wrote, and Kohl’s successor as chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, affirmed the practice: “To govern I need Bild, Bild Sunday’s edition, and the telly,” he once said. [...]

Reichelt’s agenda is marked less by novelty than by a chest-crunching resuscitation of Bild’s core commitments: pro-US, pro-Nato, pro-Israel, pro-austerity, pro-capital, anti-Russia, anti-China. According to the Bild worldview, the best way to counter the left is to portray its demands as totalitarian, and the best way to kill off the far right is to cannibalise its grievances. While Bild prints relatively little material that a supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would object to, Reichelt sees the party as a threat to his effort to remake the German political scene. “We want nothing to do with the imbeciles of the AfD,” he told me. “The way to destroy them is to make room for their voters in what used to be the political mainstream of this country.” [...]

As editor, Reichelt sees himself less as a news impresario than as an emotional entrepreneur. “Journalism is basically about emotions, as all of the other news outlets in this country seem to have forgotten,” he told me. Reichelt likes to point out what he sees as the shared delusions of the more “respectable” German press. He gave the example of Merkel, around whom he said the press had created an “elaborate mythology” that she has such natural wit and is extremely clever, whereas her skill lay in identifying the direction of the prevailing winds.

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Foreign Policy: It’s a New Europe—if You Can Keep It

 The lockdowns that stopped the virus in Europe have had a devastating economic impact. Again, the American habit of dramatizing data by means of annualizing rates of change disguises the fact that economic implosion in Europe has been every bit as bad, if not worse. The U.S. economy fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of 2020. Germany’s contracted by 10 percent. In Spain, the collapse was twice as bad, at 18.5 percent. (If Spain reported its data in the American style, it would be down 65 percent on the year.) [...]

In the process, the more conservative voices of Northern Europe extracted serious concessions. Unfortunately, those came at the expense of some of the more progressive and innovative budget elements, including spending on joint efforts in the areas of health care and green investment. Thankfully, the package is up for debate in the European Parliament, which is, step by step, asserting leverage over Europe’s politics. Earlier in the crisis, the Parliament favored a far more expansive plan, and hopefully it will make adjustments to the July compromise. [...]

This summer, there was certainly nothing inevitable about the way the deal was done. It did not seem likely. Credit goes to the European Commission for raising the stakes, upping the original suggestion by Merkel and Macron to an ask of 750 billion euros, on top of the regular 1.1 trillion euro ($1.3 trillion) multiyear budget. (It was the Commission’s officials who dug up the legal precedent that would allow the EU to justify massive borrowing.) Among national governments, one has to admire the Spanish and Italians, who began the long march toward a constructive European response back in March and suffered through the demeaning objections of Northern Europeans without walking away. The best that can be said for the Dutch and the Austrians is that they gave way in the end. Perhaps the shameless defense of the narrowest conception of national interest by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz will serve some useful purpose in dampening criticism from their domestic populists. [...]

It was not by accident that as the crisis deepened, the French government started its latest approach to Berlin not via the chancellery but by working its connections to the Social Democrats in the German Finance Ministry. In a desperate effort to revive the flagging political fortunes of the Social Democrats and his own chances of party leadership in 2019, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz had become the leading German proponent of European reform, pushing ideas both for unemployment insurance and banking. Both had been met by stony disapproval from the CDU and a nein from the chancellery.

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Social Europe: A ‘Hamiltonian moment’ for Europe

Part of the ‘Compromise of 1790’, Hamilton’s proposal as Treasury secretary, to nationalise state-level debts, is inseparable from US white-supremacist history. When Hamilton’s first attempts to achieve his purpose met no success, he negotiated a compromise with Jefferson, then secretary of state, and James Madison, member of the House of Representatives—both from the Virginia plantation elite. The compromise involved two apparently unrelated political steps.

The southern plantation elite in Congress agreed to take on the debt of the northern, non-slave states by supporting the Assumption Act of 1790. In return, the southern elite achieved its goal of locating the national capital in slave territory, with the creation of the District of Columbia via the Residence Act of the same year. [...]

This arrangement fits neatly into the propaganda of the ‘frugal four’: Merkel, Macron and the commission want the long-suffering northern-European taxpayer to take on the debts of feckless southern governments. Yet Europeanising debt aims to avoid sovereign-debt speculation, not shift the cost of debt service. As a result, it would reduce the likelihood of a northern ‘taxpayer bailout’ of southern-European governments.

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TLDR News: Germany Takes Over EU Presidency: Germany's Plans for Europe, COVID & Brexit Explained

Germany has just taken over the Presidency of the European Council, and important role within the EU. In fact, that role has rarely been more important with Germany leading the union through turbulent times with economic uncertainty, Brexit negotiations and the pandemic. In this video, we discuss Germany's leadership, their plans and their ongoing influence over the union.

BBC4 Analysis: The Smack of Firm Leadership

What does the way in which rival political systems around the world have managed the Covid-19 pandemic tell us about the global political future?

Writer and broadcaster, John Kampfner, considers what has made a "good leader" during the months of the outbreak and how that is likely to affect the vitality and long-term future of individual regimes. Are today's authoritarians - often savvier and subtler than their twentieth century counterparts - becoming more confident and optimistic? Is this a good time for the world's populist leaders from the Americas to Europe to East Asia? And has democracy, already tainted by its response to the global financial crisis and enduring questions over its popular legitimacy, continued with its woes or might there be a glimmer of light after the years of darkness?

Among those taking part: Francis Fukuyama (author of "The End of History and the Last Man"); Anne Applebaum (soon to publish "The Twilight of Democracy"); Singaporean former top diplomat and President of the UN Security Council, Kishore Mahbubani; writer and broadcaster, Misha Glenny; eminent international affairs analyst, Constanze Stelzenmüller; Bulgarian political thinker, Ivan Krastev (joint author of "The Light that Failed") and Lionel Barber, former editor of the "Financial Times".

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Politico: German conservatives’ eurobond awakening

Countries would not be allowed to use the money in the fund to repay existing obligations, which in Italy’s case totals about €2.5 trillion. The bonds sold to seed the fund would be issued in the name of the EU. That means individual members would only be responsible for repaying their own share (to be determined by the European Commission) and not liable for others’ portions.

At least in theory. It’s hard to imagine that Germany (even if it’s not legally bound) would allow the EU to default on the bonds if Italy or Spain couldn’t pay what they owed. The fallout would be too damaging. Such concerns are just one reason German conservatives rejected similar plans in the past. [...]

Unlike the euro crisis, which triggered dramatic turbulence in financial markets but left German industry unscathed, the corona pandemic threatens Germany’s own economic stability. The nations in the eye of the euro crisis storm, such as Portugal and Greece, were not key German trading partners. The countries in focus now — especially Italy — are a different story. [...]

The far-right Alternative for Germany might have had more luck mounting a counterattack if it weren’t consumed by a civil war over some leaders' ties to neo-Nazi elements.

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Social Europe: ‘Corona bonds’ and Europe’s north-south divide (13th April 2020)

The compromise agreed provisionally by the Eurogroup meeting of finance ministers on April 9th was a relief. For the Eurogroup to have broken up a second time in a week without a deal would have been a disaster. It would probably not have resulted in a bond-market panic—massive interventions by the European Central Bank have neutralised that possibility for now. But in political terms it would have sent a terrible signal of disunity.

The three-pronged package—with funding for health expenditure via the European Stability Mechanism, loans for businesses from the European Investment Bank and €100 billion for the European Commission’s unemployment fund—is modest in scope. It is disappointing to those of us who support the ‘corona bonds’ position. But it is a relief at least that it was a compromise, rather than a humiliating capitulation inflicted on the coalition of the nine advocates of corona bonds by the stubborn and short-sighted egotism of the Dutch and Germans. [...]

Of course, one should never say never. Sophisticated polling reveals an openness on the part of the German public towards corona bonds, which could be exploited by creative and brave political leadership. Expert opinion has shifted quite markedly; the broad-based calls for joint action from German economists are new and extremely welcome. Both in Germany and the Netherlands a large part of the public is frankly embarrassed by their government’s positions.

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Vox: The mystery of Germany’s low coronavirus death rate

Germany has the fifth-most coronavirus cases in the world, but only a fraction of the death toll that has been seen in other countries. And the reason remains a mystery. “We don’t know the reason for the lower death rate,” Marieke Degen, deputy spokeswoman of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI), told me. [...]

In comparison, Italy has more 74,300 confirmed cases and over 7,500 deaths, which puts its fatality rate at 10 percent. In the United States, the fatality rate is currently at about 1.4 percent according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The huge discrepancy in fatality rates between Germany and Italy is also startling because both countries have some of the oldest populations in the world, according to the Washington, DC-based Population Reference Bureau. The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified people over the age of 60 and people with preexisting medical conditions as being at higher risk of experiencing more severe symptoms from Covid-19. [...]

But outside of Merkel’s forceful speech, Germany has more or less followed similar strategies to confront the spread of the virus as many other countries. “We don’t do anything special compared to other countries,” German virologist Martin Stürmer told me. [...]

But virologist Stürmer believes it is more likely the global fatality rate will be lower when all is said and done. “I think all over the world the rates will go down, because we have so many people with mild symptoms, which are not being tested and therefore they are not reflected in the data,” he said.

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The Guardian Today in Focus: What's behind the rise of Germany's far right?

A terrorist attack in Hanau is just the latest incident of far-right violence in Germany in recent years. It left local residents outraged, with many questioning the effectiveness of the police and security services in the battle against far-right extremism.

The Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief Philip Oltermann tells Anushka Asthana that this latest attack comes at a worrying time for Germany. There is political upheaval as Angela Merkel prepares to depart as chancellor, and meanwhile the far-right AfD is making gains. He says that while many in Germany’s security services were focusing on the rising threat from Islamist-inspired terrorism, they have been accused of downplaying the threat from neo-Nazi groups.

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Los Angeles Times: Is There a Crisis of Truth?

What we’re now experiencing is not, I suggest, a Truth Crisis or even a Scientific Authority Crisis. The problems we are confronting are real but they are quite specific. Reflect back on the problems introduced at the outset. I’ve asked many people over the past months about the Crisis of Truth. They seemed to know what I meant and they agreed that there was such a Crisis. But, when asked to provide examples, practically all of them mentioned the same three instances — climate change denial, anti-vaccine sentiment, and various forms of anti-evolutionary thought. There’s no denying their importance. Material consequences follow from belief or disbelief in anthropogenic climate change or the safety of vaccines, but, although it’s depressing that anti-evolutionary attitudes are so widely distributed, it’s not evident that much of practical significance — beyond what’s taught in schools — flows from skepticism about Darwinism. [...]

Those who offer More Science in the curriculum and in the media as solutions of the Truth Crisis tend to equate science with accomplished science, textbook science, secure scientific facts and well-supported theories. A public better educated in these things will, it’s presumed, be better able to sort out reliable science from junk, pseudoscience, errors, and lies. But recall the shortlist of wrongly challenged knowledge that, on reflection, actually constitutes the alleged scientific Crisis of Truth. Evolution by natural selection is disputed in part because it opposes cherished articles of faith in strands of fundamentalist religion; vaccine safety is disputed in part because parents are desperately concerned to avoid risk to the health of their kids; human-caused climate change is disputed in part because, if it’s the case, people may have to ride a bike, eat less meat, and bring reusable bags to do their shopping. To put it in the blandest terms: disputed science is science that seems worth dispute. In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes noted, and accounted for, a crucial difference between geometry and ethics — the deliverances of the latter are endemically subject to dispute, those of the former almost never: [...]

The problem we confront is better described not as too little science in public culture but as too much. Given the absurdities and errors abroad in the land, it may seem crazy to say this, yet the point can be pressed. Consider, again, the climate change deniers, the anti-vaxxers, and the creationists. They’re wrong-headed of course, but, like the Moon-landing deniers and the Flat-Earthers, their rejection of Right Thinking is not delivered as anti-science. Instead, it comes garnished with the supposed facts, theories, approved methods, and postures of objectivity and disinterestedness associated with genuine science. Wrong-headedness often advertises its embrace of officially cherished scientific values — skepticism, disinterestedness, universalism, the distinction between secure facts and provisional theories — and frequently does so more vigorously than the science rejected. The deniers’ notion of science sometimes seems, so to speak, hyperscientific, more royalist than the king. And, if you want examples of hyperscientific tendencies in so-called pseudoscience, there are now sensitive studies of the biblical astronomy craze instigated in the 1950s by the psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky, or you can consider the meticulous methodological attentiveness of parapsychology, or you can reflect on why it might be that students of the human sciences are deluged with lessons on The Scientific Method while chemists and geologists are typically content with mastering just the various methods of their specialties. The Truth-Deniers find scientific facts and theories shamefully ignored by the elites; they embrace conceptions of a coherent, stable, and effective Scientific Method that the elites are said to violate; they insist on the necessity of radical scientific skepticism, universal replication, and openness to alternative views that the elites contravene. On those criteria, who’s really anti-scientific? Who are the real Truth-Deniers? [...]

Rather, a difference between the two — and a consideration pertinent to links between expert Truth and political consequences — isn’t knowing science but knowing where science lives: who to recognize as knowledgeable and reliable; who to trust; which institutions to consider as the homes of genuine knowledge. Knowing this sort of thing — call it a kind of social knowledge — is a different matter than knowing the laws of motion, the nucleotide makeup of DNA, or the statistical means of determining global temperature and establishing its rate of change. This type of knowledge involves rightly knowing the scientific reputation of institutions; rightly knowing the integrity of those who testify to those reputations; rightly knowing the ascribed virtues and vices of the institutions and their procedures; and even rightly knowing the personal characteristics and material interests of the spokespersons for these institutions and those who testify to their qualities. It involves knowing whose opinion to take, and to take seriously, about matters of which you happen to be ignorant. That sort of knowledge isn’t technical, and people might say that it isn’t scientific, or even that it isn’t really knowledge — but almost all of the technical knowledge that we have is held on that basis. In the distant past, I did advanced scientific work (in genetics, as it happens), but — and I speak here just for myself — everything that I know about climate change, including my knowing that Trump is wrong, is held courtesy of this social knowledge. Being a knowledgeable person may mean knowing a lot of stuff, but it certainly means knowing who knows and who does not know.

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Politico: The End of the German-American Affair

At both the official and unofficial level, the foundation that has supported the transatlantic alliance since the 1950s is crumbling. About 85 percent of Germans consider their country’s relationship with the U.S. to be “bad” or “very bad,” according to a recent study, while a clear majority want Germany to distance itself from the U.S.

Angela Merkel is in the United States this week for the United Nations climate conference but a meeting with the U.S. president, who is also in New York, is not on her agenda. Merkel didn’t see Trump during her last visit to the U.S. in May either. [...]

Merkel's role in America's culture wars, where — depending on the stage — she plays either the villain who opened the floodgates to uncontrolled Muslim migration, or the saint who rescued people in need, has complicated Germany's PR effort. That was apparent during the German leader's May visit, when she was celebrated like a lost savior during her commencement speech to Harvard graduates. [...]

But the “difficult topics” that Merkel referenced dominate the official conversation. Whether the question is Iran, trade, defense spending or climate change, Berlin and Washington are at loggerheads. Even in areas where strategic logic should make them natural allies — such as confronting China’s growing influence — the two have failed to move beyond their differences. [...]

In truth, the U.S.-German alliance has never been a partnership of equals. Tension has been part of the mix throughout the post-war era to varying degrees. If Konrad Adenauer and John F. Kennedy shared a mutual dislike, Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter absolutely despised one another. [...]

The German distrust began to take hold in the aftermath of 9/11. Though Germany joined the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan against the Taliban, Berlin refused to participate in the Iraq War, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence to support claims that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

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TLDR News: What Deal Does the EU Want From Brexit?

There's been a lot of talk, on this channel and elsewhere, about what kind of Brexit deal the UK wants. There's been significantly less conversation about what the EU wants out of it. So in this video, we discuss what the EU27 want from Brexit (and more specifically what France, Germany and Ireland are looking for).

New Statesman: Why the EU’s new top team is a setback for pro-Europeans

But let's say it goes ahead: what does it mean, and which European leaders have done well out of it? The agreement is a whomping defeat for the Spitzenkandidaten system, where the pan-European parties (the centre-right European People's Party, the centre-left Party of European Socialists, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, soon to be renamed Renew Europe) nominate candidates for the top posts and whoever wins the elections across the bloc gets to have their chosen candidate installed in the top post. In the end, none of the candidates selected by the pan-European parties got the big jobs, with horse-trading among individual member states once again the crucial factor.

Assuming it goes ahead, who are the big winners? Most obviously, it’s a victory for Belgium’s Charles Michel, who has carved out a lifeboat for himself away from the jockeying for power in his country, which could yet see his Reform Movement tossed out of power. It’s a coup for Angela Merkel, who has managed to back a nice little sinecure for von der Leyen, a Merkel loyalist once widely tipped as her chosen successor, whose handling of the defence brief saw her miss out on the top job. And it tilts the balance of European power a little to the left.

It's a qualified victory for Emmanuel Macron. He has frustrated, and quite probably destroyed the Spitzenkandidaten (or “lead candidate”) system, which he dislikes, in exchange for a return to the previous era of European power politics. He has successfully found a top job for his Renew Europe group in Michel's job as Commission President. He prevented Manfred Webber, the EPP's candidate, from taking the EU's top post. And he has bagged a big job for a French national in Lagarde, though the IMF chief has no experience in monetary policy at a fraught time for the global economy. Against that, he failed to secure his first choice as Commission President in the Socialist Frans Timmermans.

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Forbes: Foreign Spies Hunt For Angela Merkel's Medical Records After Shaking Fits, Reports

The world stage is no place for secrets. And this has been made abundantly clear by suggestions in the German media that foreign intelligence agencies are now attempting to access Merkel's health records to discover whether the recent bouts of televised shaking are indeed something more serious, with reports that "one western intelligence agency believed that the German leader was suffering from a 'neurological problem'." Those health records are reportedly locked within a secure military facility. [...]

Despite that speculation, Bild also acknowledged that Merkel's schedule would trouble the fittest of leaders—"seven hours time difference, 32 hours in Osaka on site, plus a total of 22 hours on the plane... four working sessions and ten appointments for two-person talks, as well as meetings with US President Donald Trump, China's President Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin." [...]

The German public is usually more respectful of the privacy of their country's politicians than we are used to seeing in the U.S. or U.K., but even they are "now demanding answers." Speculation is mounting as to whether the Chancellor will see out her final term in office. She is set to be replaced—sooner or later—by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who replaced her as leader of her Christian Democratic Union Party late last year.

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Politico: Conservatives rebel against Merkel’s EU top jobs plan

Among the national leaders to speak out against the proposal were Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. That opposition, along with Poland, Romania and other countries that had already voiced resistance to Timmermans, was enough to make the Osaka plan a political nonstarter. [...]

“As EPP, we haven’t agreed to the package that was negotiated in Osaka. I think it’s fair to say there’s a lot opposition to the proposal that was made in Osaka from the EPP’s point of view," Varadkar said, arriving at the Council's Europa building. "The vast majority of the EPP prime ministers don’t believe that we should give up the presidency of the Commission quite so easily, without a fight.” [...]

Rangel noted that the EPP had officially tapped two other prime ministers, Plenković and Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš, as its official negotiators in the leadership deliberations. “Mr. Plenković and Mr. Karins,” Rangel said. “They speak on behalf of the EPP.”

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