A few years ago, the idea seemed fanciful. Turkey had just been hit by twin earthquakes, killing more than 55,000 people. As the country struggled to recover from the devastation, and amid a mounting economic crisis, Erdoğan’s Turkish Century seemed destined to remain confined to the realm of fantasy and propaganda. But just two years on, the stars seemed seem to be aligning. As the old order collapses, Turkey is on the ascent, and Erdoğan is poised to take advantage. With Assad gone from Syria, and Iran’s regional influence greatly diminished, it is Turkey that looks ready to fill its place.

All the while, Turkey’s profile has been rising in the West, where the fraying transatlantic partnership is rendering Europe weaker and more peripheral by the hour. As the Trump administration raises the spectre of retreat, a disoriented Europe is scrambling to shore up its defense, and Turkey — which boasts the second largest army in NATO and a burgeoning defense industry — suddenly looks like a formidable partner. Ankara seems to be aligning itself with the EU’s bloc of Atlanticist liberals, while European leaders have shown interest in enhanced cooperation. Turkey has been invited to attend various strategic meetings in Europe and the abrupt surge in overtures prompted Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to quip that the Europeans were now “rediscovering” Turkey’s existence.

Earlier this month, Erdoğan said that “establishing European security in the absence of [Turkey] is inconceivable”. Zelenskyy was already well aware of this. On the day peace talks between Russia and the United States began in Saudi Arabia last month, which sidelined both Ukraine and the EU, it was Erdoğan who the Ukrainian President chose to visit. Only the Turkish leader was capable of projecting strength enough to command the respect of both Putin and Trump. It is clear that, in the emergent Trumpian world, one shorn of liberal platitudes about “shared values” and “defending democracy”, Erdoğan carries more weight than Kaja Kallas and Olaf Scholz. And Turkey, a Black Sea power that has retained relations with both Russia and Ukraine, as well as China and the United States, now appears better positioned than many Western states.

Turkey’s new weight in global affairs seems to have emboldened Erdoğan to take drastic authoritarian measures domestically. Earlier this week, Turkish police arrested his main political rival, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, on charges of corruption and terrorism. Some 100 other people were also arrested in a crackdown on the opposition and government critics. With Trump in the White House and the EU’s relative strength diminished, Erdoğan knows there will be little substantive pushback as he employs draconian methods to extend his political longevity.

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The response to the political turmoil in Turkey has been dramatic: protesters have flooded the streets of Turkish cities and Turkish markets have tumbled since İmamoğlu’s arrest. If Erdoğan appears as an erratic autocrat at home, abroad he is seeking to depict himself as a constructive mediator and standard bearer of regional security. He has recently offered to host peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, leveraging Turkey’s middle power status to present Ankara as a constructive bridge builder. This expands on the role Turkey played earlier in the war, when, in early 2022, it negotiated the Black Sea grain deal and brokered peace talks. Positioning himself as an indispensable middleman, Erdoğan has also expressed support for Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine, while the two men call each other friends. Though Erdoğan had “no meaningful dialogue” with Biden, Trump has repeatedly described Erdoğan as “a very smart guy” and “very tough”; he has also credited the Turkish President with the fall of Assad. During an official phone call earlier this week, Trump reportedly told Erdoğan that he entrusted Turkey with Syria’s fate. Matching his words with action, Trump’s pick for US ambassador to Ankara is one of his closest and most trusted associates, Tom Barrack, the top fundraiser for the President’s 2016 campaign. It’s a position that has been vacant since early September.

Marginalized by America, EU membership has also long eluded Turkey. Though it became a candidate country around the turn of the millennium, its accession was blocked, ostensibly over its democratic deficits and human rights record. But many suspected this rationale concealed an unspoken truth: Turks are Muslim and therefore incompatible with the European project, which has always been more civilizational in character than its liberal proponents like to admit. On rare occasions, someone acknowledges this. In a 2002 interview, Convention on the Future of the EU chair (and former French President) Valéry Giscard d’Estaing said that Turkish membership would spell “the end of the EU as a political union”. Two years later, internal market commissioner Frits Bolkestein said that if Turkey joined the EU, the “liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain”.

In any case, European leaders have often found Turkey more useful outside the EU than in it. During the early years of the Syrian Civil War, millions of refugees entered Turkey. Then, in 2015, an unprecedented number fled onward into the EU. Eager to prevent further new arrivals, the EU struck a deal: Brussels would pay the Turkish government to house Syrians. As far as Europe was concerned, Turkey was a convenient buffer state, useful for the offshoring of the EU’s problems rather than an equal partner. The 2016 attempted coup in Turkey contributed to a further deterioration in relations with EU countries. But recent weeks have seen a reimagining of this relationship, with a country once regarded as a fringe irritant elevated to the status of major player integral in European security.

If recent months have seen the tables turn for Turkey-EU relations, then the shift in relations with Syria have been yet more momentous. Turkey opposed Assad right from the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, in 2011, and for years furnished the Islamist opposition with direct and indirect assistance. His fall last year, and the victory of opposition forces led by former al-Qaeda affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was celebrated as their own — and not without reason. There is talk that Turkey might train the new Syrian army and open airbases in the country; now that HTS is in power, Erdoğan is hoping to reshape the country and region to his liking. The ambition is political as well as economic: the day after Damascus fell, Turkish construction-related stocks, primarily in steelmakers and cement, soared to new heights. In Syria’s ruined infrastructure, Turkish firms see a lucrative opportunity.

Even recent massacres of members of the Alawite sect by Sunni militants have allowed Turkey to advance a long-held interest: the thwarting of the Kurdish led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Earlier this month, the new Syrian government signed a landmark agreement with the SDF, which Ankara views as a terrorist affiliate owing to its ties to Kurdish militants in Turkey. The agreement stipulates the integration of all civil and military institutions in SDF-held northeastern Syria into a unified Syrian state. The deal also dissolved the SDF’s autonomous administration, which Turkey regarded as a threat to its security. Pro-government media in Turkey has framed the agreement as a success in securing the SDF’s “disarmament”. Meanwhile, a delegation of senior Turkish officials rushed to Damascus to press for its implementation in line with Ankara’s interests.

While it may yet be derailed, the agreement would remove the main impediment to Turkey-US relations: the US backing of the SDF. America currently has 2,000 troops in Syria to support the SDF in its fight against ISIS, but the Trump administration has hinted it might recall them. The agreement between the SDF and Damascus is seen as a prerequisite for this.

Erdoğan also has high hopes that he can now repatriate many of the millions of Syrians who have fled to Turkey in recent years. If Syria’s security situation spirals into further sectarian violence, Erdoğan risks paying a heavy political price. The initial arrival of Syrian refugees provoked a xenophobic backlash in Turkey, boosting the electoral fortunes of the nationalist opposition to Erdoğan, who see the presence of so many conservative Muslims in the country as a threat to Turkey’s secular tradition. They will only return voluntarily to a stable, functioning Syria. The massacres earlier this month already mean that the Trump administration is all but certain to keep its crippling Assad-era sanctions in place, which will make it far harder to entice Syrians back home. Regime change in Damascus has therefore presented Erdoğan with both immense opportunities and risks.

Assad’s overthrow has also revived talk of the so-called “Turkish model” — an old idea that held up Turkey as the pinnacle of regional success. The model is associated with Erdoğan’s 2000s-era honeymoon period with the West. Turkish sociologist Cihan Tugal has described it as “a marriage of formal democracy, free market capitalism and (a toned down) conservative Islam — Islamic liberalism”. This meant that Erdoğan’s conservative Muslim government could justify un-Islamic practices like alcohol consumption in economic terms, as essential for boosting tourism. The model was a response to the Iranian revolution and the destabilizing reverberations it had sent throughout the region; it was an attempt to incorporate the threat of political Islam rather than suppressing it. During the first decade of the new millennium, many believed the Turkish model might be the answer to the Middle East’s woes: it promised to make Islam both governable and modern.

As far as Turkey’s Western admirers were concerned, the model was a success: it nurtured the entrepreneurial instincts of Anatolian businessmen and tempered any excesses in piety through exposure to globalization and international capital markets. At the height of the Arab Spring, in 2011, when the Turkish model was being prescribed for the entire region, Turkey’s economy was growing faster than any country in Europe. Infrastructure projects multiplied, the country’s network of roads grew by 10,000 miles; the number of airports doubled to 50; Turkish Airlines flew to more destinations than any other airline on Earth; and gleaming shopping malls and mosques proliferated across the country.

At first glance, it appears that the new leaders of Syria would be the ideal pupils for the Turkish model. Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa sounds a bit like Erdoğan did in the mid-2000s. While carefully cultivating a pious image for himself, the former al-Qaeda emir has promised an “inclusive” political process that will reflect the will of the people. He claims to have embraced pragmatism and fashions himself as a neoliberal. He’s so convincing that “globalists” of the old school have been desperate to hear more: in January, al-Sharaa’s foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani, was interviewed on the Davos stage by none other than Tony Blair. A few weeks later, al-Sharaa was a guest on Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s podcast The Rest is Politics.

Even in the unimaginably optimistic scenario that would see Syria replicate Turkey’s example, it wouldn’t be a recipe for universal success. The Turkish model always contained major flaws. For one thing, its vast economic growth was not felt by most Turks. Even at the pinnacle of the model’s supposed success, Turkey still had a high unemployment rate, and inequality was the third highest of all OECD countries. In the end, then, the Turkish model contained within it the seeds of its own demise: the new middle class that had been empowered and enriched by neoliberalization ultimately rebelled against Erdoğan’s neoliberal government, culminating in the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in 2013. The failures of the Arab Spring, along with the government’s draconian response to the Gezi Park unrest, spelled the end for the optimistic period associated with the Turkish model. As liberal, democratic Islam and a path to EU membership receded from view, a more conservative and authoritarian version took its place. Though Erdoğan kept the neoliberalism, this vision has endured there ever since.

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At the same time, Erdoğan’s grand ambitions for Turkey’s role in the world are constrained by a gloomy domestic reality. Turkey’s economy is now in tatters. Last summer, it sank into recession and inflation has been sky-high for years, hitting a peak of 85.5% in October 2022. As of December, it was still a staggering 44.4%. In spring of last year, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost the municipal elections to İmamoğlu’s secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in a sweeping, nationwide defeat.

The fall of Assad, then, was a life raft for Erdoğan, as he struggled to navigate these domestic woes. But the neoliberal Islam of early Erdoğan is unlikely to provide Damascus with a similar boost. Donning a suit, courting the affections of the WEF, and preaching the gospel of neoliberalism like a Pole in 1991 have not yet enabled the new Syrian government to bring sectarian strife under control, or convince their doubters that they seek to build anything other than a Sunni supremacist state. And even if they could, the fact that the Trump administration and other Right-wing populists are challenging the entire liberal order — tearing down free-trade treaties, withdrawing from multilateral institutions, and raising the specter of de-globalization — makes the Davos crowd and their models look even more outmoded, almost like a relic.

If Turkey can’t export peace or a recipe for economic growth to Syria, Erdoğan could yet profit from war. The country’s booming defense industry is fast becoming a source of national pride. According to Erdoğan, Turkey now ranks eleventh in the world in defense industry exports. Last year, its defense exports totalled $7.1 billion, an increase of 29% from $5.5 billion in 2023, while its defense products are now exported to 180 countries around the world. In particular, Turkey has excelled in the production of drones. Its flagship product, the Bayraktar TB2, has been described as “the drone that changed the nature of warfare” for its affordability and capacity to evade air defenses.

Also burgeoning is Turkey’s space program, though few outside of Turkey may have heard about it. Turkey is building up its existing space research and development to supplement its defense industry. At the end of last year, construction began on its first spaceport in Somalia. (Turkey opened its first African military base in Mogadishu in 2017 and is rapidly expanding its presence across Africa.) Meanwhile, the Turkish government has acknowledged that it plans to use its spaceport for missile testing. In space as on Earth, Turkey has sought to diversify its foreign relations: it has applied to join the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a planned lunar base led by the Russian Roscosmos and China’s National Space Administration that is a competitor to the American Artemis program. Erdoğan has also met with Elon Musk and the two are said to enjoy cordial relations, the Turkish president expressing an interest in collaborating with Musk in the future, since they are both “actively working in the fields of space and technology”.

With this array of cards to play, Erdoğan is now making a renewed bid for EU membership. This time, though, he is not just asking for Turkey’s accession; instead, he is fashioning himself as the EU’s savior. “It is Turkey and its full EU membership that can save the European Union from its deadlock, ranging from the economy to defense and from politics to international standing,” he said at the end of last month.

Of course, not everyone in Europe will be happy about the prospect of closer relations with Turkey. Erdoğan and his ambitions are still viewed with suspicion by many. Distrustful observers have deemed his civilizational rhetoric and aspirations “neo-Ottomanism” — an irredentist ideology that would supposedly see the return of old imperial lands to Turkey. Steve Bannon has described Erdoğan as “the most dangerous man in the world” over his alleged desire to restore the Ottoman Empire. Such fears are misplaced: “neo-Ottomanism” is more of a rhetorical device used to fire up his base than a sinister plan for territorial reconquest. Still, Erdoğan’s civilizational rhetoric makes some in Europe bristle. Only last year the Turkish President asserted that “the West’s progress — built on blood, tears, massacres, genocide, and exploitation… has temporarily gained the upper hand to strangle the divine and human-centered civilization of the East”. Such proclamations are standard fare among leaders outside the West, but surely trouble some in Europe.

Others still are concerned about Erdoğan’s “transactional” approach to foreign policy, on full display when Sweden and Finland made bids to join NATO. Erdoğan wielded Turkey’s veto power to block the membership of both Nordic states until they agreed to crack down on Kurdish exiles accused of terrorism. If some EU leaders are prepared to embrace Erdoğan to fortify European security, they know he’ll expect to receive something in return.

This week’s arrest of İmamoğlu will be another major concern for those already skeptical of deepening EU-Turkey relations. It will also be a significant test of widely touted “European values”: will European leaders prioritize defense and security (and therefore preserving their relationship with Erdoğan) over democracy? Blunt-force authoritarian tactics can only strengthen European reservations about the prospect of enhanced cooperation, but it is also entirely possible that European leaders will simply choose to look the other way: since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Brussels has pivoted to a more aggressive posture, adopting the vision of a so-called “geopolitical Europe” that is less concerned with values and has “at last learned to speak the language of power”. Erdoğan fits into such a picture perfectly.

Indeed, Turkey’s message of European renewal has been gaining traction. Though the EU is effectively closed to new members, and Turkish accession will not be forthcoming, the country is suddenly being treated as a formidable power worthy of respect. After four years of Biden, during which European liberals paid lip service to combating authoritarianism and defending democracy, their sudden embrace of Erdoğan reveals more than just the extent of Turkey’s new relative power. That the Europeans must line up now to kiss the sultan’s ring demonstrates how swiftly the world has changed.

To understand how the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) became Germany’s second-largest party, consider the events of the past five days. In an interview with the state broadcaster ZDF on Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), made the mistake of suggesting that he would be willing to work in a coalition with the far-Right party. Less than 24 hours later, after facing a barrage of outrage, he was forced into a humiliating U-turn. This is how Germany’s political class hopes to deal with the rise of the AfD: their political resonance is recognised, but any breaking of the cordon sanitaire around them is regarded as dangerous legitimisation.

Much as the mainstream parties have failed to stop it, liberal commentators have also struggled to comprehend the phenomenon. They blame the party’s rise on extraneous factors, from an insufficiently democratic culture in the east (where the AfD enjoys extensive support) to Russian disinformation. A new taboo seems to have been erected around even discussions of the AfD’s popularity, whereby attempting to understand their rise is seen as some kind of endorsement. But the reality is that the party has benefitted from saying out loud the ugly things that others won’t. It would be simpler if the AfD could be shrugged off as another evanescent populist movement. But while gaining from a generalised political dissatisfaction, in their language and rhetoric, they give voice to some fundamental objections to Germany’s political culture — some of which date back to the refounding of the modern nation in 1989.

There are more extremist elements in the party’s ranks which date even further back in Germany’s history. The party was bitterly divided during the pandemic over whether to expel Andreas Kalbitz, an influential former candidate for premier of Brandenburg, when it surfaced that he had been a member of a banned neo-Nazi organisation, German Youths Loyal to the Fatherland. Kalbitz held considerable sway over the party’s more extremist eastern division, whose members were staunchly opposed to his removal. But the AfD’s middle-class libertarian wing in the West insisted on kicking him out; in the end, this more moderate wing had the final say.

Yet today, the party still retains some odious figures. In June, prosecutors in Halle brought charges against Björn Höcke, the incendiary leader of the party’s Thuringia chapter and of its extremist Der Flügel faction, for using the Nazi stormtrooper line “Alles für Deutschland” at a public event in Saxony-Anhalt. And the extremist Right-wing elements within the AfD have increasingly been viewed as a security risk. In 2021, the AfD became the first post-war opposition party to be placed under surveillance by the domestic intelligence agency over fears of extremism.

Despite its Rightwards shift in recent years, the party has only grown more popular. And rather than attributing this to a tradition of neo-Nazi extremism, the reason for the AfD’s proximate rise is more straightforward — and for Germany’s ruling parties, self-inflicted. Above all, the AfD has successfully capitalised on widespread disenchantment with the ruling coalition.

This dissatisfaction is rich and various: there is ample discontent with the coalition’s immigration policies, energy and climate approach, economic policy and foreign policy, especially with respect to the war in Ukraine. Indeed, it seems there is very little that voters are not dissatisfied with, and the little support that the coalition still enjoys stems from simply not being the AfD. After the relative calm of the Merkel years, the back-to-back cataclysms of the pandemic and war in Ukraine have proven crippling for Germany’s political mainstream.

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For many, then, the AfD is a simple protest party: two-thirds of AfD voters say their support derives from disappointment with conventional parties, and only a third say they vote for the AfD out of conviction for its programme. And this is in keeping with the party’s historic strategy. Since their foundation 10 years ago, the AfD has shaped itself into an adaptable and protean vehicle for oppositional politics. Prior to the 2015 refugee crisis, this primarily came in the form of economic frustration. Founded as a free-market Eurosceptic party at the pinnacle of the euro crisis in 2013, the AfD initially opposed bailouts for southern European states and criticised Germany’s role in the euro, bemoaning her lost economic sovereignty.

But the refugee crisis would forever change its course. In that year, Germany took in nearly one million migrants, and the AfD seized on the attendant controversy by embracing a virulent new anti-migrant politics. The shift paid off enormously in the following elections. In 2017, the party secured representation in 14 of the 16 state parliaments and won 94 seats at the federal level to become the third-largest party in Germany. Today, the party’s stance on immigration still provides its bedrock of support.

The AfD’s message has resonated especially well in eastern Germany, where many of the exalted promises of reunification never materialised. Its affluent west has long struggled to fully acknowledge that the unparalleled moment of liberal triumph had serious downsides in its east. Between 1989 and 1991, more than 2.5 million people lost their jobs, while the number of workers in the manufacturing sector fell from 3.3 million to 1.7 million. Over 90% of East German factories and firms were bought up by West German companies. Seizing on this phenomenon of democratic disappointment, recent AfD campaigns have invoked and repurposed the rhetoric of 1989 (the Wende or “turnabout” of reunification), with calls to “complete” the unfinished revolution. For the AfD, the “establishment”, embodied in the conventional parties, constitutes another undemocratic imposition that must be removed as the DDR leadership once was. For instance, the AfD borrowed heavily from the so-called “peaceful revolution” around the fall of the Berlin Wall for its 2019 campaign in the eastern state of Thuringia. Their campaign materials were headed “1989-2019: Be There When History Is Made” and posters spoke of a “Wende 2.0”. The local leader, Björn Höcke, made the appropriation more explicit: “We’re completing the revolution!” he shouted at one rally.

He was drawing on an widely unacknowledged thrum of despondency in Germany’s political firmament. For the country’s victorious liberals, 1989 and the next year’s unification were a moment of unparalleled triumph. “This is a day of undiminished rejoicing,” Nato Secretary-General and former Defence Minister of West Germany Manfred Worner said in 1990. With such a self-congratulatory historical record, few wish to discuss the limitations and broken promises of transition. Instead of acknowledging that the “peaceful revolution” failed to deliver on its assurance of prosperity, they opt to blame the AfD’s popularity on the east’s “anti-democratic culture” produced by the experience of the “two totalitarianisms”, and condemn them for their “misuse” of the memory of unification. They fundamentally see the AfD’s popularity in the former DDR as a symptom of East Germany’s political immaturity.

But it isn’t democracy — or the free market — that AfD supporters in the east are against, nor do they seek a return to the DDR. First, the AfD has always been a virulently anti-redistributionist party. This makes the AfD somewhat distinct from other far-Right populist parties in Europe: it has never adopted pro-welfare policies or rhetoric in an effort to court voters from lower socioeconomic strata. Even less affluent AfD supporters report a preference for lower redistribution than the most affluent non-AfD supporters. Meanwhile, whatever their political conditioning, East Germans are also overwhelmingly supportive of democracy. A recent survey by EFBI revealed that 91% of East Germans identify with democracy as an idea, though less than half find satisfaction with the everyday practice and experience of democracy. And even as AfD moves further Right, it is increasingly seen as a “normal democratic party”. According to a survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research, 17% of Germans described the party in those terms in 2016; today, that number has risen to 27%.

The subtlety that has been missed is that the language of democracy, along with the rest of the rhetoric of 1989, has proven ideologically malleable — as easily deployed in service of the far-Right as in service of socially liberal politics. A lurid example came with the recycling of the slogan “we are the people”, originally borne on the revolutionary streets of Leipzig in 1989. In 2016, a mob of demonstrators, some of them supporters of AfD, shouted the slogan to protest the arrival of a bus carrying migrants in Clausnitz.

Yet however odious the twin rise of the German far-Right and the country’s wartime remilitarisation might sound, it is also significant that the militaristic impulse is not being driven by the AfD. Instead, it is the once-pacifist Greens that are leading the hawkish charge on the war in Ukraine. Here, the AfD has positioned itself as the anti-war opposition, calling for peace negotiations and restraint on sending arms. And there is evidence that the AfD’s nose for popular outrage is still serving them well. The “traffic light” coalition’s Ukraine policies are increasingly unpopular with large swathes of the electorate. A recent YouGov poll revealed that 55% of Germans now favour peace negotiations to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, while only 28% are opposed.

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A secondary outcome of the Ukraine war has also helped to propel the AfD. As energy prices soared over the winter and German cities discussed turning off their streetlights, the AfD defined itself in opposition to the so-called “Green agenda”. A much-reviled government plan to phase out oil and gas-heating systems caused immense public backlash (a single heat pump costs between €11,000 and €25,000 per household). Even with a partial government subsidy of up to 40%, this is simply not affordable for many people in Germany. As a result, relatively poor AfD voters now regard the Green Party as the antagonist of working Germans; according to one poll support for the climate movement in Germany has halved from 68% to 34% in the last two years).

Added to this, of course, is a broader, more chastening realisation: Germany is no longer Europe’s economic powerhouse, no longer the continent’s workshop. Earlier this year, the country slipped into a technical recession, and the IMF now predicts the country’s economy will shrink by 0.3% this year, contradicting Olaf Scholz’s predictions. The heady days of unification, then, with the Deutschmark as an idol of West German affluence and a post-war pacifist tradition firmly intact, have given way to a much bleaker wartime reality. And as long as the AfD articulates this disenchantment the most powerfully, it will be the chief beneficiary of Germany’s fall from the heights of exception.

In 2023, Germany, like much of Europe, faces a massive new wave of refugees, but the widespread mood of certainty embodied by Wir schaffen das! has long since faded. Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, says he will take unprecedented steps to limit immigration.

In those heady days of 2015, volunteers greeted trainloads of exhausted people at the Munich main station with food packages and applause. I too played a tiny part in Willkommenskultur. On a rainy evening in November of that year, via a chat group organised by volunteers, I picked up a Syrian in his early thirties called Mohammed from the throng of people outside Berlin’s overwhelmed refugee registration office, gave him a meal and bed for the night, then drove him back in the morning. We had no common language, but he showed me a photo of his wife and two kids back in Aleppo. I understood he was a car mechanic. I gave him my number, in case he needed anything, knowing he’d never call.

Many Germans did far more than me, hosting families for months and years. They helped out with bureaucracy and language issues. Eight years later, there are countless examples of how Syrians and people of other nationalities have settled successfully in Germany, from outstanding Syrian restaurants in Berlin, to young people who found tech jobs, to a village in the supposedly hostile East where the arrival of Syrian families meant the local school could stay open.

Then there were the dark chapters. Reports of violent crimes involving immigrants shook Willkommenskultur to the core: the 2016 truck attack against a Berlin Christmas market by an unsuccessful asylum applicant from Tunisia that killed 12; the sexual assault of dozens of women by a crowd of largely immigrant men in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2015. Nonetheless, despite the enormous strain on Germany’s health, welfare and educational systems, within a year or two there was a general sense that immigration was by and large under control again, not least thanks to Merkel’s shaky deal with Turkey, under which Erdoğan agreed to take back “irregular” migrants who had reached Greece islands from Turkey in exchange for billions of euros.

Today, by contrast, Merkel’s deal with Turkey could crumble if Erdoğan’s challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu wins the second round of the country’s presidential election. He’s vowed to send millions of Syrians back to Syria, though some might risk entering Europe. Meanwhile, a million Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war have settled in Germany. Perhaps due to an inner European solidarity, Ukrainians receive preferential retreat and are immediately granted the right to work and the same welfare benefits as Germans. At the same time, the number of refugees and asylum seekers from elsewhere has been rising steadily too, people from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Moldova and many other places. This year, 300,000 non-Ukrainian migrants are expected to apply for asylum in Germany, according to an estimate by the CDU’s parliamentary group.

And with these rising figures, new tensions have started to simmer. At a school in Ludwigshafen where 98% of children come from immigrant families, a third of pupils had to repeat their first year because of a lack of basic German skills. There have also been reports of racist violence, such as when, last week, a group of largely immigrant pupils attending a maths camp in a village in the former East was attacked by local children shouting racist insults. The pupils were evacuated under police protection. Refugee homes housing Ukrainians have also been attacked in the East, where scepticism about support for Ukraine runs high. In the Eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland leads the opinion polls, with 28% support — placing more pressure on the political mainstream to stem immigration.

Faced with this crisis, Chancellor Scholz’s “traffic light” coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals seems to have got the memo. At a “refugee summit” last week, he committed to an additional €1 billion to be spent this year on housing, integration and digitalisation measures to help speed up the asylum application process. Even in 2023, most immigration paperwork (and much of the rest of the German bureaucratic apparatus) is processed on paper. That, combined with severe labour shortages on all levels of administration, means applications can take two years. And asylum-seekers have the right to appeal decisions. Some 300,000 people have received deportation notices but also given temporary Duldung or “toleration” status due to extenuating humanitarian or personal circumstances. A Duldung usually means you can work — which means many find a job and then get deported anyway, to the chagrin of German firms struggling from labour shortages.

Scholz, however, appears to have woken up to the fact that cities actually want a reduction of the flow of people into Germany. He has, for instance, promised more spot checks at Germany’s borders. He spoke about beefing up “infrastructure” at the outer EU border, meaning more fences, more money for the border agency Frontex, more surveillance drones. He wants to expand the list of countries deemed safe, meaning their citizens will be excluded from asylum. EU candidates Moldova and Georgia are expected to be added next.

Scholz also favours two policies the European Commission and other member states have been talking about for years. The first is fast-track asylum processing at the point that migrants enter the EU, in places like Malta and Lampedusa. Rejected applicants could be returned to the countries they had come from.

This raises the spectre of the human rights nightmare of returning immigrants back to lawless nations such as Libya — but a second policy is supposed to prevent such scenarios: a mesh of treaties between the EU and countries in Africa and the Middle East which would require those countries to take back unsuccessful asylum applicants while at the same time opening up legal avenues to a certain amount of labour immigration into Europe. The hope is that this people would apply in their home countries instead of risking a dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean, which in turn could provide the labour — skilled and unskilled — required by an ageing society with a low birth rate, where millions of baby boomers are about to retire. Spain already has a similar agreement with Morocco, but getting all of the EU onboard will be a Herculean task.

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Strangely, in Germany, major political shifts often occur under the leadership of parties ideologically opposed to those shifts. The centre-left SPD cut welfare in the Nineties. Same-sex marriage and the country’s first minimum wage happened under Merkel. Now the SPD, with their Green and Liberal partners, could herald in an era of stricter immigration rules. These are early days, though. The Greens will likely throw a spanner in the works or at least do what they can to ensure a path for genuine asylum-seekers who face persecution due to their politics and or sexual identity.

It’s unlikely, then, that Germany will turn into a giant Denmark, where even a Social Democrat-led government is gunning for zero asylum-seekers. Germany says it won’t compete in a race to the bottom when it comes to cutting benefits for refugees as a deterrent. It’s no secret that officials from Greece to Switzerland encourage migrants to travel on to Germany, a practice that conflicts with the Dublin Regulation, under which asylum applicants are supposed to apply in the first EU country they set foot in, but 2015 proved that Dublin was unworkable once and for all. Under a new Europe-wide deal, Germany hopes for a more distribution of asylum-seekers and refugees across the continent — probably pie in the sky.

Yet whatever happens in the coming months, Scholz’s new immigration course has already shifted the parameters of what a mainstream politician can say. Former health minister and immigration hardliner Jens Spahn of the CDU, who memorably complained about the pressing cultural issue of embarrassed Arab men showering in their underwear at his gym, broke a taboo on a chat show last week. Perhaps Germany, he said, needed to rethink the right to political asylum anchored in its 1949 constitution, which is outdated because it was drafted in response to the massive population movements in Europe following the war. Since Germany was responsible for the vast human misery of the war, so went the thinking, it should take a generous stance towards the oppressed and persecuted fleeing dictatorships across Europe and the world. Eighty years later, the burden of war guilt could be lifting — and with it, the spirit of Wir schaffen das! is taking on a whole new meaning.

After two world wars, an aversion to military conflict has long hampered Berlin’s ability to act decisively and shoulder its fair share of responsibility as part of the Western alliance. In the past decade, Germany’s defence budget barely made it across the 1% mark of GDP, never mind the 2% required by Nato. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the fallacies of Germany’s unconditional pacifism, it plunged Berlin into an identity crisis. A national rethink was in order and Chancellor Olaf Scholz dramatically declared in February 2022 that a Zeitenwende, a watershed moment, was underway: “the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.” While German aid to Ukraine was initially sluggish and always badly communicated, it is now among its biggest financial and military supporters. Only yesterday, 18 German Leopard 2s arrived in Ukraine.

There are many Germans who can’t and won’t kiss old certainties goodbye. But the two world wars at the root of modern German angst were all-encompassing catastrophes that plunged the entire country into a moral abyss. This trauma is a national one and, since Russia’s invasion, has triggered a lively public debate, leading to a degree of change. Alongside a vastly increased military budget for the German army, Berlin has also just announced that it wants to raise military aid for Ukraine from currently €3 billion to more than €15 billion in the next few years — a clear sign that it is beginning to come around to the idea of contributing to European security on a much greater scale despite its historical inhibitions.

The same cannot be said about another legacy of Germany’s tumultuous 20th century: the fact that it spent much of the latter half as two separate countries. Between 1949 and 1990 two Germanies existed: the Federal Republic in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East. Each found very different ways to move on from the horrors of war and genocide. And unification in 1990 was not enough to foster agreement on Germany’s response to armed conflict, particularly not one that involves Russia.

When East Germany vanished overnight, 16 million people who had been born there became citizens of a country that was in many ways alien to them. Their fellow Germans on the other side of the Berlin Wall may have shared their language and cultural roots, but they had an entirely different understanding of modern Germany’s place in the world.

From West Germany’s very foundation in 1949, its first chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s transatlantic outlook and focus on reconciliation with France laid the groundwork for a thoroughly Western political identity. His American partners supported this process, seeing in West Germany the easternmost outpost of the democratic world, one they wanted to fortify against Soviet influence. As a result of its ringside seat on the fault lines of the Cold War, West Germany became a fully fledged member of Nato in 1955, a mere decade after the end of the most devastating war the world had ever seen. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower declared in 1951 that he did “not believe that the German soldier as such has lost his honour” in the Second World War. Adenauer was trusted to rebuild a German army, the Bundeswehr, in the early Fifties.

Adenauer saw no conflict in the fact that he was binding German soldiers to their former Western enemies. He declared in 1955 that Nato’s objectives were “in full harmony with the natural interest of the German nation”. While many Germans, particularly his opponents on the Left, disagreed with him, he pressed ahead, spending over 4% of GDP on defence in almost every year of his tenure, from 1949 to 1963. Bundeswehr pilots learned how to drop American nuclear bombs which were stationed on their soil alongside American nuclear-capable missiles. With male conscription reintroduced in 1956, West German men learnt to fight for and with Nato. Even as defence spending was gradually reduced and a powerful peace movement evolved in West Germany with anti-American strains, the bulk of society remained firmly Western in outlook. Nato was a partner, not the enemy.

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It was this outlook that East Germans were expected to share when they joined the Federal Republic in 1990. After all, they had gleefully watched Western television in secret and obsessed over branded American jeans. They had eventually joined mass demonstrations to bring down their socialist system and then voted for parties that had advocated a swift and one-sided unification process. It seemed reasonable to assume that they had shared the pro-Western outlook of their counterparts on the other side of the Iron Curtain all along.

Yet East Germans were not asked to return to something they were once part of, but to blend into a state that had evolved without them. They had served in the National People’s Army, formed in 1956, and were integrated into the Warsaw Pact. Unlike the trust Adenauer had enjoyed from his American Allies, the East German leadership had a rather different relationship with Moscow. During the Prague Spring in 1968, when the Soviets suppressed political reform in Czechoslovakia, East German troops only formed supply lines and were kept directly under Soviet command. It was a decision made in Moscow, not in Berlin, that they weren’t deployed in open combat. The East German authorities didn’t even know how many Soviet troops were stationed on their own soil (still around 350,000 in the Eighties). They relied on guesswork based on water use in Soviet military installations to gain a vague picture. This peculiar mixture of being tied to Moscow without enjoying its confidence defined the East German experience for 41 years.

Military affiliation is just one facet of the worlds that collided in 1990. East Germans had learned Russian at school, they read Russian literature, watched Russian films, and had Russian partner schools and organisations. Meanwhile, West Germans learnt English and watched Hollywood movies.

Unsurprisingly, these differences still echo today. According to one survey carried out last month, only a quarter of Germans living in the former East think of the US as a “reliable ally”, as opposed to the majority of West Germans. Fewer easterners also deem Russia a threat to peace, (though the figure is still high at 73%). Meanwhile, East German politicians such as Michael Kretschmer, the Minister President of Saxony, or Sahra Wagenknecht, a vocal member of the far-Left party Die Linke, have been among the most ardent supporters of a swift peace in Ukraine — even if this means severe concessions towards the Russian aggressor.

On Russia and Ukraine, many Germans in the eastern states keenly feel the economic legacy of division. It is here that oil and gas connections, such as Druzhba, one of the world’s longest oil pipelines, once delivered Russian energy. Many German locals were involved in its construction in the Sixties. Today, however, sanctions and escalating tensions have seen the pipes dry up, leaving entire regions uncertain about their economic future.

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Yet all these ongoing rifts have largely been ignored. East Germans are a minority: there are more than five times as many West Germans. In terms of actual representation, the picture is even more slanted. In his new book, Dirk Oschmann, an academic who was born in the GDR, points out that only 1.7% of the senior positions in media, research, the justice system and the civil service are currently occupied by East Germans. It has been a bestseller for weeks in Germany, obviously voicing concerns that many feel have been ignored for too long.

Will King Charles, caught up in the circus of his first foreign trip as monarch, also ignore them? It seems unlikely, given his special affinity with Germany. He has visited the country more than 40 times since his first trip at the age of 13, and has dazzled audiences with speeches delivered in fluent German. He will also make a point of visiting places in the former East, such as the rural village of Brodowin, 50 miles north-east of Berlin. The respect he will show small East German businesses — such as by visiting an Ökodorf, an eco-farm, where he will make his own cheese — makes the important point that a state visit to Germany should include its eastern regions. At a time when almost 60% of East Germans say they feel second-class citizens in their own country, Berlin’s political class would do well to take note.

For while Germany rethinks its position in the world and in Europe following Ukraine, it needs to rethink its society too. When the East German state disappeared in 1990, the life experiences of its former citizens did not. To airbrush 41 years of political, social and economic history out of the national story as a failed experiment, an anomaly or the side show to the continuity narrative is as ahistorical as it is unhelpful. Reunification was a step towards bringing the nation back together, not the happy ending of that path. A Zeitenwende in German foreign policy might be underway, but a domestic watershed is needed too.

The plan will involve not only the upgrade of Japanese weapons but the procurement of at least 400 US-made Tomahawk cruise missiles. It is a decision some have interpreted as effectively superseding the pacifist constitution and putting Japan on the road to becoming a military superpower.

The initiative shows how seriously Japan’s government takes the threat of an invasion of Taiwan. A Chinese takeover would be calamitous, as it would endanger the shipping lines that supply much of the country’s manufacturing materials and nearly all of its oil. With an American response far from guaranteed, the Japanese clearly feel they need to take their own precautions and signal their intentions unambiguously.

At present, Japan has a unified military structure, the Japan Self-Defence Force (JSDF), founded in 1954. With nearly a quarter of a million personnel, its original purpose was domestic security, logistical (non-combat) support for international peacekeeping missions under the auspices of the UN, and reassuring the population that Japan wasn’t completely defenceless.

Japan was obliged, under Article 9 of the 1947 constitution, to renounce war as a “sovereign right of the nation” — the only country ever to do so. The exact wording stated that Japan would never again maintain “land sea or air forces”, but over time the JDSF has developed from its initial Dad’s Army-style and scale into a significant military force, with license to operate overseas, albeit in limited circumstances. The rearmament plan marks a significant step towards Article 9’s further reinterpretation, this time into virtual meaninglessness.

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Japan’s defence from external threat has long been the preserve of US forces stationed in the country, sanctioned under the Security Treaty signed in 1951 and renewed periodically thereafter. A reorientation of this arrangement would liberate the US from much of its responsibility in the region and a good deal of the cost. The UK is also set to gain, as witnessed by the trinational fighter jet deal with Italy and new defence agreement signed in January.

How do ordinary Japanese people feel about it? The majority, it seems, are pleased. In an opinion poll published by public broadcaster NHK last month, 51% supported increased spending on the military, with 36% opposed. Where once any move to increase the radius of Japan’s military aegis would have seen thousands marching through the streets; now, there are only a few forlorn-looking protesters in Shinjuku station. The press is onside too, with even the Left-wing Tokyo Shimbun newspaper seemingly reconciled to the new direction.

The war in Ukraine has been a powerful catalyst in this change of mood. Nightly coverage of devastated Ukrainian cityscapes has reminded the Japanese that they have had their own quarrels with Russia in the past (over the Kuril Islands), and the threat of a nuclear option sends a chill down the spines of citizens of the only country to have suffered atomic destruction. Kishida himself is from Hiroshima and several members of his extended family were killed in the atomic bombing.

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As for energy, Japan imports 90% of its supply — with 9% coming from Russia — and so is especially vulnerable to disruptions to supply chains. Last May, Kishida announced the restart of the country’s nuclear energy programme, partly suspended as a result of the Fukushima disaster. This, too, was met with little opposition. The anti-nuclear energy movement, once formidable, has weakened considerably in recent years in parallel with the anti-Article 9 revisionists. It was reported in August that 60% of Japanese supported the restart, fuelled by concerns of a winter energy crunch if the Russians were to cut off supply.

The personality of Kishida may be a significant factor too. It is ironic that the current Prime Minister, seen as a milder, more Left-leaning figure than his predecessor Shinzo Abe, should be the one to reposition Japan as a significant military power, realising his forebear’s lifetime goal. But Abe, whose father had volunteered to be a kamikaze pilot and whose grandfather was a Class-A war criminal, was too closely associated with the war, and with the far-Right, for his arguments for reforming Article 9 to be accepted without suspicion. He was seen by many, fairly or unfairly, as an ultra-nationalist who sought to restore Japan to its pre-war glory and military dominance.

Kishida, by contrast, isn’t viewed with such animosity. The mild-mannered former banker is part of the moderate Kōchikai faction within the ruling party, which has generally supported a dovish foreign policy. He has acquired a reputation as being broadly supportive of the pacifist constitution, or at least lukewarm about revising it. For this reason, the Japanese seem more willing to believe his argument — that, in an increasingly dangerous world, the rearmament is necessary and defensive in nature, and not part of a secret plan to return to the dark imperial past.

But can he pull it off? This is the big question. Germany has made similar promises about bolstering its lacklustre armed forces in recent months and so far, they have yielded few concrete results. Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a €100 billion increase to its defence budget nearly a year ago, with promises to make a significant contribution to Ukraine. But apart from a few military vehicles, little has been forthcoming from the Federal Republic. There have even been hints that Germany may resile from its spending pledge altogether.

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The rearmament plan could unfold in a similarly nebulous fashion in Japan. Announcing a major new policy direction is one thing, turning it into a reality quite another. Kishida’s once impressive approval ratings have plunged since his controversial decision to award Shinzo Abe a state funeral. Beset by scandals that have seen four cabinet ministers resign in the last year, and with the fallout from revelations of his party’s close relationship with the cultish Unification Church ongoing, his political capital is low.

As for actual capital, it is unclear how the rearmament will be funded. Koichi Nakano, Professor of Comparative Politics at Tokyo’s Sophia University, says it is “most likely unaffordable”, without adding to Japan’s already-colossal public debt. The Japanese economy is in terrible shape; 2022 saw a disastrous current account deficit, the Yen has tumbled, and that once-peculiar foreign phenomenon inflation has begun to manifest itself. Signs have gone up in shop windows apologising, in exquisitely formal language, for even modest price increases. Tax rises are the obvious answer, but polling suggests the Japanese are resolutely against higher taxes to pay for an increased military in times like these.

This leaves Kishida in danger of overpromising. For along with the military buildup, he has committed himself to dealing with Japan’s demographic crisis by huge increases in welfare spending. The world’s oldest country is losing hundreds of thousands of citizens every year as the old die off and the young stubbornly refuse to procreate. By some estimates, on this trajectory, the Japanese will cease to exist in a couple of hundred years. The obvious quick fix is a massive increase in immigration, but that is still anathema to most Japanese who view their culture as a unique and delicate artefact that wouldn’t survive the rough touch of legions of imported citizens. Many Japanese are asking themselves: will it be babies, or bombs?

Today, around 50 defence ministers from around the world are meeting at the US air base in Ramstein, not far from Frankfurt, to again discuss western military support for Ukraine. Naturally, Germany will be in the spotlight. The US and other allies are counting on Scholz to take on more responsibility, to assume more leadership in Europe’s greatest security crisis in decades. And Scholz has been making the noises that Germany’s allies have hoped to hear: in a recent article in Foreign Affairs he writes: “Germans are intent on becoming the guarantor of European security that our allies expect us to be.” This echoes Scholz’s stated aim of making Germany a Führungsmacht, a leading power. But how close is he to achieving it? Very, very far.

The visiting defence ministers will encounter a Germany riddled with problems. For one, Monday saw the resignation of the incompetent defence minister, Christine Lambrecht. By Tuesday a new one, Boris Pistorius, had been named. He’s in for a baptism of fire. Germany has been under enormous pressure to supply the Leopard 2 battle tanks that Ukraine has been requesting for months — or at least to green light the re-export of the German-made fighting vehicles from countries like Poland and Finland. And that pressure was ramped up a notch this week by Britain’s decision to provide Challenger tanks.

In truth, there’s little willingness in Germany to spare any of the 340-odd Leopard 2s in use by the nation’s army. The government, on this front, has been dithering and stalling — or at least is that how it comes across publicly. Back in October, Scholz’ spin doctor Wolfgang Schmidt had all sorts of strange excuses not to provide the tanks. The Ukrainians wouldn’t be capable of maintaining the sophisticated German machines. Or, even weirder, the iron cross on the tanks would indicate to the Russians that the Germans were an active participant in the war. At which Ukrainians tweeted: “Don’t worry, we have paint.”

As with every German weapons delivery, making it happen would take a solid kick up the arse from President Joe Biden. Perhaps one was delivered in the phone call between the two men on Tuesday. But at the Davos summit the next day, Scholz’s communication on Ukraine was still vague and non-committal. When asked about the Leopards, he dodged the question and rattled off a list of armaments that Germany has delivered so far. It’s true that these armaments have not been insignificant. They have included howitzers, mobile anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missile systems. This month, the German government pledged 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles — but only after dragging its feet for months.

Why isn’t the Zeitenwende happening a little quicker? Partly because Germany’s military structures are sclerotic. Modernising them must be the eternal quest of the nation’s defence minister. Especially bureaucratic is the procurement of weapons and gear. A small example: a pedantic military official once noticed, while purchasing tanks, that they didn’t have mirrors that conformed to the German highway code — so he or she absolutely insisted on getting them installed, complicating and slowing down the acquisition.

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Ursula von der Leyen, while serving as Angela Merkel’s defence minister, hired McKinsey to sort out the Bundeswehr’s crusty organisational structures. A consulting budget of €2.5 million ballooned into €100 million, in what was known as the “consultant affair”. Relevant data requested by a parliamentary enquiry vanished under von der Leyen’s watch — but none of the allegations stuck. And although she massively boosted defence spending, the operational problems persisted.

Even more useless was Lambrecht, who took the reins of the defence ministry in December 2021, when Olaf Scholz’s coalition assumed power. In response to the Russian invasion a few months later, she dispatched 5,000 helmets to Ukraine, earning her ridicule. But her true talent was social media blunders, which included a post of her son riding in a military helicopter, and a New Year’s Eve video message with a backdrop of exploding pyrotechnics that sounded a lot like artillery fire. Empathy wasn’t her strength. Neither was running the military. She achieved practically nothing with a budget of €100 billion. Last month, all 18 Puma armed personnel carriers participating in an exercise broke down, coming to symbolise how ill-prepared the German army is for combat.

Lambrecht’s replacement, Boris Pistorius, is said to be a tough-talking, no-nonsense kind of guy. His appointment has upset the gender parity of the Scholz cabinet, attracting criticism from the Left. But hiring a capable minister should probably take precedent at this point. There’s a war out there — and the double challenge of getting Ukraine what it needs and turning the German army into an effective defence force once more is enormous to say the least.

But it’s not just practical challenges slowing down the tectonic shift. Equally complex are the beliefs that inform the German approach to Ukraine. Pro-Russian and anti-American impulses are common on the political fringes, among both the far-Right AfD and far-Left Die Linke, but also among mainstream politicians, including Michael Kretschmer, the premier of the eastern state of Saxony. This is the same Michael Kretschmer who called for the repair of the Nord Stream 1 undersea pipeline that was attacked in September. We’ll need that cheap Russian gas after the war, Kretschmer said. Granted, his state has close business links to Russia, but isn’t it a little early to start cozying up to the aggressor?

As I’ve written for UnHerd, many East Germans feel less connected to “The West” as an idea. It’s common in this region to reject military support for Ukraine and believe in a negotiated peace with Putin. Which is confounding when you remember that East Germans staged a peaceful revolution to free themselves from the Soviet bloc. That Ukrainians were also part of that bloc doesn’t seem to make East Germans more sympathetic to their resistance.

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How influenced is Scholz by such sentiments? None of the parties in his coalition are anti-western, per se. But last summer, Scholz’ foreign policy adviser Jens Plötner snapped dismissively: “You can fill many newspaper pages with 20 Marders [the fighting vehicles Germany would pledge to Ukraine], but larger articles about our future relationship with Russia are less frequent. That question is at least as exciting and relevant.” Plötner has, for years, played a key role in Germany’s appeasement of Russia. His comments came not long after the discovery of mass graves in Bucha.

It’s not so much what Germany does as how, according to Benjamin Tallis, senior fellow at the German Council for Foreign Relations, and author of the new book To Ukraine with love: Essays on Russia’s war and Europe’s future. For him, Germany is “moving at the speed of shame. It’s been pressured into taking every one of its steps to support Ukraine. Its leadership, particularly in the chancellery, has seemed extremely reluctant to take each one of those steps, or even providing weapons at all. Now we see it again on the Leopards, the main battle tanks that would really be a game changer.”

To Tallis, the German approach is “a nostalgic politics for the recent past”, when Germany outsourced “its energy needs to Russia, its security needs to the US and its trade to China”. Since the defeat of Nazi Germany, West Germany has taken an ever more pacifist approach to foreign policy. In the late Sixties there was Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which allowed the Federal Republic to begin importing natural gas from the Soviet Union. And then came 1989.

As Thomas Bagger, currently Germany’s ambassador to Poland, articulates in his 2019 essay “The world according to Germany: Reassessing 1989”, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany — more than any other country — took Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” to heart. Or, at least, an oversimplified version of Fukuyama’s thesis. Liberal democracy embedded in a rules-based international order was, in Germany, the only model with any future. Authoritarian powers like Russia and China could be turned into friendly, liberal partners if only you did enough business with them.

“Even long after it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, they continued to pursue this,” says Tallis. “It was remarkably comfortable, remarkably easy. You got to pretend you were doing good by doing well.” And all the while you whittle down your armed forces from nearly 500,000 troops in the Eighties to 180,000 today (a mere 24,000 of them combat-ready soldiers). You retire most of your military hardware, kick back and enjoy the peace dividend, under the umbrella of continued American protection.

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The chickens have come home to roost, thanks to the war. Or, as Tallis puts it: “The hypocrisy of Germany’s position is coming out now.” Its recent history shaped by the idea that “Germans, having atoned for their past, had moved beyond these very 20^th century vices of war, violence and power politics”, the nation has fallen foul of a “head-in-the-sand approach: We can get away with this while others sully their hands.”

One German commentator describes the lingering recalcitrance this way: “It sometimes seems like there’s been an accident, someone is injured, and there’s a bunch of people standing around. And Germany thinks, hopefully someone knows what they’re doing and takes decisive action to help the person, otherwise they might die. There’s a war in Europe, it would be good if someone did something. But Zeitenwende means we’re the ones who have to do something.”

Germany is doing something. The question is: is it enough? Despite the words coming out of Scholz’s mouth, it still feels as though the nation is in denial about the fact that there’s a devastating war raging just two countries away. Or it is, at least, in denial about the nature of that war — and the huge geopolitical shift it represents. Perhaps today, faced with so many of the world’s defence ministers, the nation will pull its head out the sand.

Instead, Abbas launched into a tirade about Israeli crimes, saying that Israel had committed not only “50 massacres” but, in fact, “50 Holocausts”. The visibly annoyed Scholz did not think on his feet quickly enough to contradict Abbas’s relativisation of the Holocaust. Somewhat surreally, after Abbas had finished the two men shook hands and walked off.

Outrage was quick to follow. Abbas backtracked on his statement, and Scholz publicly stated his anger at what Abbas had said. Some German commentators suggested that Germany should rethink its funding for the Palestinian Authority. That idea did not gain traction. After all, the Palestinian Authority governs over those dense population centres in the West Bank that Israel, the occupying power since 1967, does not wish to govern itself. Germany’s funding of the corrupt, inefficient, and undemocratic Palestinian Authority is in Israel’s interest. Ironically, yet largely unbeknown to the outraged German Twitterati, defunding Abbas is a demand that many of Israel’s strongest critics would happily get behind.

As much as it likes to claim the role of the peace-seeking outsider, Germany is deeply entrenched in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not only because of the importance of the Holocaust to the creation and self-understanding of the Jewish state. Germany played an important role in the conflict via its crucial economic, financial, and military support of Israel, especially before 1967. But the 1972 terrorist attacks, and Germany’s relationship with them even 50 years on, throw a spotlight on Germany’s true role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and its connected efforts to whitewash its barbaric past.

Munich was the second time Germany had been invited to host the Olympics. The first invitation came after the First World War, the follow-up after the Second. Both times, the idea was to symbolically welcome Germany back into the circle of “civilised” nations. When, in 1931, Germany was awarded the games to be held in 1936, the Olympic Committee did not envisage the imminent rise of Adolf Hitler to power. The infamous Nazi Olympics became a showcase for Nazi power and ideology. Jews were largely barred from participating.

In 1972, with Social Democrat and former Nazi opponent Willy Brandt in power, the danger of Germany backsliding into Nazism seemed remote. The Federal Republic appeared to be firmly entrenched in the Western bloc. It was also becoming a more autonomous player on the world stage via Brandt’s Russia-embracing Ostpolitik (itself a policy under much scrutiny these days). For West Germany, the 1972 Olympics were another milestone on the road to normalisation, and an occasion to show the world the friendly face of the “new” Germany.

There was, however, something schizophrenic about this effort. Twenty-seven years after the German defeat, most former Nazis and their legions of enablers were still alive. More than that, they were respected members of society. Post-war Germany had normalised its Nazis even before the world had normalised the new Germany. The bureaucrats, professors, diplomats, teachers, journalists, and captains of industry on which the West German state was founded all too often were compromised figures.

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And it could not have been otherwise. The main reason Western allies never saw denazification through was that getting rid of the Nazis would have meant crippling the German state to such a degree that it would have been unable to fulfil its function as a frontline state in the Cold War. The Cold War enabled the survival of the German state at the cost of letting most perpetrators go unpunished. Most recently, David De Jong’s new book Nazi Billionaires shows to what extent Germany’s tycoon families owe their wealth to their involvement in Nazi crimes. His study is the latest of historical efforts to show the extent to which the new Germany was built on the old.

Due to the manifold continuities of Nazism in the new republic — not least in terms of lingering antisemitic and racist attitudes and an only slowly-eroding authoritarian mindset — West Germany needed to signal to the outside world a democratic and civil character. While this was especially true of the immediate post-war years, virtue signalling to the outside world has long become part of the German foreign policy package (a tough pursuit of economic interest being the other and more important part).

And so, in 1972, the German hosts wanted to organise Games that were opposite in spirit to those of 1936. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of the master race, the Olympics were meant to showcase the newfound German pacifism. And this they did, uncompromisingly so. Die heiteren Spiele — the joyous games — went the official slogan. To ensure that nothing disturbed the joyousness, German security guards at the Olympic village were unarmed and dressed in light blue suits, the literal opposite of the black-clad and armed SS-men patrolling the grounds in 1936.

By today’s standards, the lack of security measures was baffling. About as baffling as passengers smoking on a plane, or, for that matter, smuggling guns onto a plane and hijacking it. After all, these were the Seventies, a golden age for anti-colonial and radical Left-wing terrorism. As archival research by journalists of German magazine Der Spiegel revealed, German security services were warned of potential terrorist plots on the Games. However, no effort was being made to increase security measures. Showcasing the peacefulness of the new Germany took priority over safety concerns for Israeli athletes.

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On the morning of September 5, eight members of Black September climbed the walls of the Olympic compound and proceeded to the quarters of the Israeli team. They killed two athletes and took nine Israelis hostage. The next day, after a catastrophically botched German rescue mission undeserving of its name, all Israelis had been killed by the terrorists. One German policeman was dead, as were five of the eight Palestinians. Zvi Zamir, chief of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, was present at the final shootout. “They didn’t make even a minimal effort to save lives,” an exasperated Zamir reported. Zamir was shocked to realise that the German priority had been to continue the Games with as little interruption as possible. Surprisingly and bizarrely, the “joyous Games” had remained uninterrupted almost throughout the whole hostage crisis. While the Israeli team left the Games, the rest of the world continued with the competition.

Two months later, Black September hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Beirut and blackmailed Germany into releasing the three surviving members of the Munich squad. Israel had warned Germany of such a scenario and had asked Bonn not to give in to terrorist demands. Germany did the opposite and expedited the three Palestinian prisoners to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, where they were given a hero’s welcome. Israel was furious. Germany, its crucial ally, had not only refused Israeli help and advice during the Munich hostage crisis but had acted against every principle of Israeli counterterrorism policy.

The attack by Black September was an attack not only on the Israeli team but implicitly also on the political rationale behind the games. Black September named its operation “Ikrit and Biram” after two Palestinian villages razed to the ground after the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and whose inhabitants were banned from returning. All of a sudden, Ikrit and Biram were violently forced into one historical equation with Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement, and nearby Dachau, the first concentration camp on German soil. This was a brutal collision of different historical events and logics. A terror attack rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took on a new meaning: Jews were murdered in what was meant to be the new Germany. And more than just a historical footnote in this context is the fact that Black September was aided in its preparations by a known German neo-Nazi. 

The Munich attacks and Israel’s uncompromising retaliation mission in its aftermath have been covered in academic writing, a Steven Spielberg movie, and the Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September. It is the stuff of Cold War spy thrillers. Less attention has been paid to the German role in the whole affair. One question is why Germany had been so insensitive to Israeli wishes and opinions throughout the crisis. Germany had widely been considered a key ally of Israel up to that point, and for good reason. However, wondering why Germany had acted irresponsibly towards Jewish lives on its soil misses the original point of West Germany’s pro-Israeli orientation. This point was explained by former chancellor Konrad Adenauer on primetime German television in 1966: “We had done to the Jews so much injustice, committed such crimes against them that somehow these had to be expiated or repaired if we were at all to regain our international standing… Furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”

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Angela Merkel's empty leadership

By Wolfgang Streeck

Here, as well as on other occasions, Adenauer stated clearly that the goal behind Germany’s support of Israel was rehabilitation — regaining international standing. That goal is then intertwined with a core idea of modern antisemitism: supposed Jewish influence over world affairs. To Adenauer, this was a natural thing to say to the German public as late as 1966. Rehabilitation, whitewashing the past, faking democracy — whatever you want to call it, the Federal Republic consistently prioritised its international reputation over domestic efforts at working through the past.

Belatedly, the German government is seeking to make amends for its 50-year old failure to protect its Israeli guests. Last week, a €28 million compensation deal was finally agreed with relatives of the Israeli victims. No amount of compensation, however, can undo history.

What Black September did in September 1972 was to crash a German party that was all about celebrating and showcasing a novel Germany to the world. And the German response to the terrorist attack was guided by one overarching desire: to throw the party crashers out the door and to continue the party. In the process, 11 Israeli athletes were killed. Perhaps, when the German journalist asked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas whether he wanted to apologise for what happened in Munich 50 years ago, he should have addressed this question to Chancellor Scholz as well.

The attack on Ukraine has rendered it desirable to condemn Putin, to call for an end to energy dependence on Russia, and urge shipments of arms to Kyiv. Nato has replaced the phantasms of EU-based defence. Ukraine is given a path, albeit lengthy, into the Union. Our bemusement rises as we recall how ragingly this departs from the iron-clad, cross-party consensus under Angela Merkel and her predecessors.

No U-turn has been more radical than the pledge to end decades of de facto pacifism, and to spend seriously on the armed forces. Self-congratulations reverberated in early June when Germany’s parliament agreed a one-off fund of €100 billion, ostensibly to bring the painfully under-resourced Bundeswehr up to scratch. Virtual unanimity ruled. Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition was joined by the opposition CDU-CSU. At home and abroad, the vote was hailed as evidence of new geopolitical maturity.

But that for now is nonsense. There’s been no time for the Berlin state machine to develop a new security doctrine and to sell this to the population. In an echo of other unGerman instant shifts — remember Merkel’s departure from nuclear power, and her opening of the borders? — the decision has preceded the thinking.

What Germany does with its military is clearly crucial: for allies, neighbours, Putin, and the world. So as we monitor the evolving policies, we’d do well to remember how brittle the overnight epiphany might be. The war itself is hardly berechenbar, the impact of Putin’s squeeze on gas isn’t predictable, and the German body politic is deeply split on matters of defence.

Symptomatic of the divisions is the coalition‘s internecine war over weapons for Ukraine. The Foreign (run by the Greens) and Finance (the FDP) Ministries have fought against Defence (run by the SLD). At the core of the chaos has been the Chancellor himself, pathologically opposed to sending vital panzers and other serious kit.

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Germany's arrogant pacifism

By Maurice Frank

At the EU, G7, and Nato summits Scholz has again sworn to support Ukraine. His veracity has been undermined, however, by his chief foreign policy adviser, who blurted out that Germany’s main aim is to secure its future links with Russia. No surprise here, perhaps: the atavistic SLD apparat has long had a sadomasochistic fixation on Moscow. Scholz himself felt puppy love for Russia when senior in the SLD’s youth wing in the Eighties. He was a fanatical Marxist, rabidly pro-Soviet, and dead against democracy for Central Europe. He rose under chancellor Schröder, latterly legendary as a paid lobbyist for Putin. In this context a sally by Lars Klingbeil, head of the SLD, has raised eyebrows around the world. Germany must be a leading power, a Führungsmacht. The military implications were there but weren’t explained.

Which brings us to the Bundeswehr. The new fund is less than a third of the measly total spent by Germany on its military in the past six years. In 2014 all of Nato agreed a target of 2% of GDP on defence, but Germany brazenly refused to keep its word. It’s been spending around 1.3%. The target of 2% would have meant a total of around €520 billion; 3% would have equated to €780 billion. The US percentage has been around 3.5%. Sir Richard Shirreff, Deputy Supreme Commander of Nato in Europe in the mid-Merkel years, isn’t impressed. He tells me: “It’s likely that Putin would’ve been put off his adventures if the largest economies in Europe, Britain, France, but especially Germany, hadn’t freeloaded, and had invested properly in defence.”

In any case, we can’t be sure that the €100 billion will be spent sensibly. The numbers throw up many questions. €33 billion is to go on air systems such as 35 American F-35s, €21 billion on digital command and control, €17 billion on land capabilities, and €8 billion on vessels. But what about “sustainment” costs? In the US, initial outlays for F-35s are less than a quarter of forecast “through-life” costs, and similar arithmetic will apply to Germany’s other purchases. Modern military kit costs many times what you pay up front when operations and maintenance are factored in. So even if the shopping list makes sense in light of Ukraine, it’s pretty clear that in future Germany will have to spend close to 3% of GDP. But there’s no sign of support even for 2%, not from the Finance Ministry under the fiscally frigid FDP, nor from the pacifists in the SLD, or in the population at large.

Then take motivation and morale. The Bundeswehr has a mere 100,000 personnel or so in combat roles (total headcount is 183,000). Expansion will rely disproportionately on the eastern Länder, where unemployment is relatively high, but support for the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is strong. This cannot be ignored: the military have been wracked by Right-wing penetration.

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German pacifism is dead

By Giles Fraser

Worryingly, the Bundeswehr has itself been fostering distortions of the Nazi past. The extent of the disease was shown in a survey for the elite newspaper Die Zeit: half the population is convinced that the Nazis were a small group who captured their country, so most Germans were innocent of war and Holocaust (among supporters of the AfD, 84% think so). Meanwhile, 30% believe, insanely, that their relatives resisted. Around two-thirds believe the country was not defeated but liberated in 1945. Almost 60%, and over four-fifths of AfD supporters, hold that other countries are just as guilty as Germany for Nazi wars and crimes. As the Bundeswehr expands, this kind of thinking may be more rife than ever in its ranks.

So as we watch how Berlin rearms, we’d do well to monitor the narratives and doctrines it develops as closely as the technology it deploys. Nowhere will scepticism be greater than on the Nato and EU front line in Central Europe. There’s consternation there over Germany’s recasting of its history. There is existential worry, too, about Bundeswehr fulfilment of Article Five of the Nato treaty, under which each member is to fight if any is attacked. Before the Ukrainian war only 34% of Germans would have helped if Russia invaded the front-line states.

We don’t know if more (or fewer) would today. Whatever the number, what would it mean for the nascent Führungsmacht? In places like Warsaw and Prague many are already convinced that the whole German deep state, not just the SLD, is with Russia in wanting Ukraine to fail. This is because a successful Ukraine (plus Moldova and Georgia) would soon be in the EU. With Poland and others, they could form a pro-Atlantic block with one-third of the Union’s population, and so scupper Germany’s hegemonic plans. When Jarosław Kaczyński, head of the ruling party in Warsaw, wondered publicly the other day whether Germany is arming against Putin or Poland, he was making a joke. Not a very good one, perhaps, but one whose bitter core is clear.

Perhaps it is not strange that Putin, himself a former FSB officer, did not question this reckless optimism. He knew that the CIA fully agreed with the FSB estimate, as did the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BDN) and the French Direction du Renseignement Militaire (DRM).

The latter induced President Emmanuel Macron to rush to Moscow and Kyiv to avert Ukraine’s imminent downfall by offering last-minute concessions to Putin. But the BND’s error had far graver consequences: told that it was impossible to stop Russia’s swift conquest, German chancellor Olaf Scholz refused to send weapons to Ukraine, refused to allow Estonia to send 122mm howitzers originally received from Germany, refused to rule out restricting its use of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and refused to allocate funds to rehabilitate Germany’s sadly diminished armed forces. Since Putin is especially attentive to German politics, this served as a strong green light for his war.

As for the CIA’s totally wrong assessment, it had still more serious consequences. Acting under the impression that the Russians would swiftly conquer Ukraine, the White House chose to evacuate the US Embassy in Kyiv instead of rushing in weapons that would only become Russia’s booty. The demoralising effect was amplified as other Western diplomats followed suit and fled.

The failure to dissuade Putin, then, was an intelligence failure — but this is something that only requires the resolve of 51 Senators and one President to fix. By contrast, Russia’s war-making capacity has failed at every level: in the quality of individual and unit tactical combat, in operational capacity, and, most egregiously, at the level of theatre strategy (the deployment of forces over the territory). The attempt to conquer Kyiv with an endless double column of armoured vehicles advancing on a single vector meant that every act of Ukrainian resistance generated cascading stop-and-go delays that emptied out fuel tanks.

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Has Putin overplayed his hand?

By Edward Luttwak

The most important tactical failure came right at the start. In the pre-dawn hours of the war on February 24, elite “air assault” infantry proved incapable of executing the key mission of the entire invasion. This was the Coup de Main that was to secure the Antonov airfield in Kyiv’s Hostomel exurb and open the way to the heart of the city, from where Zelenskyy was expected to flee in panic, leaving Ukraine’s forces leaderless and exposed. Arriving in a fleet of helicopters, the Russians duly seized the little-used airfield. Ilyushin Il-76 heavy transports were then expected to bring in many more troops to secure it, pending the arrival of mechanised units from nearby Belarus. But Zelenskyy and his ministers, who had gathered for war instead of fleeing, immediately ordered an all-out effort to counterattack the Russians with any and all forces that could reach the scene quickly.

In any normal scenario, to send odd lots of soldiers against cohesive elite units would be a sure recipe for disaster — but the ferociously determined Ukrainians overcame the Russians, who were disconcerted by having to fight hard just to survive, instead of advancing triumphantly to Kyiv’s central square, the Maidan. The IL-76 transports could not land amid the fighting, so the surviving airborne troopers had to be relieved by troops from Belarus. By that point, Ukraine’s forces were mobilised nationwide and the rapid capture of central Kyiv was out of the question.

Having blocked the Russians in Hostomel, the Ukrainians were unable to gather larger forces to crush them rapidly because they needed to send units across the country — from Kyiv and Kharkiv all the way round to Mikolaiv and Odessa. But by then the crucial fact had been established: the Russian airborne troopers in Hostomel were not tactically superior as professional elite troops should have been. The subsequent weeks of war have shown that the same was true of Russia’s tank crews, mechanised infantry and the artillery units that pounded towns and cities. Whether it was down to inattentive officers, perhaps distracted by business opportunities on the side, or because of inadequate supplies of fuel and ammunition, almost all Russia’s troops were badly undertrained, and therefore tactically inept.

Russian tactical incapacity also magnified the consequences of another surprise of this war: the emergence of super-empowered infantry that can destroy main battle tanks and knock helicopters out of the sky with shoulder-launched missiles, thereby regaining its long-lost role as the Queen of the battlefield. By 1943, the rocket-launcher M1A1 — nicknamed the “bazooka” — allowed heroic and very lucky infantrymen to occasionally destroy tanks; by 1955, the French produced wire-guided missiles that could destroy tanks if shielded from artillery, smokescreens or gunners on the hunt for them. But neither weapon could seriously impede armoured operations given normal artillery covering fires.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Now it is different. With today’s missiles, soldiers can reliably destroy tanks and low-flying helicopters with shoulder-launched missiles that need only be pointed at the target once — while still retaining the infantry’s ancient advantages of economy, of abundance, and its ability to find cover far more easily than mechanised forces.

Russian army chiefs must have missed this tactical shift — not because they are still focused on re-fighting the last war, but because, just like their American counterparts, they were hypnotised by the trendy next war. This was meant to be fought with “post-modern information warfare”, or hybrid warfare, or “4^th Generation warfare ”— all so much more sophisticated, more advanced, and more high-tech than the old-fashioned “kinetic” warfare fought by blokes shooting at each other. It must have come as a big shock to Russia’s generals when Ukrainian soldiers could not be persuaded to surrender by sending menacing messages to their smartphones.

But now that the Ukrainians have gone on the offensive, they have lost their key advantage of remaining under cover while firing at exposed advancing enemies. They need armoured vehicles to avoid being held up by Russian fire, but so far they have received only a handful from the Czechs and Germans. What happens next in this war will very largely depend on the quantity and quality of the armoured vehicles friendly countries are willing to hand over to the Ukrainians. There is certainly no shortage of them in Europe, where shrunken armies have placed thousands of armoured vehicles in storage, ranging from thinly protected ten-ton M.113 troops carriers that are still better than nothing, to full-weight battle tanks with guns that can still be formidable if supplied with up-to-date rounds.

And this is just one more challenge in a war that will continue until Putin is willing to cut his losses and accept the one thing that Zelenskyy can give him: a promise that he will not apply for Nato membership. As to why the stalwart Zelenskyy has indicated he will do this, declaring that Ukraine’s model will instead be self-sufficient Israel, the answer is obvious: instead of strengthening its members, in recent times Nato has provided an alibi for their unilateral disarmament, which persisted even after Russia’s annexation of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Crimea. Not only have armies shrunk, but their training is more ceremonial than functional, as became painfully evident when supposedly well-trained units were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Putin is following the Bosnia playbook

By Philip Cunliffe

In the years since Putin ended the post-1945 peace by seizing Crimea, only two European countries have acted to strengthen their armed forces: Finland in diverse ways, and Sweden whose government promptly reintroduced conscription to rebuild a strong army — neither of which are Nato members. Poland, which is a Nato member, contrives to have an army of 60,000 with its 37 million inhabitants, as opposed to Finland’s 280,000 on mobilisation with one sixth of the population.

As it happens, I was in Warsaw in November 2021, admittedly long ago, before the war. Upon asking the Presidential adviser whom I met for dinner why it was that Poland did not have a remotely commensurate army to defend itself given that it was next to Russia, he cited Nato’s security guarantee, which allowed Poland to spend its defence funds on what really mattered: a frigate in the Baltic (admittedly an excellent target for torpedoes or missiles), fancy helicopters for Polish units sent on peace-keeping missions, and the elaborate peaked hats of Polish officers. No wonder Zelenskyy gave up on Nato membership so easily.

The very great problem we all face — Americans, Europeans, Ukrainians and even Russians — is how to end this new European civil war. Now we are all stuck: Putin cannot leave the roulette table without the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as his prize, but Zelenskyy does not have the authority to give away Ukrainian territory even if he wanted to.

So here is my modest proposal: a referendum in each of the regions that requires a total ceasefire and which itself implies the renunciation of any further claims on Ukraine. Putin’s invasion failed within hours of being launched. Almost 50 days later, it is time for it to end.

Those unforgettable words, written in 1945, remained buried in the German psyche. A bottomless sense of guilt for the crimes of the Third Reich meant that for decades many Germans (mostly in the western half) harboured a deep suspicion about their own culture and country, a fear that a militarist, nationalist, murderous Germany could rise from the ashes of the war.

Hence, for decades, Germany pushed pacifism and disarmament coupled with trade and dialogue, a policy that took off with social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the late Sixties and Seventies, as West Germany began to import natural gas from the Soviet Union. When, in 1999, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who had lived in Dresden and was a fluent German speaker, replaced Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, Germany doubled down on Wandel durch Handel (change through trade). Volkswagen opened a large factory in Kaluga south of Moscow in 2007.

In 2011 — under the watch of ex-chancellor Angela Merkel — the Nord Stream 1 Baltic pipeline began to inject Siberian gas directly into the veins of German industry — circumventing transit countries like Ukraine, robbing them of revenue. Until the day of the invasion, Germany somehow imagined the controversial Nord Stream 2 would still open.

In December 2021, Putin phoned Merkel to thank her for “many years of fruitful cooperation”. In hindsight, what he meant was: thank you for filling my war chest. A day earlier, the Russian president had written to the incoming social democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz: “I count on engaging with you in constructive dialogue and working together on current issues on the bilateral and international agenda.”

In mid-February, as the Russian troop build-up suggested that Putin was really planning the unthinkable, Scholz took his turn at the end of that six-metre table in the Kremlin to talk diplomatic solutions — and flew back to Berlin, hopeful.

Then, on February 24 the sky fell in. Putin’s invasion of a large sovereign country two borders away (as the crow flies Kyiv is 748 miles from Berlin) shattered every illusion. The entire West was duped, but no country was more duped than Germany.

Germany was lost for words. The vocabulary required to describe what had happened lay beneath the ruins of the country’s beliefs about itself, Russia and the world. As Armin Nassehi, a sociologist at the University of Munich, wrote on February 25: “We seem to be completely blank to Russia’s aggression, not only militarily but also intellectually and conceptually.”

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By Aris Roussinos

The Germans had failed to fathom that, nearly 80 years after the Second World War, the existential threat to Europe would come from elsewhere. As the scale of Putin’s plans for Ukraine sunk in, Germany’s political consciousness began to shift. It was now clear that the support of Europe’s economic powerhouse for Ukraine (5,000 helmets!) had been shamefully inadequate. On Sunday February 27, Olaf Scholz — who up to that point had been viewed as a bland, ineffective chancellor — stood before the Bundestag and announced the most profound about-face in German foreign and security policy since World World II.

“In view of the turning point Putin’s aggression represents”, he said, “our standard is: What is needed to secure peace in Europe will get done”. A €100 billion defense fund for this year alone, twice the size of the annual military budget. Massive modernisation of the arsenal, structural reform of the decrepit, poorly organised armed forces. Germany would, for the first time since WWII, send weapons into a crisis zone. From now on the budget would surpass 2% of GDP — just as a blustering Donald Trump had demanded. A few sentences transformed Germany into the world’s third largest military power in terms of expenditure, surpassing Britain and France.

MPs cheered. Some cried. Scholz had turned Germany’s understanding of itself on its head. The widespread delusion that a country of 80 million smack in the middle of the continent could remain an over-sized Switzerland died for good.

Naturally, left-wing SPD backbenchers and their Green counterparts made their outrage heard but the leadership of the two left-of-centre parties stands behind the Scholz proclamation, as does the yellow partner in the “traffic light” coalition, the pro-business FDP. Unsurprisingly, the centre-right CDU is on board.

“In less than 96 hours”, wrote Die Zeit, “the political coordinates have shifted. The SPD has thrown 30 years of foreign and security policy overboard, the Greens have finally said goodbye to pacifism, the FDP has said goodbye to austerity at all costs and to the idea that the energy transition should not cost the state anything — and the CDU has said goodbye to the certainty that 16 years of Merkel were 16 good years”.

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Angela Merkel was no saint

By Maurice Frank

This government’s central project, climate neutrality, has been derailed. The idea that Russian gas could serve as a stop-gap measure until enough renewable energy sources came online was one more shattered illusion. The Green economy minister Robert Habeck must now cobble together a path to carbon neutrality that slashes dependency on Putin’s fossil fuels. To keep the lights on, Habeck, of all people, is mulling an extension of coal and nuclear plants. Security trumps climate.

Another observable effect is a fraying of the political edges. The Right-wing populist AfD is fractured and weakened. Their previous admiration for the Russian president isn’t a good look, neither is ranting about “globalist” institutions such as the EU and Nato. Their whining about “corona dictatorship” comes off as puerile when an actual dictator starts a war.

Meanwhile, members of the small Left-wing party Die Linke, with its roots in East German communism, have also struggled to condemn Putin and suppress their anti-Nato instincts. Some still insist that the alliance’s eastern expansion is to blame for the war, but they’re getting lonelier by the day. This line of thought resonates with ever fewer Germans. As one commentator wrote: if Poland weren’t in Nato, the Russians wouldn’t stop until they reached Słubice on the German border.

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A minority of Twitter leftists warn of a new German militarism and the dangers of “shifting baselines” — the implication being that a better-funded, more effective Bundeswehr could result in aggression originating from Germany itself. In the minds of such people, Germany will always have an authoritarian, bellicose core, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

A dictator has spat in Germany’s face and is threatening the stability of its neighbourhood. “We have an enemy again, who turns the gaze on ourselves”, writes Nassehi, meaning Germany has finally woken to the obvious fact that it is a mature, responsible democracy firmly anchored in Europe. That neighbouring countries such as Poland celebrated Scholz’s sea change boost is significant.

A friend close to the SPD leadership explained that Scholz’s defense initiative will be deeply embedded within European structures and in coordination with Germany’s allies. It’s light years from the old German militarism.

Has Germany banished its ghosts once and for all? Was this the final milestone on its path to normality? There are grounds for scepticism. The VW plant has closed but Russian gas still flows through Nord Stream 1. One could argue that Scholz didn’t really change his mind, but was strong-armed by allies. Some point out that throwing money at the neglected Germany military won’t solve its structural problems. A writer in Berliner Zeitung says Germany’s “toxic pacifism” will rage on beneath the surface.

Ten days into the war, Germany is a changed country, no question. What another ten days could do, is anyone’s guess.

This was in striking contrast to her public image during the Greek debt crisis, when cartoonists depicted her in SS uniform resplendent with swastika. But those cartoons were for the masses only. The European political elites, all of them, happily voted with the Merkel government when it came to disciplining the Greek dissidents. They were as eager as the Germans to keep European monetary union alive. Merkel has left Europe to a political class to whom she has not only taught the trickery of two-level politics — national and supranational — but whom she has also, in part, brought to or kept in office. It is a political class that has bet its future on a Europe built around German hegemony.

In many parts of Europe, it is still considered a pleasant surprise to see a German who is soft-spoken with good manners, a wide heart and a big purse, smiling rather than shouting. This proved useful in her rise to becoming informal ruler of the continent. It also helped that she was a woman — someone who could be pictured as a nourishing mother as opposed to a punishing father.

But other things were more instrumental in her rise. When she took office, in 2005, major developments had recently taken place, and major decisions made, which certainly eased her career progression. In the Nineties, centrist political parties, of the Right as well as the Left, had been programmatically emaciated by the advance of neoliberal globalisation. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), had been unable to reconcile ever more rapid capitalist modernisation with its traditional commitment to paternalist social protection. This left an ideological vacuum that would give her unprecedented room far for manoeuvre once she became leader.

It also helped that her main rival, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was breaking apart over the Third Way social policy reforms of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder — in particular Agenda 2010, which cut unemployment benefits and increased the pressure on people to accept job offers. Not only did the Agenda weaken the SPD for decades, but it spared Merkel, once she had ascended to the chancellorship, from having to implement the neoliberal reforms she had promised as opposition leader. Instead, she could allow the SPD, her partner in three coalition governments, to try to work out reforms to the Schröder reform, thereby reminding its constituents that it was responsible for policies they hated. Merkel, for her part, could claim for herself rising levels of employment and the balancing of the federal budget.

Rising employment and declining fiscal deficits weren’t just a result of the Agenda, though. Merkel’s third and most important long-term advantage was the work of the European heads of government who had created European Monetary Union in the Nineties. It is worth remembering that the common currency was a project not of German but of French and, to a lesser extent, Italian elites, who had hoped that a currency shared with Germany would force neoliberal restructuring in their own countries while protecting them from German financial competition. As it turned out, the former goal was defeated by domestic opposition, while the latter evolved into a Plan B: the southern member states would extract monetary and fiscal policy concessions from Germany in exchange for remaining in the union.

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For Germany, on the other hand, the monetary union was an economic godsend. It made the country the growth pole of Europe, the centre of a liberal economic empire. It also firmly established the preservation of the euro as Germany’s paramount national interest.

Unlike others in Germany, Merkel understood early on that preserving the monetary union would require side payments to its losers. These did not necessarily have to be financial but could be symbolic, for instance by occasionally allowing her colleagues on the European Council to outvote Germany. At home, Merkel had to overcome opposition to what the German public was always prone to see as excessive concessions to profligate southerners. To avoid conflict between domestic and European political needs, most side payments, especially the more expensive ones, had to be made under the counter, through complex operations deep in the bowels of that monster technocracy, the European Central Bank.

This does not mean that there were no tough negotiations on the magnitude of compensations due. Merkel tried to keep the price Germany had to pay as low as possible. But she also understood that the cost had to be sufficient to keep the currency union together. The transfers did not need to solve the continent’s structural imbalances. Their main purpose was political: keeping pro-EU governments in power by helping them fend off challenges from anti-euro parties and movements; providing them with the material and ideological resources to reward their supporters and thereby preserve ‘political stability’.

Very early in her tenure, Merkel realised that the central concern of German policy in Europe had to be defending monetary union against the disappointment of its original proponents. This required keeping alive the impression that the EU was run, if not by all members alike, then at least by a French-German “tandem”, and not Germany alone. Four French Presidents — Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron — had to be reassured on this score.

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French aspirations for ‘European sovereignty’ — meaning French sovereignty extended to Europe as a whole — and for a shared ‘strategic culture’  —meaning the EU adopting French military doctrine and ambition — Merkel could satisfy only symbolically. In reality, German national security remained firmly in the hands of the United States and NATO. To keep both the US and France happy, German foreign policy had to rely on rhetorical obfuscation and double-dealing, disciplines in which Merkel excelled. German troops were sent to both Afghanistan and Mali, and would have had to be sent to other places as well had the government not had the excuse that under the postwar German constitution, out-of-area military missions have to be formally approved by the Bundestag.

Domestically, Merkel’s main project was to build a hegemonic neo-bourgeois political centre, with her party in the driver’s seat. Early on, she decided on the Greens as ideal partners who could inject urgently needed new blood and close the generation gap from which older parties suffer in a world of fast cultural change. In the end, however, the alliance with the Greens failed spectacularly. Shutting down nuclear energy after Fukushima and later phasing out coal pleased the Greens but raised the question of how to secure a growing energy supply. The answer was making Germany dependent on Russian gas, to the dismay of the United States. Russian gas also is resented by the Greens, with their “value-driven” idea of foreign policy. While she went along with Western sanctions against Russia over its re-possession of the Crimean Peninsula, Merkel at the same time founded her energy and climate change policy on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a project that her Green friends want to abort, as do her French friends, who are eager to sell their nuclear-produced electricity to Germany.

Similar difficulties and domestic-international complexities arose after Merkel’s decision to open the German borders for one million mostly Syrian refugees in 2015. While her refugee policy once more endeared her to the Greens and the new middle class, it divided her party and reinvigorated a then declining Alternative für Deutschland. It also forced her to negotiate an agreement on behalf of the EU with the Turkish dictator, Erdogan, in which Europe paid him considerable sums of money to act as the EU’s gatekeeper, preventing Syrian and other refugees from crossing into Europe. Also to control immigration, Germany insisted on a quota system in Europe for future refugees, knowing full well that it would be unacceptable to most other member states as it would involve a de facto Europeanisation of the German asylum regime. The result was passionate opposition in Eastern Europe and a split in the EU just as in the German electorate.

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By Maurice Frank

Merkel’s migration policy was one reason why the recent Green advance was accompanied by a decline of Merkel’s own party such that in the 2021 election, the CDU/CSU became too small to form a successor government. In the end, the neo-bourgeois centre that Merkel had intended to build was to consist of a three-party coalition under the leadership of the SPD and a chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who as Merkel’s finance minister had done his best to learn from her. As the new government was sworn in, the outgoing chancellor was so alienated from her party that she seemed quite content to see her office turned over to a Social Democrat.

For her successors, Merkel’s will be a hard act to follow. Her manner of leadership by evasion — deferring decisions, delaying moments of truth, papering over conflicts with ambiguous rhetoric, substituting opportunistic improvisation for strategy and suppressing uncertainty by a public display of optimistic equanimity — requires specific personal skills. The same holds for Merkel’s extraordinary ability to get away with abruptly reversing decisions and making conflicting promises to different constituencies. From Merkel, two or three generations of European statesmen and stateswomen learned that leadership in the crises of today means nothing more and nothing less than making yourself appear optimistic enough to satisfy public desires for public displays of optimism.

Now, however, this may no longer be enough. Merkel’s equivocally friendly stoicism is unlikely to serve the next German government, or a German Europe, as well as it served her. During Merkel’s tenure, there was always enough money around to keep most of her partners reasonably happy — enough slack, in cash and time, for making the incompatible appear compatible. That this is no longer true was indicated, among other things, by the recent German coalition agreement, which could come to pass only because the parties deliberately abstained from discussing finance.

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But financial issues will soon assert themselves whether the parties want to discuss them or not, as the monetary union and the pandemic do their work, and German domestic needs make themselves felt. Note that already before Covid struck, there was a crisis of German physical infrastructure. Moreover, the new government, unlike Merkel’s Grand Coalition, will face an opposition in CDU/CSU that it cannot exclude from public debate on principle — as Merkel and all the rest excluded the AfD. This means, among other things, that questions will be asked and have to be answered on Germany’s ability to pay to keep “Europe”, meaning the monetary union, alive by keeping pro-EU governments in control in the south. For this, the ECB will have to invent ever more extravagant methods of direct state finance, including holding interest rates down close to zero in spite of rising inflation and cutting government debt by “fiscal repression”.

The list of unresolved problems Merkel leaves behind is long. It extends from the future fiscal and monetary constitution of the eurozone to Europe’s ever-increasing public debt, the relationship of the EU and its member states to the two hostile global superpowers, the United States and China, the European and especially the German relationship to Russia, the tension between German Atlanticism and French Europeanism, the status of national sovereignty in the EU state system, the future energy supply of Western Europe, and asylum and immigration policies, national and European. More issues could be listed, each urgent, some critical, none easy to resolve.

In a few years’ time, Merkel’s tenure may be remembered as a golden era when pious wishes still helped — a time when hard decisions could still be successfully postponed, dilemmas hidden by optimistic denial and benevolent neglect, and contradictions reconciled by all sorts of pocket money, borrowed or printed. Now, by contrast, things are about to get serious.

What form did this ‘high ground’ take? According to the Harvard student who introduced her 2019 commencement speech at the Ivy League college with a litany of her good deeds: “She has passed Germany’s first minimum wage, closed Germany’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima nuclear explosion, promoted marriage equality, led progress in tackling climate change, and opened her country to over one million refugees from the wars of the Middle East.”

Merkel’s junior coalition partners the Social Democrats would no doubt roll their eyes if they heard that; the policies listed by the Harvard student were all theirs. Take the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Merkel, a conservative, actually opposed it for all of her career, but, sensing a shift in the Zeitgeist, let it pass through parliament in 2017.

But that was typical Merkel. She always let the public mood determine her policy choices: she was the first German chancellor to receive a weekly detailed briefing on opinion research from her press department. Perhaps that’s why she was synonymous with dithering, sitting on the fence and remaining quiet on key issues — so much so that a neologism was spawned: merkeln, the Langenscheidt dictionary’s 2015 word of the year. “To Merkel” is defined as “to do nothing, make no decisions, issue no statements”.

It was not her strong convictions that endeared her with German voters. It was her lack of them. She is the opposite of a visionary; once asked what she associated with Germany, she said “well-made windows”. Not Germany’s rich cultural heritage, not its landscapes, not its football squad, not even its robust Grundgesetz (a set of basic laws put in place after the war, essentially a constitution). Far more important are its… well-sealed windows.

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So, is she really the “liberal West’s last defender”, as the New York Times would have it? Much of the ‘moral compass’ talk is based on Merkel’s momentous decision to open the German border to more than a million refugees from Syria and elsewhere in 2015. No doubt it was an event of historic importance that changed Germany and Europe forever. But was it really on par with Willy Brandt’s epic 1970 genuflection in Warsaw, as some have suggested? Or, as some commentators said at the time, a monumental, healing gesture that showed the world that Germany had finally shaken off its Nazi baggage and become a force for good? Not quite.

Only two months before she opened the borders, Merkel had appeared at a townhall-style event called Living Well in Germany, in which she engaged with a group of teenagers from across the country. There, Reem Sahwil, a 14-year-old Palestinian refugee who spoke flawless German and had stellar marks in school, expressed her fear that her family would be deported, extinguishing her dream of attending university in Germany. Without a hint of empathy, Merkel told her that if everyone like her stayed, thousands of other refugees from the Middle East and Africa would flood into Germany, something the country couldn’t cope with. When Sahwil began to cry, Merkel said: “But you’ve done really well for yourself. Let me give you a stroke.” (Something she actually did.)

When, just two months later, tens of thousands of Syrians were passing through Hungary and Austria towards Germany, Merkel first considered taking a hardline approach and mobilising thousands of police officers to secure the southern frontier. Opinion polls, however, suggested most Germans favoured a compassionate, welcoming approach. So without consulting EU partners, she opened the borders. Within days, she was shooting selfies with young Syrian men.

In a matter of months, however, Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) started to haemorrhage support. And the supposedly moral Merkel was soon replaced by her old pragmatic, shape-shifting political self. She tried to export the refugee problem to the outer borders of the EU and brokered a dodgy deal with the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to stem the tide of human beings fleeing across the Aegean. To placate the conservative wing of the CDU, she spoke at a December 2016 party conference of banning the burqa — to jubilant applause. She also started to take a harder line on the deportation of refugees and asylum seekers who had committed crimes, even to war-torn Afghanistan and Syria.

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But for many it was too late. The massive influx of refugees was the boost the odious, far-right AfD had been waiting for. Largely thanks to Merkel’s shambolic immigration policy, the party is now a permanent fixture of German politics and commands a majority in two eastern states.

Merkel’s political contortions extend well beyond immigration, however. On climate policy, too, she has been immensely disappointing. Granted, she had a few successes on the diplomatic stage, such as persuading Russia’s Vladimir Putin to sign up to the Paris Agreement. But when it comes to actually reducing Germany’s climate footprint, her governments’ actions have been woefully half-hearted. Following a tiny slump during the pandemic, carbon dioxide emissions are up again, and it looks unlikely that Germany will hit its target of a 65% drop in emissions from 1990 levels.

Meanwhile, after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Merkel rushed to fast track Germany’s plan to drop nuclear power. Yet renewables haven’t picked up enough to fill in the gap in power production. Instead, Merkel has pushed for the Nord Stream pipeline (admittedly initiated by her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, who now even sits on the operator’s board) through the Baltic Sea, enabling Germany to pipe in Russian gas directly without paying fees to those pesky middlemen such as Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Did her moral compass slide off deck?

And then, as always in Germany, there is das Auto. Successive Merkel governments have been slavishly beholden to the car industry. How else are we to explain Dieselgate, where it took the US authorities — and not the corrupt or incompetent German regulators — to reveal that Volkswagen was installing software that enabled its cars to cheat during emissions testing. Sales of German cars fell briefly. But few heads rolled.

Instead, Merkel merkelled: she held ‘diesel summits’ at which the hitherto extremely profitable carmakers — the perpetrators — begged for and received mountains of cash in the form of subsidies and government-funded customer incentives to prop up demand for electric, petrol and — yep — diesel cars of the slightly cleaner variety.

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But Dieselgate was, for the most part, unexceptional. The Merkel years were defined by scandals of incompetence and corruption, none of which, incredibly, stuck to the chancellor herself. She had a knack for outsourcing difficult decisions to commissions, for delegating hot button issues to her foot soldiers. It was always easy for the press to point a finger to one of her flailing ministers. She remained aloof from the mudslinging — while working on her ‘moral compass’ act with earnest speeches and high-profile international negotiations.

Yes, she was Germany’s first female leader, and the first chancellor from the East. But the fact that she was a protestant pastor’s daughter in a communist country — a tale of humble origins spun in every English-language profile — didn’t make her the deeply moral politician so many made her out to be. Rather, during the Trump years, when it felt that the world was being taken over by blustering male populists, her plodding, unflashy style made her stand out. Against that backdrop, her measured mediocrity was mistaken for a moral virtue.

That probably isn’t what Obama had in mind when he spoke of her saintly principles. But let’s not forget that even saints are only human.

But, although it seems to have slipped the minds of the EU’s finance ministers at their meeting yesterday in Brussels, the truth is that the scope of the bloc’s support package has been wildly overblown. The IMF puts the EU’s discretionary fiscal stimulus at a paltry 3.8% of GDP — a figure dwarfed by the massive discretionary fiscal stimulus of 25.5% of GDP in the US.

The same chasm between narrative and reality can be seen with the much-vaunted Europe-wide “recovery fund” known as Next Generation EU (NGEU). Despite the fanfare, it amounts to barely 5% of the EU’s GDP. What’s more, the funds will be disbursed over the course of six years, resulting in, at best, a fiscal expansion of around 1% of GDP on average between 2021 and 2024. And that’s compared to a GDP loss for the EU as a whole of around 15% just in 2020.

Predictably, the funds come with very strict troika-like conditions attached. They are conditional on compliance with the European Commission’s infamous country-specific recommendations, which in the past have consistently demanded that governments cut public spending — especially on social expenditure (particularly pensions), healthcare and unemployment benefits. This is ultimately what the NGEU is all about: increasing Brussels’s control over the budgetary policies of member states and strengthening the EU’s regime of technocratic and authoritarian control. It’s the EU doing what the EU does best.

So overall we can say that the pandemic has not resulted in any radical rethinking of policy at the European level. Neither has it resulted in any structural change. Indeed, the old fiscal rules are set to be reinstated in 2023. Even though there’s much talk of “reforming the EU’s fiscal rules”, the truth is that everyone knows that serious treaty reform is off the table — as Valdis Dombrovskis, executive vice president of the European Commission, has repeatedly stated.

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It’s not just the opposition of the so-called frugal countries — the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, the Baltics and Austria. Anyone who expects a change of heart from the new German government is also bound to be disappointed. Olaf Scholz, Angela Merkel’s successor, is, as Wolfgang Münchau has noted, “a staunch fiscal conservative, on a par with his predecessors, Wolfgang Schäuble and Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democrat behind the debt brake”.

Moreover, regardless of who takes over Jens Weidmann’s role at the Bundesbank, growing inflationary pressures in Germany — in September, inflation hit a 29-year high of 4.1% — mean that fiscal hawks will easily gain the upper hand in the debate. Regardless of the actual cause of inflation (which is largely a result of the massive supply chain disruptions happening around the world), German fiscal hawks will blame it on overspending — with cuts being the only solution.

So, all things considered, we can expect a return of austerity to Europe in the near future. Indeed, it is already taking form. Mario Draghi’s Italy is a case in point. In the current debate, the EU’s most indebted country is often presented as a champion of flexibility and European fiscal reform. However, the reality is quite different. Italy’s latest budget report forecasts a huge deficit reduction — from 10% to 4% of GDP (more than 100 billion euros) in little over a year. Italy’s age of austerity, then, seems far from over.

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A return of austerity to Europe as a whole would be devastating, especially given that many countries are still recovering from the post-2008 austerity shock therapy. That experience didn’t just prove to be a colossal failure in economic terms but also led to nothing less than a social and humanitarian catastrophe, particularly in those countries that were subject to the “economic adjustment programmes” (EAPs) demanded by the EU-led troika: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy (which was never officially in an EAP but saw the imposition of EAP-like policies by former European commissioner Mario Monti, who came to power through an EU-orchestrated “soft coup”).

Numerous reports over the years have confirmed that the budget cuts and tax hikes implemented in these countries disproportionately hit the poor and are directly responsible for a dramatic rise in inequality and unemployment levels (especially among the youth), as well as rates of suicide, poverty (including child poverty), severe material deprivation, homelessness, social exclusion and distress. Even a report from a few years back by the European Parliament’s own employment committee claimed that “the austerity policies and the structural reforms imposed in the troika countries have led to a real social tsunami of massive unemployment (it has tripled in some countries) especially among young people, the closure of hundreds of thousands of companies, mainly SMEs; and a sharp rise in poverty and social exclusion”. These policies have in many respects undermined the very material bases of democracy, leading to social and economic instability.

In recent years, some countries have introduced measures to cushion the effects of austerity. In Italy, for example, the Five Star Movement-League government that emerged from the 2018 elections — which was first and foremost a rebuke of the parties that had administered the disastrous austerity policies — introduced two major policies that went in that direction: a “citizenship income”, a form of income supplement for poor households, and a pension reform lowering the retirement age.

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Both those policies are now under threat from the techno-authoritarian government led by Draghi, who is, let us not forget, one of the chief architects of the EU’s post-2008 austerity framework. A new reform raising once again the pension age has already been announced, and the ranks of those in the Government calling for the abolition of the “citizenship income” continue to grow.

This would leave millions of families with no support whatsoever, in an economy that has been ravaged by 18 months of pandemic. But punishing the poorest and weakest members of society for crises they have not caused — first the financial crisis, now the Covid crisis — has long been standard policy, in Italy and elsewhere. As the saying goes, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.