Presented by The University of Chicago’s Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts
Send tips and thoughts to [email protected] or follow Ryan on Twitter.
Happening Today
GERMANY ELECTION RESULTS: Just as Europe muddled along under Angela Merkel’s leadership, Germany muddled through its national election Sunday.
Check out POLITICO’s German Coalition Calculator
Latest results (percent of vote share): Social Democrats 26 | CDU/CSU 24 | Greens 15 | Free Democrats 12 | AfD 11
There was a mood for change — three out of four German voters voted for someone other than the incumbent center-right, and three out four voted for a party that will not end up supplying Merkel’s replacement. But the muddled mood provided little clarity about what happens next, and Merkel may remain in charge for weeks, if not several months, while coalition negotiations unfold.
Olaf Scholz, Germany’s finance minister and social democrat candidate for Chancellor, is Merkel’s most likely replacement. His idea of a fast formation of the new government: “It should be before Christmas.”
UNGA CONTINUES — A FINAL SPEECH FOR SOME: Yes, UNGA is still going — it’s a sixth day of speeches today. There will likely be dramatic scenes when the representatives of Myanmar and Afghanistan speak. U Kyaw Moe Tun is clinging to his job with American support, though the junta that seized control of Myanmar Feb. 1 is likely to demand U.N. credentials soon. The Taliban has already made that demand — and with the U.N. cooperating with them on-the-ground in Kabul and elsewhere, few doubt they’ll eventually seize control of Afghanistan’s seat, now held by Ghulam M. Isaczai.
GERMANY IN LIMBO — OLAF SCHOLZ LIKELY NEW CHANCELLOR
While Scholz’s SPD party finished first, narrowly, there’s a broad baseline for change: In a poll for public broadcaster ARD, 38 percent said the SPD should lead the next government, compared to 28 percent for the incumbent conservatives (CDU/CSU). Scholz was preferred Chancellor candidate for 45 percent of voters, well ahead of the conservatives' Armin Laschet on 20 percent. My colleagues in Brussels warn you shouldn’t rule out Laschet negotiating his way to the Chancellery: “If there’s one thing Laschet is a master of, it’s failing up.”
The upside of the muddle: Other Europeans and the U.S. spent a century hoping, organizing and fighting on the battlefield, for a stable, affluent Germany that preferred to muddle along, rather than invade or dictate to its neighbors and foes.
Yet there’s a growing realization that Germany is not benign. A unified Germany is still big enough to block the EU from moving forward when it’s not happy about the direction: bogging down the EU. Germany still fails to invest adequately in its defense: bogging down NATO. And even when Germany changes for the better — think for a second about first-time German voters this weekend, they can remember only Germany led by a woman — that doesn’t mean wider political change follows. German politics is still very much a man’s world.
Things you need to know about the king and queen makers of Germany: German youth flocked to the country’s Green and Liberal (FDP) parties, which will decide who gets to replace Merkel (the SPD won just 14 percent and CDU/CSU just 11 percent support from under 25s).
Greens leader Annalena Baerbock was a high school exchange student to Orlando, Fla., a masters student in London and cut her foreign policy teeth as a European Parliament adviser before becoming a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader.”
Free-market liberal Christian Lindner Sunday evening nominated the finance ministry as his price for bringing the Free Democrats into government. We’ve been watching Lindner’s rise for years from our Berlin and Brussels offices (he took over his party in 2013, aged 34). To note: The FDP were continuously in power from 1949 to 1998 as junior government partners. They’ve only held federal office once since then.
While the Far-right AfD lost support overall, it remains the second-strongest party in the former East Germany.
THE DIFFERENT LAYERS OF IMPACT OF THE GERMAN ELECTION
Domestic political balance inside Germany: Not much changes. Parliament majorities will not be easy to form, either for propping up a government, or on individual bills. Meanwhile, the leaders of Germany’s 16 states — who wield significant power in German politics — remain evenly split: seven from the SPD, seven from the CDU/CSU, one is a Green, and one comes from The Left.
Germany in Europe: This was not a big part of the campaign. Germans take for granted that they’re in charge, but that complacency may not work in the post-Merkel vacuum. European leadership is still Germany’s to lose, but as Jana Puglierin, head of European Council on Foreign Relation’s Berlin office, emails: “[F]or Germany to retain its status as the leading driver of EU policy, the new government will need to provide its European partners with clear-cut ideas about how the EU can compete in a divided and crisis-shaken world. It will need to lead the EU towards a post-dependent Atlanticism.”
Polling on how other Europeans see Germany’s role in the EU: 41 percent would choose Merkel-style leadership over Macron-style leadership.
German foreign policy: The Chancellery has been centralizing powers for years, leaving the Foreign Ministry less important than the last time a center-left government was in power. But the pressure will be on whoever leads the Foreign Ministry to work better with European colleagues instead of freelancing on relations with Moscow and Beijing as Merkel tended to do.
Viewpoints
"I'll be darned... They're solid," President Joe Biden reacts to Scholz’s success.
“75 percent of Germans did not vote for the party of the future chancellor,” Christian Lindner, who leads the fourth-placed Free Democrat Party
“The election campaign had something self-centered about it. The ambition to lead Europe and the world economically, culturally and innovatively was nowhere to be felt,” Ulf Poschardt, editor-in-chief of Die Welt
“There’s no big Olaf Scholz moment in this campaign. There are a bunch of moments where basically others mess up in some way, and Olaf Scholz is left standing,” POLITICO’s EU Editor, Andrew Gray
Germany can no longer avoid its responsibility to European defense, Alexandre Robinet-Borgomano, head of the Germany program at Institut Montaigne
ICELAND ELECTION — RULING COALITION WINS; GENDER EQUAL PARLIAMENT: The country’s three governing parties together took 37 out of 63 seats in Iceland’s parliament, state broadcaster RUV reported in the wake of the Saturday vote. Initial reports suggested female MPs would make up the majority in Parliament, but a recount knocked the result back to 30 out of 63 female MPs. It remains unclear whether Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir will keep her job.
INTERVIEW — JOSÉ MANUEL ALBARES, SPANISH FOREIGN MINISTER
Global Insider caught up with Spain’s new foreign minister as UNGA wound down. For what it’s worth: He correctly predicted the tight outcome in the German election.
Spain looking outwards: “Spain is one of the few countries in the world that have a global vision. And therefore the global voice of Spain has to be heard in the different crisis centers. We have a double soul: a European soul, and we have our second part of our soul in Latin America. I've made a new part of the ministry: the Secretary of State for Latin America, and the Spanish language."
So what does that mean on an issue like irregular migration? “Migration is not an issue that has a solution: Structural issues don't have a solution. But they are managed. And the way to manage it in Europe is at the European (EU) level, and to engage with the origin and transit countries. The real answer at the end is to make sure that migration is a choice of someone and that they are not forced for climate reasons, or economic reasons.”
Sounds like you want to tackle “root causes” … “That will take a long time. At the same time, we need to give quick, short answers to our societies, and we have to note the difference between irregular migration, and refugees, asylum seekers, and the migration that we need for our economy to continue going on.”
On recognizing the Taliban: “I don't think there's the conditions [to allow it],” he said, while insisting that dialogue and U.N. work must continue. “Who is going to pay for the teachers in Afghanistan? We need to support them, but we must make sure that the assistance gets to them.”
Impact of Afghanistan withdrawal and AUKUS on transatlantic relations: “I think that Europe must take its own destiny more in hand. This is not opposed to keeping a close relationship with the United States. We need Europe to transform, in order to give answers to the challenges that we are facing in today's world, we cannot always rely on the outside."
“We must be able to choose the time, the pace of engagement. And in order to do that we need to work on [building] our own capacities.”
Europe and the world: “Europe has a global vision. There is a role for Europe in the Indo-Pacific, [and] if Europe is with Latin America, and with Africa, that's quite a lot of votes in the General Assembly, or in the WTO.”
Next stop — 2022 NATO summit in Madrid, where a new Secretary-General will be announced. The date is not yet set, but Albares is confident: “We are going to make a very successful summit in Madrid. It's going to be very important. There is a new NATO Strategic Concept, we’ll talk about lessons learned from Afghanistan.”
GLOBAL RISKS AND TRENDS
CHINA — ALL CRYPTO TRANSACTIONS BANNED; WAITING FOR EVERGRANDE TO FAIL: China’s big tech crackdown has expanded into crypto, which is now illegal.
Does the real danger with Evergrande comes if Beijing won’t let it fail? "Issuing new loans to enterprises that would otherwise go bankrupt — and should — locks you into a cycle whereby ever-increasing amounts of capital are diverted from promising new opportunities to old, inefficient, politically protected sectors. It also contributes to China’s epic property boom."
U.S. DOMESTIC AGENDA — A CRUNCH WEEK WITH GLOBAL RIPPLES: He is beset by turmoil overseas and is confronting chaos at the border, but President Biden’s main challenge this week comes from his own party and what spending they’re willing to back.
That matters globally because Biden was given a grace period by many allies who acknowledged his big domestic challenges. But his credibility will be undercut if, after arguing that he needs to concentrate resources at home (an argument used to explain everything from Afghanistan withdrawal to the Covid vaccine export ban), Biden’s Democratic Party doesn’t let him spend cash on those domestic problems. Who around the world is going to believe Biden’s Congress-dependent climate promises if he can’t get the debt ceiling raised or get a supposedly bipartisan infrastructure bill out the door?
Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists the infrastructure bill will be finalized this week, and America’s biggest-ever annual budget may soon follow. Success = more time for the world. Failure = an inward turn.
TECH — WHEN LEGISLATORS REJECT YOU, JUST BUILD A NEW WORLD INSTEAD: inside Facebook’s ‘metaverse’ political strategy.
Some, like Protocol’s David Pierce, think Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sick of creating new public versions of himself and is now employing a No Zucks Left to Give strategy.
UNGA — WHERE WERE THE TECH COMPANIES? While Zuckerberg was getting wound up about coverage of his hydrofoil surfboard, UNGA was unfolding without him (though Facebook created a web page showcasing their presence). Still, it’s notable that the biggest tech impact at UNGA came from former tech execs like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
Sure, Microsoft had a partnership with Eurasia Group’s GZERO Media spin-off, and Google executives spoke at side events. But overall, it felt like the world’s biggest companies didn’t have much impact, which is very unlike them and a contrast with their Davos footprint.
Tell me what you think: Is it a good thing that diplomacy’s superbowl can unfold without much Big Tech impact? Or should tech companies be louder and more involved? Email [email protected].
AFGHANISTAN FALLOUT: Situation becoming 'dire' at U.S. airbase in Germany housing approximately 2,000 pregnant Afghan refugees.
CLIMATE — BORIS VERSUS RISING ENERGY PRICES AND EMPTY SUPERMARKET SHELVES: It’s not yet winter but energy prices are spiking and supermarket shelves are emptying. Boris Johnson wants his people to care about climate change and to pay a price to stop it — that’s the message of the COP26 conference countdown. We’re about to find out how much Britons really care.
NATO — TURKISH PRESIDENT DEFIANT ABOUT TURNING TO RUSSIA FOR DEFENSE NEEDS: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan says U.S.-led interventions haven’t made the world safer, so he toured American media asking why Russian-made weapons would make it less safe?
GLOBETROTTERS
GLOBAL CITIZEN CONCERT RUNS OUT OF FOOD: The global concert movement — this generation’s answer to Band Aid (1985) and Live Aid (2005) — pulled off seven huge concerts in seven cities around the world Saturday, raising awareness for global challenges as leaders gathered for the U.N. General Assembly.
New York concert-goers thought they were coming to help end famine — only to find they were the ones starving. Prevented from bringing in food, concert-goers arrived to find that the only things longer than the speeches were the food lines. Then around half-way through the concert, the food ran out (your author had been lining up for about 75 minutes at that point).
“The thing that makes me most angry," said Hugh Evans, founder and CEO of Global Citizen, "is that $60 billion is needed urgently for food security." While that may be so, Global Citizen is a heavily branded experience: dependent on celebrities, royals and even Coke-branded drinks (the only ones for sale). In this case the concert brand was not aligned with either its values or its stakeholders’ stomachs.
WHO — TEDROS RENOMINATED: France and Germany nominated WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for a second term.
IMF’S GEORGIEVA FACES CALLS FOR RESIGNATION: The Economist is leading the charge over claims she inflated Chinese data while working as CEO of the World Bank — allegedly to mask the true difficulties of doing business in China, at a time when she needed Chinese support for reform at the bank.
THE POLITICAL FIGHT OVER AMAZON’S "BURNING": what happens when you stir a pot that includes Cate Blanchett, Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos and the Australian government? Hollywood’s climate-change crusade is gaining energy — and crashing into hurdles.
BRITISH MP AT RISK OF CHINA EXTRADITION IN 50 COUNTRIES: Britain’s Foreign Office has warned a British parliamentarian as well as a trio of prominent human rights campaigners against travelling to more than 50 countries that have extradition treaties with China after being named in a Hong Kong security case.
FEMALE QUOTIENT GOES GLOBAL: The most interesting venue in Davos during the World Economic Forum is now hosting regional virtual dinners and concerts. The Europe edition is Wednesday, Sept. 29. RSVP here.
BRAIN FOOD
Angela Rayner: single mother at 16, grandmother at 37, future British prime minister at 41.
What if the 2020 U.S. election was just a rehearsal? Zack Stanton dives deep with election law specialist Rick Hasen.
Big Tech’s system error, a panel with Rob Reich, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Nabiha Syed
Thanks to editor Ben Pauker, Tara Palmeri, Suzanne Lynch, Jakob Hanke Vela, David Pierce
"again" - Google News
September 27, 2021 at 08:41PM
https://ift.tt/3CPoClR
Germany muddles through, again - POLITICO - Politico
"again" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YsuQr6
https://ift.tt/2KUD1V2
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Germany muddles through, again - POLITICO - Politico"
Post a Comment