Five Things: Iron Curtain, Merz and Women, Ambushed Zelensky, Trumps World Order, BSW
It's Sunday, again.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
What a year. March just started and I am exhausted as if it were November. Germany just had its federal election and the results are awful. 20 percent of the country is voting for a fascist party. The conservatives will eventually side with these people as they are currently very happy that the left lost the elections and are hoping for the big rollback to begin now. I remember the 80s and I don’t want them back, others apparently feel different about this.
Also, I am deeply annoyed about the evolving new world order which is seeing an isolationist USA cutting its ties with Europe. I am mostly annoyed that European leaders didn’t start to act accordingly during the first Trump administration and are now scrambling to pick up the pieces. It was clear that this would happen. There were signs. Big ones. But it is easier to just ignore what’s going on in the world instead of telling the people to get ready to living in a world with more violent confrontations and war. Now we need to deploy gazillions of Euros to rearm the continent, which is a lot more expensive now that the zero interest phase of politics is over. Also, we need years, if not decades to get all the planes, tanks, ship, drones and whatnot and to build new army bases, reinstate the draft and whatnot. It’s unbelievable how this whole continent has been sleeping, with the exception of Poland, the Baltics, Sweden and Finland. Hopefully we wake up before it is too late.
The Iron Curtain Casts a Long Shadow Over Germany’s Election
There are plenty of maps of Germany showing the divide between West and East. And while there are some people who openly and only half jokingly say that they want to give East German back to the Russians, the maps only show part of the picture. Yes, the East overwhelmingly voted for a fascist right-wing party that wants to abolish our democracy. But the West also voted for the AfD in a lot of places and they oftentimes came in second in the polls, ahead of the SPD. And this is not shown in the maps. It’s also not shown that there has been a brain drain of over 2 million people who left East Germany in the last decades. Overall, this is bad, and it is bad in all of Germany.
Merz’s all-male team photo revives question of gender equality in Germany
One outcome of the last election in Germany is that there will be far less women in parliament as the SPD and Greens lost many seats. This photo shows just how male dominated the conservative parties are. As a male German above 50, I resent this backlash.
It Was an Ambush
“Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting.” - what a disgrace.
The World Trump Wants
“None of the usual descriptors of world order apply anymore: the international system is not unipolar or bipolar or multipolar. But even in a world without a stable structure, the Trump administration can still use American power, alliances, and economic statecraft to defuse tension, minimize conflict, and furnish a baseline of cooperation among countries big and small. That could serve Trump’s wish to leave the United States better off at the end of his second term than it was at the beginning.” - this article untangles nicely how USA, Russia, China, India and Turkey all are actors in the new world order, while neglecting Europe as a whole. That’s quite telling and the author does have some good points about the different motivations for leadership in their respective regions. I truly doubt that the final sentence, the quote above, makes any sense anymore after what we have seen this week.
Sahra Wagenknecht loses her civil war on the German left
I always try to put at least one article in to my selection that gives my readers a bit of hoppen in difficult times. This is the article. The former leader of the communist platform within the rebranded Socialist Unity Party of East Germany, decided to leave the leftist party “Die Linke” (The Left) last year to form her own party, also named after her. They had some early success in East German state elections, but ultimately didn’t get into the federal parliament. This person has had far too much airtime on national TV for her absurd ideas. She’s married to a former leader of the SPD, who quit the party while in government after the era of Chancellor Kohl, only to form his own party. She is openly pro Putin and wants to stop immigration. She announced beforehand that she’d quit politics if they won’t make it into parliament. I’m still waiting for her resignation. One openly pro Putin party is more than enough.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico