The legacy of Merkelism
What we read in the essay by Letizia Tortello and Alessandro Politi “Goodbye Merkel. Because for 16 years she commanded ”(Edizioni del Capricorno). The article by Giuseppe Gagliano
In the first part, the author – Letizia Tortello, journalist of La Stampa – illustrates in great detail the most salient aspects of the biography of the German Chancellor and also her global vision of politics.
One of the considerations of a political nature that the German Chancellor formulates is that according to which one cannot afford to be distracted when one is convinced of a way forward; in fact, being irresolute does not inspire confidence and changing your mind every day is certainly not the way to achieve political success.
Secondly, thanks to her experience within the GDR, the chancellor has had to face numerous crises in her life and has learned that in bilateral relations one must avoid Trump-like postures of breakdowns but one must know how to pilot crises to one's advantage. In our opinion, it is significant that Merkel never condemned the totalitarian politics of the GDR, but passed from one regime to another without trauma. And this reveals, regardless of the reconstruction that the author makes of it, its pragmatic and therefore sometimes opportunistic character.
Thirdly, at the EU level, the Chancellor has often stressed that European politics is in fact part of domestic politics and has repeatedly invited, vehemently in conferences and debates, young people to reflect on how big the project is. Union, warning since the euro and migrant crises that reconciliation between nations that have been hostile for centuries must be supported.
Let us be clear, however, the increase in the importance of Germany in Europe like Merkel was not only linked to economic results, but also to her person. Thanks to the weaknesses of the French presidents Sarkozy and Hollande, and following Brexit, she had and wanted to play the role of mediator and referee to become the keel of Europe.
From the point of view of her political rise, Tortello conveniently underlines how at only 36 she officially becomes a member of the Bundestag and is aware that with Kohl she is preparing her for a role in the government. In fact, he will give her the ministry of youth and the family (a ministry that will not pay particular interest on the part of Chancellor Merkel). Thanks to the resignation of Lothar de Maizière, on 11 September 1991, due to the scandal of collaboration with the Soviet secret services, Angela becomes deputy secretary of the party, just two years after her entry into politics. But it will also be thanks to another scandal that the rise of the chancellor will be decisive and will be favored. As the author explains in detail in 1999, “the shame mounts for some apparently illegal donations, totaling one million German marks, by a Canadian lobbyist and arms dealer, Karlheinz Schreiber. The suspicion is that the man handed over money to a parking lot in Bodensee, in the south of the country, near the Austrian border. On November 5, the court in Augsburg, southern Bavaria, issues an arrest warrant for Walter Liesler Kiep, treasurer of the CDU from 1972 to 1992. Investigators suspect that the bureaucrat had not declared lobbyist Schreiber's donations to the Federal Electoral Commission . Schreiber defends himself, arguing that it is a bribe intended to persuade the government to approve a sale of German and Airbus tanks to Saudi Arabia, and that he was merely an intermediary between the Arabs and the CDU. However, there is also another accusation against the party: it seems that it has not paid the taxes related to another donation, which would not have been – again – reported. This time the donation comes from France. The parliamentary commission summons Kohl and the former party secretary general, Heiner Geißler, accused of violating electoral laws and tax regulations in the name of a bribe. The hearings reveal that the money was not registered. True, the former chancellor had not personally earned from the deal. For this, his entourage thinks that the issue can be quickly forgotten, despite the huge undeclared figure and the political implications of the French affair: 40 million euros paid by the then government of François Mitterrand for the purchase of a company. oil from East Germany by the parastatal company Elf Aquitaine, of which 15 million would have been paid directly to the CDU for the 1994 Kohl election campaign ”. Well, Merkel will use this scandal to liquidate her mentor: “After such a long political life, it is really too much to ask him to resign overnight and leave the field entirely to his successors, the younger ones. But the party must learn to walk, have self-confidence to face the struggle even without the old battle horse. Like someone going through puberty, he has to get away from home ”.
The repeated insistence on the importance of compromise, the authors point out, is one of the central aspects of the policy implemented by Angela Merkel. The search for compromises is not the search for the lowest common denominator, but it is the only way to arrive at common solutions in which everyone can identify, has always supported the Chancellor.
Of course, there is a limit to the politics of compromise, as the author stresses: "There are still limits for you in the search for compromise: with the anti-Semites, right-wing extremists and despots like Gaddafi, Mugabe or Assad, and finally with the virus deniers who gathered under the banner of the Querdenken ('lateral thinkers'), it was never arranged ”.
As regards the problem of immigration, the attitude of the German Chancellor has certainly changed as Tortello points out: "At the beginning her idea was far from opening the doors of the country but instead she wanted to close the borders of Europe as a whole, to leave the internal market free. He wanted to find a way to prevent refugees, via Greece, from coming to the EU. Thus, his advisers worked day and night to understand how to secure the external borders, negotiating with Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia and even with Libya ”.
But in 2015 the political conversion takes place: the chancellor decides in the following days, in the night between 4 and 5 September, to let in eight thousand refugees who press in Hungary, blocked by Orban.
On the one hand, through the agreements with the Turkish president, but on the other also through the restructuring of the immigration office, the refugee problem finds a solution that will certainly cost Germany very dearly on an economic level. In fact, after five years only half of the migrants who applied for asylum in 2015 got a job. The integration of 1.5 million refugees who entered Germany from 2013 to date has cost the German government between 13 and 16 billion, 0.4% of GDP.
In the second part, Alessandro Politi – director of the NATO Foundation – gives an unscrupulously realistic assessment of the possibility, indeed, of the fact that the global economic crisis was predictable, in fact there were very clear indicators in this sense from authoritative Italian and foreign institutions. And how did President Obama save his country from this crisis? The author explains it with great clarity: "Obama was re-elected president by popular acclaim because, by completing the sacrifice of Lehman Brothers (a large global financial company) as a scapegoat, initiated by Bush, he had saved the entire financial system, covering the holes with the public money of the American central bank. But one of the effects of this choice – underlines the author – will be the growth of 'shadow finance', that is, a non-banking financial system, in practice a legal gray area. But what are the real numbers of this shadow finance, the author asks? "In 2015 it was 34 trillion dollars, that is one and a half times the gross domestic product of the USA". Now, in the face of such enormous growth, neither Obama nor the other presidents made ad hoc laws. For a very simple reason as shadow finance is of great importance to the US economy. This means that in the American system, savings banks can carry out financial speculations on a very large scale using the money of account holders. Furthermore, these large banking complexes can buy debt and resell it in increasingly risky financial products. And what to say about the notorious rating agencies that the author underlines, not without irony, they are very attentive to the debt of a state, especially the Italian one, but coincidentally they are much more flexible in evaluating products that are then defined as toxic. On the other hand, the analyst Politi underlines: "Let's start with a simple fact: the three big rating agencies occupy at least 95% of the world market, are an oligopoly and, although formally subject to the legislation of the countries in which they are based, they are de facto irresponsible for any reputational damage they may cause (the worst that can happen is to pay a fine). The real problem with these agencies is that they are paid by the clients they have to evaluate and this creates an inherent conflict of interest, because the evaluator ultimately wants to keep his goose that lays golden eggs alive. Which private school fails its paying student? The other problem is that they are concentrated in two countries (two are American and one Anglo-American), which creates an oligopoly that is not only a market, but a geopolitical and geo-economic one. Other than infectors, they are the powerful arm of a projection of political and economic power on the map of the world ”.
Well, how did the Chancellor deal with the crisis?
The Chancellor wasted no time in enacting laws to limit financial risks in August 2008 and in October she went so far as to declare the private savings of every saver in any bank in Germany officially guaranteed by the State. A first economic package and a car scrapping incentive (January 2009) came immediately afterwards to support the national industry.
Following these measures, there will then be operational implications of great importance: "In September, the ECB begins to actually buy government bonds from countries in crisis and under attack, and in the same month the German Constitutional Court declares the aid of the Mechanism to be constitutional. European Stability. The acute phase of the crisis had been overcome and the German internal debate was also at peace ”.
On the immigration issue front, his contribution in the European context was certainly fundamental, emphasizing the importance of some fundamental principles of the European constitution: "A human constitution in which the fundamental right to asylum is in force for the politically persecuted and for all those who flee from wars. The second principle is that of the dignity of every single person: it does not matter if he is a citizen of the State or not, from where and why he comes and with what prospects of being accepted as in need of asylum ".
On 4 September, tens of thousands of refugees happily arrive at the German stations in celebration. But why did the chancellor accept such a large influx of immigrants?
But of course for economic reasons. In fact, it is no coincidence that: “The association of industrialists in Berlin is beginning to worry about the shortage of skilled and unskilled labor. Merkel took good note, because hers is a country with a very strong export of industrial products and therefore she understood that, without a strong injection of immigrants, she was losing competitiveness especially with respect to China and other nations with many workers. In 2019, official data accounted for a gap of 1.2 million jobs and specialized research institutes calculated at least a requirement of 440,000 jobs that cannot be carried out in any way by German workers, for the simple fact that there are no ".
The judgment given by the English periodical Guardian therefore appears adequate: “Angela Merkel's human position on migration is a lesson for us all. […] The German political leader stood up to be taken into account. Europe should follow it. […] He wants to keep Germany and Europe open, to welcome legitimate asylum seekers with normal humanity, while doing his best to stop the abuses and keep the flows within manageable proportions. This requires a European response ”.
We now come to the energy policy followed by the Chancellor. As a convinced nuclearist after the Fukushima accident, the German Chancellor decides that Germany must abandon nuclear power as clearly demonstrated by the ethics commission which summarizes its work in a few clear points: • we must exit nuclear within a decade; • less risky options exist; • the portfolio of alternatives includes wind, sun, water, geothermal, biomass, increased efficiency and productivity of energy sources and the environmentally sound use of fossil energies; • different lifestyles are necessary to respect nature as the basis of creation. Of course, the opposition can only agree. There is only one detail that is relevant, once the end of nuclear power and the energy turnaround has been decided, how to replace 8.5 gigawatts of nuclear energy? The only alternative is to build a slow and gradual synergy, despite all the profound differences on the Crimea issue, with Putin through Nord Stream 2.
As for bilateral relations with the US, these suffered a profound flaw due to Snowden's revelations with Prism. With a certain irony but also with absolute frankness Alessandro Politi points out: "While the CIA makes the films, the NSA has created over the decades a capacity for interception of communications worldwide and its Prism program, together with a large group of other programs and tools, it allows to penetrate any civil communication via cable, satellite, radio waves, listening and recording every conversation even encrypted. When they tell you that your communication on a social network is encrypted, it is not for the NSA based on specific pressures and technological advances, and if they tell you that your data is safe in a cloud, well, it is often a act of faith. The NSA is not alone and its closest brother is British and does the same with its Tempora program, while the competition is made up of Chinese, French, Israelis, Russians and the rest of the world ”.
How does the Chancellor react to German? “In no uncertain terms and with a leaden face, Merkel makes it known that the relationship of trust has been seriously damaged, especially since reunification has made Germany make a qualitative leap in trust in America. In short, it is simply not acceptable to spy on an ally. The position is underlined by his foreign minister and increased by the minister of the interior: espionage is a crime, committed in Germany infringes the law and sovereignty ”. Then as usual, implementing a compromise policy typical of her modus operandi, the German chancellor sends her secret service coordinator to the United States in order to understand the details. What will be the result of this visit? According to what was declared by the Chancellor, the American intelligence agency would not have damaged German national interests in any way…. But doubts remain. And many.
On the bilateral policy front, the Chancellor's policy was inspired by an unscrupulous pragmatism, as Alessandro Politi points out: "The Chancellor's Chinese policy has been branded as 'Merkantilism', but it is not only this, even if it has been accused several times. to close both eyes on human rights and climate. By now we know it well, does not believe in muscular politics, does not know what military power is for and does without it as much as possible, uses sanctions if strictly necessary and believes that only a patient political, diplomatic and economic engagement can change something in the medium-long term, with no illusions about unlikely "regime changes", convinced that in the long run the greatest damage can be avoided by dealing almost indefinitely ".
In fact, the Chancellor will be the one to propose the CAI (Comprehensive Agreement on Investment) signed between the European Union and China in December 2020. What determines an agreement of this kind? This agreement: “offers a new regulatory framework for investments between the two parties, improving the conditions of access to the markets; its main feature is to offer greater legal certainty to European businesses. In practice, it is an important step forward to adapt Chinese companies and the market to levels of greater transparency and competitiveness on an equal footing, safeguarding European standards in sensitive sectors such as energy from conventional sources, agriculture, fisheries, audiovisuals and public services. Unfortunately, the ratification of the document has failed. The reaction was not long in coming, not only with counter-sanctions, but with the non-ratification of the agreement in mid-July 2021 and with the orientation of MEPs towards granting an investment agreement in Taiwan. Not to mention the inevitable confrontation with the new president Biden ”.
Ultimately, Politi wonders what is the legacy of the German Chancellor ? The Washington Declaration itself lays the foundations for the continuation of the relationship in the short and medium term. The essential points are: • a common commitment to democratic principles, values and institutions; • the defense of an open and free way of self-determination; • a united Europe, free and at peace (guaranteed commitment in NATO); • rules, norms and parameters on emerging technologies directed towards freedom and not towards repression; • responsibility in leading towards global responses to common challenges (climate, health and related security, resilience, a fair, inclusive and regulated, sustainable global economy).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/leredita-del-merkelismo/ on Sun, 26 Sep 2021 07:02:04 +0000.