GER politics thread

[mapuc]

Going to be interesting to see whether he does as threaten or if EU will give in for the pressure.

Markus

[Skybird]

Merkel forced Europe into an absolutely weak position and prone to blackmailing with her migration policy 2015. And this folly now takes revenge. Turkey, Russia, Belarus, China... German foreign diplomacy is an insanity and it fails because it has no strategic longterm undestanding, just a rescuing of oneself from one day to the next.

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by mapuc

Can Nord stream 2 handle all the needs if we get a hard winter in Western Europe ?

Markus

Nord Stream 2’s annual 55 billion cubic meter flow can’t even come close to supplying Europe 200 billion cubic meter demand. I don’t think Gasprom can afford to be seen as an unreliable partner either and has the power to keep Lukashenko in line.

IMO the gas will continue to flow. What Luschenko’s threats accomplish is they affect the markets and drive energy costs up. Which is a good thing for Russia, Gasprom and Belarus.

As Ukraine is slowly squeezed out of the picture I expect we’ll hear more from Lukashenko.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

Nord Stream 2’s annual 55 billion cubic meter flow can’t even come close to supplying Europe 200 billion cubic meter demand. I don’t think Gasprom can afford to be seen as an unreliable partner either and has the power to keep Lukashenko in line.

IMO the gas will continue to flow. What Luschenko’s threats accomplish is they affect the markets and drive energy costs up. Which is a good thing for Russia, Gasprom and Belarus.

As Ukraine is slowly squeezed out of the picture I expect we’ll hear more from Lukashenko.

It is said the man behind is in fact Putin. Wonder if he would let the leader of Belarus close the two gas line.

An interesting winter lay ahead of us, that's for sure.

Markus

[Jimbuna]

Belarus's threat to cut off gas supplies to Europe would be a breach of contract with Russia, President Vladimir Putin has warned.

In a TV interview, Mr Putin said President Alexander Lukashenko may have made the threat in a fit of temper.

Mr Lukashenko is facing new sanctions over a growing migrant crisis at the country's western border with Poland.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59274351

[Rockstar]

Games people play.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/european...down-1.1680376

(Bloomberg) -- European gas prices rose after Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said he might consider shutting down a key pipeline linking Russia to Europe.

Benchmark European natural gas futures reversed earlier losses after the threat, which came in response to further sanctions against Lukashenko’s regime. About 20% of Russian gas flows toward the European Union passed Belarus territory so far this year, mostly via the Yamal-Europe pipeline, which also crosses Poland and ends in Germany.

[Skybird]

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:


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Difficult times are ahead for the German Ministry of Defense. Because despite growing tasks and necessary investments, the budget is expected to shrink substantially in the coming years. After around 50 billion euros in the coming year, the budget is to decrease gradually to 45.7 billion by 2025. This is what the medium-term financial planning that Olaf Scholz (SPD) presented as finance minister provides.

The union with Chancellor Angela Merkel and Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has agreed to this. At the same time, however, the Ministry of Defense had calculated for the Bundestag that it would actually need at least 62 billion by 2025 to fulfill its mandate. Should the budget remain as planned, Germany would break its promise to its Western allies to spend 1.5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defense by 2024. In fact, after Russia's annexation of Crimea and the attack on Ukraine, an agreement had been reached to increase defense spending to two percent of GDP.
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No comment.

[Skybird]

That went much faster than I expected. The coalition treaty should be introduced to the public today.


The Green will get a new super minstry for economy and climate, the FDP will get the key ressort of finance, also educaiton and traffic infrastructure. Defence will be an SPD minstry.


So far so good, but here is the joke: Green Baerbock shall become foreign ministre. That means a helpless clash with China. With Russia. With the US. Ready your popcorn, ehjoy the show when the Germans oince again get educated on the difference between what they want and what they can acheive. German lecturing nevertheless will raise to new heights not seen before.



With defenc ebeing in SPD's hands and a decline of defence budgets by 10% over the coming 4 yeras alreeady decided, do not put too much hope into Baerbock achievinb a stenghtening of a French-German-EU front against Russian aggression.



Whether or not the new coalition will stop Nordstream 2 remains to be seen. SPD and Greens at elast enver were fans of it. But fact is Germany cannot afford to piss the Russian this drasticaly in this winter. Nor in the coming ones. Question is: does her Empty-Headedness Dame Baerbock understand this? So far my search for signs on intelligent life in her was not overly successful.



The FDP seems to have negotiated extremely clever, and seem to be able to prevent the worst of threats from the Greens and the SPD.



Whether the Green party convent will agree, remains to be seen. Some commentators predict a violent radicalization of the Green youth and climate activists due to the Greens having failed to live up to their high flying promises and announcements.

[Skybird]

The Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung comments:


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Every nation thinks of itself as something special. The Americans see their country as a divine promise, the French believe in their civilizing mission and the Swiss in the superiority of direct democracy. And the Germans?

After the break in civilization, you put together a substitute identity in whose canon of values ​​economic efficiency and political stability are high up. May the US Democrats and Republicans fight each other in unanimous hatred, in France every halfway popular politician may found his own party, Germany was not impressed by that. It was a role model for solidity and predictability. Maybe that's changing right now.

For the first time in recent history, the Federal Republic will receive a government that presumably consists of three parliamentary groups. Never in the past has a Federal Chancellor assumed office in such a weak starting position as Olaf Scholz finds.

Of course, the next Chancellor will also have the authority to issue guidelines. The constitution has deliberately focused on the head of government, who is only third in the unofficial ranking after the President and President of the Bundestag. But the political foundation of the office is crumbling.

For the first time, the two prospective coalition partners, the Greens and the FDP, together have more percent of the vote and Bundestag mandates than the Chancellor Party. Even in the grand coalition, which by definition consists of two almost equally strong partners, the Union weighed more heavily than the SPD.

Greens and liberals ostentatiously meet in a friendly atmosphere, their party leaders shine harmoniously into the cameras, just to make one thing clear: we are more united than the Social Democrats. The commentators are already wondering whether the tail is wagging the dog or vice versa. We'll see, Scholz won't want to be degraded to a loyal dachshund.

In any case, the power structure is a first. The last Social Democratic Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, proclaimed in his inimitably prepotent manner: "The older one is a cook, the smaller one is a waiter." This order from the times of the red-green coalition no longer applies in a red-green-yellow alliance.

This shift can be seen in the distribution of ministerial offices, but even more so in everyday political life. In the coalition committee, the two waiters can insist that another menu be cooked.

Angela Merkel, too, was only able to make solitary decisions in selected cases, otherwise she would have risked breaking her coalition. But their leeway - especially in the second half of their era - was greater because they had the stronger battalions. Wedged between the two coalition partners and his left wing of the party, Scholz has to act more cautiously.

Of course, the two left parties can unite against the liberal troublemaker, but in the long run that leads straight to the end. In an interview with the NZZ, political scientist Frank Decker rightly stated: "The FDP is trapped." Because she let the Jamaica coalition burst in 2017 and received a lot of criticism for it, she couldn't help but get involved with the SPD and the Greens.

The analysis applies to the coalition negotiations. Christian Lindner would like a traffic light alliance, also because the framework conditions are better than in 2017. At that time, Merkel told him that the liberals should get rid of any change in the government's current course of action. Scholz cannot afford categorical bans on thinking, otherwise he will find himself in the unloved grand coalition. She knew best about lack of imagination.

But once the coalition is in place and has worked for a while, the FDP will regain its freedom. She will always find a reason to terminate the Faustian pact with two notoriously state-loving parties. The Liberals are not in Babylonian captivity.

They are just not allowed to sell themselves below their value, as they did when they last participated in government, when they watched the undesirable developments in the euro without doing anything, so as not to endanger ministerial posts and company cars. The voters punished so much discouragement by being expelled from the Bundestag after the party started with an even better election result than it is today.

What comes together now does not belong together by nature. The triple alliance is a mesalliance; born from the compulsion to form a government that should not end in a grand coalition, carried by the hope that the three partners will succeed in convincing climate protection.

However, the world cannot be reduced to a single policy area. It is an often repeated truism that climate protection is of existential importance. But the future of the welfare state and the safeguarding of prosperity are also existential questions.

The coalition is therefore just as measured by what it brings about in terms of taxes, pensions or the debt brake. Here all three parties have to bend over the top in order to come together. The necessary formula compromises are likely to burden the coalition just as much as the precarious power structure.

So will Germany become more unstable, will it even become weaker in the new constellation? The will to power still prevails, which creates unity between the future partners. But how far will it go, given the considerable differences? And above all: what can the trio achieve in terms of content on this narrow basis?

To condemn the alliance as a “future coalition” is not enough. Before you know it, the future is the past again. Rather, Germany needs a present coalition that does not postpone the big problems into the future, but instead solves them now. It is worth taking a look at international developments, although the election campaign remained trapped in the provincial logic of domestic politics.

After reunification, Germany slipped in terms of economic power. It was considered by many, especially the Americans and the British, to be the sick man of Europe. Then the rapid ascent followed. The years from 2010 turned into a real German decade.

Schröder's social reforms worked. The euro crisis and the Russian annexation of Crimea made the Federal Republic of Germany the European financial hegemon and once again the control center of Ostpolitik. The turbulent Trump years and Brexit made foreign observers even more confident in Berlin as an anchor of stability.

The twenties will hardly be a German decade. In the major conflict between the USA and China, Berlin is playing a passive role, anxious to avert the worst for its foreign trade. The anti-Beijing alliance between America, Great Britain and Australia reminds continental Europeans that they are extras in Asia, the powerhouse of the 21st century.

The EU, the political foundation of German influence in the world, will not find its way out of the crisis mode. Whether the ongoing dispute with London or the alienation of the Eastern European members: the Union is becoming a burden that costs a lot but brings less and less.

At the same time, the competitiveness, which forms the economic foundation of supremacy, is eroding. Germany has recorded significant increases in productivity and value added since 2000 and is well ahead of France, Italy and Great Britain. But this means that Germany is no longer top of the class, but only the EU average. In addition, the country is still benefiting from Schröder's reforms. Since then, it has done little to improve its position. Merkel's years were lost years. At the same time, their international charisma whitewashed the creeping loss of meaning.

The grand coalition has not turned the corner. It would be almost a miracle if the traffic light coalition, with its much more fragile construction, succeeded in doing this. Most importantly, voters don't seem particularly keen to shoulder such challenges. The federal election with its fragmented result is not a clear mandate, but rather an expression of perplexity.

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Earlier, in Octobre, the NZZ called Scholz the "male Merkel". There is much truth in that, he has no profile and thus is so featureless that he offers no attackable trait or characteristic, apparently, just is covered with a thick coat of grease and teflon. So far, so much Merkel. But he is, different to Merkel, weak, his party is outnumbered by the two coalition partners, Merkel during the "grand coalition" at least had the strongest batallion behind her, though at decreasing dominance. He is also unscrupulous and, last but not least, far more red and left and pro Euro and pro EU and pro money inflating and pro debt collectivization than he tries to let the public believe. His time as mayor of Hamburg and durign the extremely violent riots during thats summit back then are spelled a desaster, and he weaseled himself out of it like he weasels regarding his responsibility of the enormous and very costly in German so-called Cum-Ex scandal that costed the state billions. I see him neitehr as honourabnle nor trustworthy nor driven by principles of any kind, but he is a merciless opportunist, and ticking very strongly left. He is only clever to not boast with the latter.

But the FDP holds the finance ministry, and that is a foot on the break of quite some wet dreams the SPD and Greens might have had.
SPD 6 ministries, Greens 5, FDP 4.


Baerbock as foreign minister will be a desaster worse than the SPD-Heiko. He at least hasd entertainment value in his hilariousness. Baerbock has not even that.

[mapuc]

Will there be any changes for the individual German citizens ?

Will the politics under Mrs Merkel remain ?

Markus

[Catfish]

Originally Posted by mapuc

Will there be any changes for the individual German citizens ? Will the politics under Mrs Merkel remain ? Markus

The administration does not care much, which elected parties rule under it.

[Skybird]

"Voting age down to 16", the treaty says. They discriminate kindergarden kids and patients in coma.


"Feminist foreign policy", says the treaty. Russia and China and North Korea and Iran and many others LTAO. Maybe there is more entertainment value in Baerbock than I gave her credit in my previous post.



"Coal ends 2030", says the treaty. Think I need more batteries and petroleum.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Catfish

The administration does not care much, which elected parties rule under it.

Reading between the lines in Skybird's comment on his countries politics gives me the hunch that he has very little trust.

Markus

[Skybird]

How did you get it...?

I fear them to become very inefficent, but extremely costly. Scholz' handling of desasters (Hamburg) are deasasters in themselves, and textbook exmaples of how to weasle yourself out of respnisiblity and liability. The Greens are not so much driven by reality, but ideology and want to notoriously lecture and educate other people - to make them dream for the things in their minds. Whether what they have in mind and what reality is and recommends are in congruence, they do not be interested in that much.

At the same time this coalition is so fragile that it can only hold if everybody does not push for anything too hard. That can be good regarding some things if the things being pushed for are stupid things anyway, but it can be a tremendous waste of opportunity and time if those things get prevented that might be useful to achieve, but cannot be acchieved due to coalition and party interests. Conflict-avoidance and fear of the voters will be the driving motives for this coalition. And Scholz' habit to copy Merkel in not offering any profile for any criticism or attack, resulting in indifference, self-paralysis, and lack of drive to push for indeed real innovations.

No, I do not expect much form this government (or any other), but raising costs and being exploited for green ideological propaganda purposes.

Also, they have not said so far how they want to pay for all the promises they made.

The lousy quality of contemporary potlial culture is such that I already would already be satisfied these days if a politician would tell me: "If you vote for me, and I win, I promise you will never hear and see of me again, I will do nothing that brings me back on your mind, and I will not make your pay one Euro more or less than before." Such a politician would immediately get my vote. If times are this shabby as they are, you need to lower your standards and expectations, you see.

[mapuc]

Here is BBC with an little article and a video about our island I live on.

It's about energy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p09...y-than-it-uses

Markus