 Hello, everybody. My name is Barry Kulfer. I'm the Director of Research here at the IIEA. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this second annual end of year review of German politics with Derek Scali, something I do hope will be an annual affair going forward. Thanks to everyone for being able to join us and most especially to Derek. And Derek obviously is the Berlin correspondent for the Irish Times and very generous, but this year and various occasions in the past to take time out to be with us and to inform us. And it's really appreciated. Derek is going to speak for about 20 to 25 minutes. And then this will be followed, of course, for the all important questions and answers if you are audience. As ever, you can join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screen. And do please send in questions as we go along and they may be component over the course of Derek's intervention, as well as afterwards in the Q&A proper reminder that today's presentation and the Q&A are both on the record. And as ever, you can join the discussion using Twitter slash X using the handle at IEA. So to briefly introduce our speaker before handing over to him, Derek Scali is a native of Dublin, and he studied at DCU and at Humboldt University in Berlin. He's been Irish Times correspondent in Berlin since 2001, covering politics, business and culture and he's a regular contributor to German news outlets as well, including DIOS 8 Weekly and Deutschlandfunk VDR Radio. He reports regularly from Northern and Central Europe, and he's also the author of the best Catholics in the world published by Penguin. Derek, thanks a millioners ever for being with us and the floor is yours. Thank you very much and good afternoon everyone. It's good that some good did come under the pandemic, having gatherings like this, so it's good to just keep up the tradition. Anyway, preparing the talk, I just started drowning in things I could talk about. And the last Merkel term was almost a politics-free zone, I felt in many ways. And now we just have like extreme politics. There's literally so much to talk with even since last year. And things are looking very different from a Berlin perspective and perhaps a New York perspective looking in on Germany. They always say in journalism, say the most important things first. So for anyone who's going to drop off the call discreetly halfway through, some thoughts just to start us off and then I'll go into some of the details. Looking at Olaf Scholz recently, looking at him getting more and more tired, more and more ashen-faced. I mean, I certainly don't want to be him. I don't think anyone wants to be the German Chancellor at this point. You've got historical trauma where Russia ruptured, you've got historical trauma with Israel, and it's also shattered and creating shockwaves right through your political system. And it's really shaken to the core his three-way coalition. Two years ago, they came to power, promising a break from Angela Merkel's sort of politics as the after the possible. They were going to pick up an awful lot of what was left lying by Merkel after four terms. They wanted to be a green, progressive, transformative climate change government, also with an eye on the social week. So they wanted to kind of square the circle of social democrats and greens, improve and track record and power during the Schroeder years, Schroeder and Joschka Fisher, and then bring in, unfortunately to bring up numbers, the FTP, with whom the SPD have contributed, collaborated in the past. But this idea of sort of a progressive green government has just gone out the window and the coalition partners are barely talking. And when I look at Charles Thise days, I often think of that, to boulderized that phrase. I look at his politics as his coalition's politics is the art of the impossible. He literally has to try and square several circles, even just on a domestic front, regardless even disregarding for a moment. um Russia, Israel and the rest and we're really heading into a poly crisis situation and I from the tone and from people I talk to and this is a general feeling of exhaustion and hopelessness and even a very typical German feeling self-loathing and when you start seeing the self-loathing editorials piling into the newspapers definitely rounds me of 2003 the end of the Schröder era where everything just seemed to be one thing seemed to be triggering the next it was just like a a dominant game of crises one crisis collapsing the next into the next into the next and eventually Schröder had to risk it all and he lost very closely but he lost on social transformation now it's it's a bigger it's about preserving Germany's industrial base in the 21st century by balancing its emissions it's about retooling its military to make us a player worth talking about in Central Europe and a NATO member worth the membership fee and and with Israel yeah we don't even know can't even begin to see where Germany's position is going we know we've heard a lot of the familiar refrains but how long that can hold up and whether the population is behind it is something I'll come back to later on and we've got destabilizing forces coming in we've got the aft day rising and rising and we've got the dark horse Sarah Wagenknecht extreme left person launching her own party collapsing her previous party and just sort of sending further shockwaves through the German political landscape and this is a country that loves a nice stable political landscape like parties where they are and nothing changes too much but things are speeding up um there are external shocks are called the internal shocks and vice versa and so it's a very destabilizing destabilized exhausting situation I won't cover everything that's been on my desk in the last 12 months but um I guess we spotted the start of where we were a year ago the government comes into office it has its grand plans and then we know Russia had other plans Schultz came along and gave his site and vendor watershed speech promising shattering to boo breaking German exports of weapons of war to Ukraine and to spend 100 billion and overhaul the German military so we're we're two years on nor halfway through the Schultz term um nearly two years on from that big speech how are things looking um I was looking at some of the numbers and Germany is still exporting huge amounts to Ukraine um despite the uncertainties of of the situation in the U.S. Germany from a slow start or very slow start um just this year alone 5.4 billion in arms for Ukraine's we're talking 80 fighting vehicles 30 battle tanks um 60 all-terrain vehicles more battle tanks more arms spare parts um they've created a tank repair facility I think it's in Poland on the Ukrainian border and Germany is up and running on this front it's it really can't I think it it it doesn't need to hide itself hide its light under a bushel it very much is doing the impossible what couldn't have been even considered two years ago and this is certainly not what the Greens got into power for but they and the other two college partners are very united on this um and I think Ukraine has stopped complaining about Germany as they did in the past I mean there could always be more but I think considering where Germany's come from and considering the state of its own military it's done quite a bit that's the second point there's the second part of the the Titan vendor was reforming the military and yeah it's been fascinating German troops I know have been serving on the ground in places like Latvia in Lithuania and Poland and they're being asked to stay on I mean this is you know Titan vendor a complete watershed the neighbors of Germany asking the military to come in and to stay and in terms of spending overall things aren't working so good um they they pledged to meet the two percent NATO target and now they've changed it to say we want to meet the two percent target over five-year period and when you ask Olaf Scholz about two percent he says they will meet two percent spending target two percent of GDP obviously over what he calls a planning horizon so that to me sounds like medium-term not annual and that was even before the Constitution Court ruling on debt spending which I will come to at the end of the talk so everything is quite up in the air but when I talk to people I know in the military they say well nothing has arrived here it's been one-way traffic out of the depots out of the armories towards Ukraine most of the equipment isn't being replaced and Germany's at the back of the queue for a lot of the heavy heavy goods so I don't really see how the Titan vendor can come about it's just practically it just doesn't seem like it's it's got legs at the moment um so there's a lot of talk and there's a lot of good will but um the focus seems to be on exporting to Ukraine and it's not at all clear if they will have money the the promise is that the Titan vendor took place outside the budget but not in any of the off-balance sheet issues that have been raised by the Constitution Court which I will get back to so the money seems to be there but actually finding ways to spend it seems to be procurement seems to be an issue finding suppliers is an issue and Germany was very late to the game other other countries were already ordering shortly after the Russian invasion what we also got this year was a new German foreign policy document and well too we had one Germany generally and sort of fleshing out the Titan vendor and then one on China I won't go into the details but um I found the documents nothing they're very interesting they're more prescript or more descriptive than prescriptive um Germany said its priority is to protect our country its free democratic order and our values we don't say um and for now it defines Russia as for now the most significant threat to peace and security in the Euro-Atlantic area and Charles is talking about sort of an integrated approach bringing in cybersecurity countering disinformation and food supply medication and he's agrees with the Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbauch about climate issues climate security being also national security issue and she Annalena Baerbauch has I think proven a lot of her critics wrong she seems to have for most of her partners considered a policy heavyweight and in Israel she was very quick to get there I think she's made at least four visits since then on the foreign policy in a general sense obviously before October 7th she said Germany's priorities would be security issues would be expanded to include climate change biodiversity food supplies and security in the 21st century she said is more than diplomacy and military and it's um it's about providing agencies she she wants to basically retool German agencies so they're all working with each other that they're spending the money more efficiently and that every spending decision has to consider every government spending decision will have to consider geopolitical issues and China was interesting only because for once they finally had a China policy but after months of basically committee thinking between several ministries in particular the chancellery and the foreign ministry turned out to be rather unexciting document but it does describe China's acting time and again counter to our interests and values but then in the next sentence of the document it says China is a partner with whom without whom many global challenges and crises cannot be resolved Beijing was paranoid about this document I don't think they had much to worry about when it finally came out and Scholes has always been very clear about this he he says on the one hand our firm transatlantic anchor is not to be questioned but working with Washington on one hand does not preclude Germany from having its own ideas about China and fostering sort of a multilateral world order and new relationships with other non-Chinese Asian partners so that's that's let's say policy some of the major policy things and what about the politics and we're in a bit of a brief quiet period we're gonna have another run of state elections next year the German system as you know is federalized so you have your federal elections we had them two years ago we'll have them in another two years and then staggered through the four-year federal election period are your state elections which sort of a holdover or it's a it's an inheritance from the allies the idea is keeping state elections keeps keeps politicians honest that someone someone everyone in your party somebody in their party is having an election somewhere so you might want to take that into mind supposed to stabilize the term political system but what we're seeing is yeah the old stabilities the old certainties are no longer there and this year we had an election in the barrier we had nearly 15% for the AFD that's slightly above the national polling numbers in Hesse where Frankfurt is 18% for the AFD so I think definitely if there was any doubt this is the year when the AFD finally became pan-german party it is already represented in all federal in all excuse me in all state parliaments but there was a lot of western Germans in particular they had this sort of they were lying to themselves saying oh the east Germans AFD in some states it's twice that's into 30% but there's still this idea oh there are these crazy easterners but I would always count them well you know most of the AFD leaders are actually from west Germany you know so they may be having their success in east but these are your people and I think with the Bavarian and Hesse elections in particular you've seen that it's the taboo has gone out of it the arguments are still there is this a protest vote usually as some of it is a protest vote every time the coalition falls out you can see the AFD going up ticking up two points in polls but they are increasingly stabilizing themselves establishing themselves and we're going to see next year I think next year is going to be crucial for the AFD and for the German political system because we have elections in Saxony, Brandenburg and Turingia those are three eastern states I was just looking at the numbers today in Saxony they're going to the polls the 1st of September 35% for the AFD most popular party 35 more than the third in Brandenburg that's the state that surrounds Berlin they go to the polls on the 22nd of September 27% and Turingia which is central german state it has AFD polling after 34% and Turingia is important because they've already gotten the first AFD county councillors there so the AFD policy has actually been to decentralize and to go local go as local as possible and it's starting to pay off for them that there seems to be a lesser taboo of voting for the AFD in your county council municipal elections and but obviously they're hoping that the polls for them in these three federal states will hold steady which means either you have all of the other parties combining their forces to keep the AFD out which will probably just boost the AFD even more because it will be a bickering bickering coalitions and or somebody will have to break it to go and go into politics go into government with the AFD so it's really all to play for and they're 10 years in existence and already three federal states really they they could be calling the shots by this time next year what could spoil the fun for them is a lady known as Sarah Vagenknecht some of you will be familiar with her um Red Sara some of them call her and while everyone else was out celebrating the fall of the wall in 1989 Sarah Vagenknecht was sitting at home reading Emmanuel Kant and she joined the SCD ruling party in East Germany shortly after the Berlin Wall fell so I think you can call her um she's more a Trotsky uh she's more a contrarian than a Trotsky some people say she's an old-fashioned Stalinist um she would consider herself a life long Marxist and she has been the torn in the flesh of the left party the Linke earlier this week the Linke ceased to exist as a parliamentary party in the Bundestag and it's largely because of Sarah Vagenknecht in recent years she's she's always been a hard leftist very uncompromising whereas a lot of the Berlin and Bundestag Linke were very much pragmatists she's sort of a pure a purist let's put it that way ideological purist and um she has been fighting her party for the last two or three years accusing them of turning the party into sort of a woke activist party that's more interested in pronouns than welfare and and this type of thing it's it's a play you'll be familiar with from other countries but um what she's done is she's walked out she's taken I think it's about nine or ten MPs with her which collapse the Linke parliamentary parties so they lose a lot of their privileges and speaking rights and she is going from broke she's hoping to run a the european elections next year she's hoping in in some of the autumn state elections and then of course the year after next year of the federal elections so this is all without a party actually haven't been founded it's more sort of a a wish a dream she's raising funding at the moment and we're not at all clear where all the funding is coming from um she I attended a a reading uh she was reading from her one of her books and it was an absolutely fascinating evening um where she she's basically offering leftist but particularly eastern voters sort of a a narrative of everything she's basically saying we're living in a a very complicated world there's increasingly more conflicts and we need to remind people that you cannot solve conflict with military means and this plays very well particularly with an eastern audience who would have a more pro-russian anti-american outlook and definitely strong pacifist tendencies um and it's all a lot about is a you know course versus attack on ukraine com trump contravenes international law and this without justification but and then she launched into sort of anti-american attack and she basically says that seitan bender the transformation of german foreign policy that schultz announces just sort of a pr strategy um and it's about militarizing germany um and uh yeah it's nobody's asking the who benefits questions and she's basically saying you know in particular germany's left as liberals who would have been pacifists in the past and are now um she says they're now examples of prussian militarism who still feel entitled to quote excommunicate critics of the war in ukraine as as pacifist rabble so this plays very well with an eastern audience i'm not sure how well it plays well in west but we're not sure where this is going with her the party may not actually come about um but it's definitely a wild card and it could um many people believe it could see a lot of af-day voters being pulled away um people political political um purists much smart and i are talking about horseshoe politics so that you've got the af-day on the right extreme right and sarawak is extreme left and somehow their policies are almost touching so what's something that she'll pull voters across from the extreme right af-day others are afraid that she will actually um join forces with them at some point that's there this very little separating separating their politics um on israel listen i could talk for 25 minutes on israel you've probably been following that i've just got an eye on the clock so i'll i'll keep it short um i mean shoals it took shoals two attempts in the bundesag i thought was quite interesting to actually mention gaza and the first reference he talked about our history our responsible responsibility rising from the holocaust makes our constant task to stand up for the existence and security of the state of israel this responsibility guides us in a second speech this was after the fonderline plus when she went to israel and didn't necessarily mention the humanitarian crisis in gaza he did mention gaza as well but very much that they are hostages of um hamas um the from an Irish perspective i think it's quite interesting that we have daikopotzl the former german ambassador to Ireland who's now been appointed as humanitarian envoy for the farm in the street well effectively for the for the federal government i had an interview with her a couple weeks ago if you haven't read it i definitely recommend going back and reading it i won't go back through it but she's basically full-time i was just texting with her yesterday she's very long days um and i was i did challenge her i said you know is germany a soft touch uh for israel is can israel pretty much do anything as far as germany's concern and she says no that's not the case and she was very she said obviously we have our historical responsibility towards israel and its security um but she said we've had very frank and very open talks with all relevant relevant players in this regard in terms of her priorities are getting humanitarian aid in uh securing the situation for humanitarian workers and getting german uh german citizens out and but when i pressed her she said look i mean we can lots of people are the criticism is hailing down on on israel from outside but you know she didn't say this but the implication was do you really think israel is impressed by enough that she says we have in germany have built up a relationship with israel from the most terrible beginnings to a relationship of trust um where people where there is mutual respect people are listening on each side so she said if if a country like germany starts criticizing in discrete terms in back rooms not a megaphone diplomacy she said you know you'd like to think that will have a different impact than let's say sweden or in arland who has had its quite robust public stance i'm not sure uh this is my own interpretation how much that will impress anyone in so sometimes friends uh our close friends criticism from them i think is the the line coming from berlin sometimes might be listened to more closely um i really could go on and on about that i haven't even gotten to the death break so i'll finish up with the death break uh you've probably been following very closely in simple terms whilst schultz and his government tried to do was they discovered before he even became chancellor 60 billion was left over from corona funding they said oh i know why don't we put a new label on that old wine bottle and we can use that for in particular climate spending we can use it for um all sorts of things um uh renovating germany's train system um which has fallen into terrible disrepair and the constitutional court says no you can't do that you went to us looking for emergency money these things you're talking about are emergencies in the wrong way but that's that's normal politics you need to fund that out of day-to-day spending which is a problem because germany has what it's called the death break dating back to the to the euro crisis no more than 0.35 percent of gdp can be borrowed by politicians which means that if you have no growth which is at the moment germany has no growth you have no borrowing so um we have so ending up where we started we have a government trying to square the circle it is a has a liberal finance minister leftist major majority party and uh green left in its heart um what would greet grace climate spending project ambitions and there's no money for any of this so um germany is basically tied itself up and knots here and debt is still the great taboo for germany even if it's literally cutting into its own flesh so we're in the middle of that debate we're not sure where that's going and there it could be serious implications as i've heard today from on european on the european budget debate but anyway the death the death break like israel is is is enough to talk about for an entire hour but it's 25 past two so i suggest i leave it there and we go to questions