German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the darling of Russia hawks because of her steadfast insistence on Ukraine-related sanctions against the Kremlin. However, if she wins next month’s election, as seems likely, she may get a foreign minister who is openly in favor of a more accommodating Russia policy.
A large part of German society is behind such a pragmatic softening.
Christian Lindner, the charismatic leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a small free-market party with a socially liberal bent, has faced relentless press criticism since saying in an interview on Saturday last week that Russia’s annexation of Crimea should be considered “a long-term provisional solution.”
Lindner — also an advocate of a close relationship with the US — has been calling for “encapsulating” the Crimea problem to take “positive intermediate steps” and put forward “proposals that would allow [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to correct his policies without losing face.”
If the FDP gets back into parliament, as polls predict, it will be the preferred coalition partner of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats, as it was in many previous governments. The junior coalition partner usually gets the foreign minister’s portfolio. (The legendary foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who excelled in the job under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, was an FDP member.)
That would put Lindner in the hot seat.
TABOOS
Lindner acknowledges that accepting Crimea’s inclusion in Russia is a taboo, so he has been careful not to call for anything as drastic as lifting EU sanctions.
Instead, he has coated his detente proposal in historical analogies: “We have never recognized the annexation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union, but statesmen like Willy Brandt and Walter Scheel have been able to develop an Ostpolitik that Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher pursued right up to German unification.”
Conservative and centrist commentators have nevertheless accused him of proposing a Kuschelkurs — a policy of cozying up to Putin.
IN A LOOP
In addition, given Lindner’s possible role in the next governing coalition, the government felt compelled to issue a statement saying its position on Crimea has not changed: It was a human rights violation and a threat to peace in Europe.
Lindner has found himself in an uncomfortable endless loop of self-justification.
“The signal to Moscow should be that Russia has a place in the house of Europe, only if it abides by the house rules again. As long as that’s not the case, there can be no cooperation. I don’t know if there’s readiness in Moscow to change course. But I know that it won’t start with big questions but with small ones,” he told the German tabloid Bild.
These may sound like puzzlingly opaque statements, but they appear to be in line with the feelings of those voters Lindner is trying to capture: the FDP base in the business community and the far-right supporters of the Alternative for Germany party, whose popular backing the FDP is trying to erode with some hardline rhetoric on immigration.
PUBLIC OPINION
A poll published yesterday showed that by suggesting more openness to Russia, Lindner scored with both these groups — and that 44.4 percent of Germans agreed with him, while 43.2 percent disagreed.
A plurality of Germans and a majority of both right-wing and extreme left-wing voters do not want Russia as an enemy.
Lindner is trying to exploit that without directly supporting Putin’s agenda; the leader of a party calling itself both Free and Democratic can hardly afford Putin advocacy in the style of failed French presidential candidates Marine Le Pen and Francois Fillon.
However, what exactly are the “small questions,” “intermediate steps” and “face-saving proposals” Lindner is talking about? He’s never described them, but Germans — likely including Merkel — understand what he means.
The EU last week added some Russian officials to its sanctions blacklist following revelations that gas turbines built by German industrial conglomerate Siemens had been moved to Crimea, violating earlier sanctions.
However, the German government has not punished Siemens or pushed it to withdraw from Russia. The company has gotten away with closing one of its Russian joint ventures (far from the biggest one) and suing the buyer of the turbines in a Russian court, which is highly unlikely to overturn the deal.
Nor is Germany likely to do anything about popular Hamburg techno band Scooter’s recent concert in Crimea, which had Ukraine up in arms and threatening eight-year prison sentences for the musicians.
Germany also has not compromised on its strong support of Nord Stream 2, a Russian pipeline project to bring natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea that Eastern European countries, primarily Poland, are trying to halt.
The US, too, opposes it, hoping to supply more liquefied natural gas to Eastern Europe.
To ensure the project succeeds, Russia is signaling readiness to relax the gas export monopoly of state-owned Gazprom — the biggest legal obstacle to more Russian gas supplies to Europe.
If Russia liberalizes gas exports and Germany pushes through Nord Stream 2, it could be seen as one of the “intermediate steps” Lindner suggested.
A NEW ‘OSTPOLITIK’
It is possible that Lindner is merely talking openly about something that Merkel would rather keep quiet — the cautious shaping of a new Ostpolitik that will ignore the unresolved Ukraine crisis and refocus on reaching out to Russia without changing the current sanctions regime — but also without its overzealous enforcement.
Whether or not the FDP leader becomes foreign minister, Germany will move in that direction because that line was historically successful with the Soviet Union and because there is not enough voter demand for a hardline policy.
A quiet, piecemeal rapprochement will do as little to change Putin’s calculus as open US hostility. However, at least German business interests can benefit while all the requisite nods to human rights and the sanctity of borders are made.
Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers