The peace chancellor that Putin laughs at: Olaf Scholz wanted to copy Angela Merkel, now he is imitating Gerhard Schröder. How much longer can Germany afford to have a chancellor who has lost his compass in the biggest crisis since the Second World War?
by cito
17 comments
Translation of this opinion piece from a German newspaper:
Olaf Scholz is the return of history as farce. A chancellor who believed he could copy his predecessor, even though reality had already collapsed over her policies when she was still in the chancellery. Now that the Merkel method is clearly no longer working, Scholz is taking Gerhard Schröder as his role model and imitating the “peace chancellor”. What the election campaign speech in Goslar was for Schröder, the video message from the Chancellery is for Scholz: “To put it bluntly: as German Chancellor, I will not send any soldiers from our Bundeswehr to Ukraine,” said Scholz – as if Vladimir Putin were the new George W. Bush.
(for context: Schroeder opposed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq 20 years ago in an election speech in Goslar)
But the Kremlin ruler is not a man who wants to invade a country in the Middle East on trumped-up war grounds. Instead, he is shifting the borders in Europe by force, his soldiers are leaving a trail of devastation and horror through Ukraine. And Putin leaves no doubt that a NATO state could soon be on his menu. If the Chancellor is copying Gerhard Schröder’s rhetoric, this is only consistent to the extent that the former Chancellor has allowed himself to be made a useful idiot by the war criminal in the Kremlin.
It’s not as if the Germans don’t see through Olaf Scholz: Hardly any chancellor before him had worse poll ratings. But the next federal election will not take place until the fall of 2025, and the question is whether Germany can afford another year and a half of a chancellor who responds to the problems of the present with the mistakes of the past.
Merkel has already failed to take the election of Donald Trump as an opportunity to build a European defense policy worthy of the name. The Chancellor lamented the decline of the international order verbosely and with apocalyptic comparisons and made no recognizable attempt to build a functioning European security system together with France. After Trump’s election, she declared that Europe must now stand on its own two feet – and then continued to bleed the Bundeswehr dry.
Perhaps the most brutal war since 1945 is raging in Europe, but Scholz is making no serious effort to develop a joint plan with Emmanuel Macron. Instead, he is engaging in showdowns with the French president as if the man in the Élysée is the problem and not the dictator in the Kremlin. The Chancellor is clinging to the hope that Joe Biden will be re-elected as US President.
But all the polls show that it would be irresponsible to rely on this. The “New York Times” has just determined in a national survey that Trump is five percentage points ahead of the incumbent. An overwhelming majority of Americans consider the 81-year-old Biden to be too old to last another four years in office. Nevertheless, Biden is not making the slightest effort to make way for a younger candidate.
What Biden and Scholz have in common is a bunker mentality in which a sober view of reality is considered defeatism. The normality of yesterday has vanished, Bernd Ulrich just wrote very aptly, only “our chancellor is standing with his briefcase in the middle of the epochal break and saying: I don’t want to change, you don’t have to either.” Germany needs a new chancellor or a new Olaf, according to his colleague from Die Zeit. But where should he come from?
I met Scholz at the G20 summit in New Delhi last fall. He was standing at a hotel bar in the evening with a few journalists and his entourage, and every fiber of his being radiated the happiness of having reached the top. In Wolfgang Schmidt, Scholz has a head of the Chancellery who confirms his greatness on a daily basis, and in Jens Plötner, a security advisor who helped to devise a Russia policy that has damaged Germany more than any other policy in recent decades. Like his boss, Plötner considers it a sandbox game to even think about European nuclear weapons – but like Scholz, he has no idea what Europe should do if President Trump no longer feels like defending the old continent.
(continued in reply)
Merkel and Schröder are probably the worst possible role models for him. He should try to find his inner Bismarck instead.
The pendulum has certainly swung in the opposite direction regarding military prowess for Germany.
Appeasement out of fear didn’t work 1939, and it won’t work with Russia. Scholz is too weak for the job. We need a strong, brave leader right now.
France is the leader of Europe rn
Scholz is either compromised, or woefully inadequate to hold that office, and I’m not sure which one is worse giving the time we live in.
Germany always on the wrong side of history
Please wake the f up Germany.
Hes a typical libtard idiot, removed from reality living in his own dream clouds
Don’t blame him /s. He tried to maneuver his way so that Germany would “keep the cake and eat the cake” at the same time. It was a golden business deal. Through russian sponsored ngos and other green ecologists agencies demote coal, oil and nuclear energy. Buy cheap gas from russia – labelled green by the ecologists and sell it to neighbours i.e. Poland, Czech Republic and so on … it was a golden deal and Putin fucked it up. They waited for UA to fall like putin and his cronies planned (take Kyiv in 3 days) but it all went FUBAR. That’s why they were so reluctant to give any military equipment in the early stages of war. That’s why still they having some discussions over Taurus missiles etc…
Didn’t Merkel cozy up to Russia which is now why Germany has issues because they relied on Russian gas?
That’s ridiculously extreme.
Germany is still the second biggest supporter of Ukraine behind the US. They are doing more than most countries even in regards of GDP.
Could they do more? Should they send Taurus? Yes, absolutely. But that doesn’t mean that Germany is completely out of touch.
Meanwhile France is being hailed as hero due to their words, which aren’t backed up by action. That’s out of touch with reality. There are so much countries that could do more, but some here are hyper focused on the country that’s already doing more than most.
There are three problems
1. Scholz’ party, especially the left wing. They were dead wrong about Russia, but are still trying to save their worldview, so they cannot admit that Russia is an Imperialist aggressor, just as in the Cold War they pretended that the Soviet Union was a country interested in peace. They were not, they were held at bay by weapons. SS-20 missiles were not removed by peaceful negotiations, they were removed by counter-arming with Pershing 2 and cruise missiles and then negotiating.
2. The Kremlin might have threatened to do something underhanded, they could go on a sabotage path with plausible deniability, staying below triggering article 5 and doing damage nonetheless.
3. Diplomatic maneuvering in conflict with hard military consequences. To achieve a settlement, there has to be an advantage of stopping the war over continuing for Russia and in extension the current regime. There are actually two approaches to do this. Make continuing as expensive and painful as possible, that of course is done by delivering as many weapons as possible to inflict damage on Russia. The other approach is to make stopping as attractive as possible and I am quite sure that every diplomat wants to offer Crimea to Russia in a final settlement. By delivering Taurus, potentially cutting of Crimea from the Russian mainland and making it vulnerable to Ukrainian liberation this option would be negated. Militarily speaking retaking Crimea would be far easier then retaking the East, Luhansk and Donetsk. This is of course self defeating, even if following this train of thought, because the threat of loosing Crimea might bring Russia to the negotiation table with an acceptable offer.
Friendly reminder that Germany is Ukraine’s biggest supporter in Europe. It seems that people forget that when they write nonsense like this.
COWARD!
Another 10 minutes?
He’s still hoping to get Russian oil and gas, these Russian apologists need to be rooted out from every level of government everywhere