It’s hard to overstate the pace of the change now under way in Germany. A country that had been defined by its reluctance to deploy military force is now sending lethal weapons to Ukraine and promising €100 billion more in defence spending. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would have ferried more Russian gas to Germany, has been abandoned. Germany has accepted Russia’s exclusion from the Swift banking system, in spite of the collateral economic damage. All of this adds up to the biggest policy shift that I can remember.
Perhaps the most significant change is in the tone of German public debate. Take last weekend’s gathering of 100,000 on Berlin’s streets: it was not your usual anti-war protest. There was outrage against the Kremlin and placards saying ‘Better a cold shower than Putin’s gas’. Astonishingly, the arms to Ukraine and the extra defence spending is backed by more than three-quarters of the German public. For the first time in living memory, there is also public outrage against Social Democratic party politicians – such as Gerhard Schröder and Manuela Schwesig – who lived in Vladimir Putin’s pocket for so long.
The German media has reassessed 16 years of Angela Merkel, her energy policy and her special relationships with dictators. ‘We’re starting over now,’ says the editor of Die Welt. ‘Now’s the chance to let go of old illusions that you have grown fond of and to accept the demanding seriousness of a complicated reality.’ Bild is delighted. ‘A left-wing Chancellor is implementing demands for which conservative and middle-class journalists and politicians have been ridiculed for many, many years,’ it says.
That Chancellor – Olaf Scholz – is now using the language of confrontation. ‘We are experiencing a turning point,’ he told the Reichstag on Sunday.
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