Germany

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

You think British trains are bad? Try German ones

I found Jean-Pierre standing at a half-open window gulping down lungfuls of stale Dutch air as our night train chuntered, unseeing, through an expectoration of towns: Zutphen, Eefde, Gorssell. He was 79 years old, he told me, and returning to Berlin for the first time in 61 years for a meeting with an old friend. Our steward made it absolutely clear he couldn’t give a stuff that there was no buffet car Back in 1962, Jean-Pierre had been a very young Belgian Jesuit employed in smuggling hard currency from West to East Berlin, which he did by stuffing the notes inside a plaster cast which covered his right leg. There

Wednesday

Fredrik Erixon

What does the European centre-right stand for?

Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), dropped the bomb last weekend. In a TV interview, Merz opened the door for collaboration with Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the nationalist-populist party that is home to Germany’s cabal of crackpots and right-wing extremists. He didn’t say what form such co-operation would take, but talked about finding ways to run local councils when the AfD won democratic elections – which happened a few weeks ago when Hannes Loth won a mayoral race in a small town in Saxony-Anhalt. The reactions to Merz’s comments came thick and fast. Politicians from the left questioned his democratic credentials. He’s the ‘wrecking ball of

Sunday

Katja Hoyer

The unlikely rise of Germany’s defence minister

An unlikely political star has risen in Germany. Boris Pistorius, a 63-year-old father of two is a career politician and, as of January, defence minister, an office that has proved a dead end for many of his predecessors. On the face of it, Germany’s Boris has little by way of stardust. Yet he is the country’s most popular politician by a country mile and his department is set to increase its budget at a time when overall government spending is being sharply cut. It seems for the first time in decades, Germany is serious about security and defence – but how long will that seriousness last? Pistorius is often seen

Monday

Cindy Yu

How divided is Europe on China?

39 min listen

The word ‘West’ is often used as a shorthand to describe liberal democracies in Europe, and perhaps in Asia too, such that we’ll often talk about ‘the West’s attitude to China’, or the ‘West’s relations with China’. But this is at best a lazy shorthand – because when you dig a little deeper, it’s clear that there is no unified West on China. On this episode, I’m joined by Noah Barkin, senior advisor at the Rhodium Group and author of the Watching China in Europe newsletter with the German Marshall Fund, to disaggregate the idea of ‘the West’, focusing especially on the continent of Europe. How do different European nation

Wednesday

David Crane

The Franco-Prussian war changed the map of Europe – so why are we so ignorant about it?

Is there a single major European conflict of the past 200 years that gets so little attention in this country as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71? In 1961 Michael Howard brought out his history of the war, but Howard and the odd battlefield tourist apart, Rachel Chrastil’s bibliography – strong on contemporary memoirs, strong in fact on everything from the miraculous appearances of the Virgin Mary and the cult of St Radegund to the transmission of smallpox – is curiously thin when it comes to British interest. There may be simple enough reasons for this – among them, Britain’s determined neutrality and the infinitely worse conflicts to come – but

Monday

James Snell

Germany’s missteps in Ukraine have left Scholz fighting for his political life

Difficult though it may be to believe, there is chaos at the top of the German government over its mishandling of the war in Ukraine. Germany’s defence minister, Christine Lambrecht of the Social Democratic party, has quit her post after the most extraordinary series of unforced errors.  The war has brought all of this to a head. It has exposed Europe’s lax security and complacency. But German defence has been in a league of its own for many years. Over the course of the war, there has been no end to the amount of troubling information that has emerged.    German authorities so underrated the chance of war, the country’s intelligence chief

Friday

William Cook

Why Munich is the ideal Advent destination

Ambling through the Christkindlmarkt, Munich’s biggest Christmas market, feeling distinctly tipsy after my third (or maybe my fourth?) mug of Glühwein, I experienced a strange sensation, something I hadn’t felt in ages. For the first time in a long while, I realised I was feeling rather festive. Back in Britain, I’m the archetypal Christmas grouch – but leave me in a German Christmas market for a few hours and I become a big kid again. This is the first year since Covid that Munich has been able to mount a proper Christmas market season. That might not sound like such a big deal to Brits, but it’s headline news in Bavaria.

Monday

Katja Hoyer

How the Queen helped to fix Germany

The Brandenburg Gate has often reflected the state of the German nation. Throughout the centuries, Berlin’s iconic landmark has been a symbol of victory, defeat, unity, division and restoration. It has even reflected Germany’s energy crisis, no longer lit in order to save electricity. But on Friday night it shone brightly once more: in red, white and blue as Germany mourns the death of Queen Elizabeth II. This is much more than a gesture of condolence. ‘Expressing our sympathy and our mourning by lighting the symbol of our city and our country in the colours of the Union Jack to honour Queen Elizabeth II fully represents the sentiments of people

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Green parties are facing a reality check

How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that we should be kind to our planet, that sort of thing. But in every country they got too free a ride. They ended up preaching catastrophism to a supplicant media. And they ended up demanding that we all get off fossil fuels yesterday without any satisfactory explanation of how we were meant to keep the

Wednesday

Katja Hoyer

Is Germany afraid of China?

The German air force has taken off for its first deployment in the Indo-Pacific region. It will take part in Australia’s biennial warfare exercise Pitch Black from Friday, side by side with other western nations as well as regional partners such as Japan, Singapore and South Korea. Berlin’s show of solidarity will be welcomed by Nato allies, but it will also draw pushback from China. It’s an opportunity for Germany to show that it can make a meaningful contribution to the deterrence of Chinese aggression in the Pacific. But in order to do so convincingly it will have to resist pressure from Beijing with more confidence than it has in

Thursday

The Spectator

Germany’s energy crisis is a warning to Britain

During the eurozone crisis, southern European states had to go cap in hand to Germany to stave off national bankruptcy. A decade on and it is Berlin doing the begging. Europe has reluctantly agreed a 15 per cent cut in gas use this winter in the hope that German factories can stay open and German citizens can keep from freezing. Meanwhile, Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom threatened to reduce the gas flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline yet again so that Germany would receive only a fifth of the amount it did before the Ukrainian invasion. While Berlin has said it plans to wean itself off Russian gas over

Monday

Ross Clark

Putin has Europe where he wants it

Have we reached the endgame of Vladimir Putin’s energy war against the West, the point at which he turns off the gas for good? This afternoon, Gazprom announced that from Wednesday morning it will cut the quantity of gas flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany to 33 cubic metres per day. This will halve the current flow of 67 million cubic metres and is just 20 per cent of the 167 million cubic metres which flowed through the pipeline before the Ukraine invasion. Ostensibly, the cut is for reasons of ‘maintenance’. That is unlikely to wash. Nord Stream 1 relies on a compressor station powered by six

Friday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

How Germany’s energy crisis could bite Britain

For now, Berlin can breathe a sigh of relief: after a ten-day shutdown for maintenance, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline is back online. Russia is once again heating German homes, fuelling German industry, and using German money to finance its war in Ukraine. But this happy exchange may not continue; the pipeline is still operating at just 40 per cent of its usual capacity, and Vladimir Putin is warning this could fall to 20 per cent next week. With Germany’s gas reserves just 65 per cent full – thanks in part to state-owned Russian energy company Gazprom’s curious oversight in maintaining them last year – and plans to refill it

Tuesday

Susan Eisenhower

Enlarging Nato will ostracise Russia (1997)

It’s 25 years this month since Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were invited to join Nato. The Spectator’s cover story that week was this essay by Susanne Eisenhower, president of the Eisenhower Group and granddaughter of President Eisenhower. Explore The Spectator’s archive here. Washington, DC When historians, decades from now,  consider the 20th century they will probably be struck by how the major conflicts of the century were ultimately resolved. At the century’s end, Germany, the country that wreaked more destruction on the world than any other power, is economically prosperous, unified and firmly locked within Nato — all due to the magnanimity of its victors. The Russians, on the other hand, enter the new

Thursday

Wolfgang Münchau

Cold war: Putin’s plan to hold Germany to ransom

Russia has a long history of using the cold to defeat Europe. The winter of 1812 arrested Napoleon’s special military operation. Hitler’s troops hit the deep-freeze outside the gates of Moscow in December 1941. Now Vladimir Putin has the option to turn off the gas sent to Europe – a strategy against which Germany appears to have no defence. Gazprom, the monopoly supplier of piped Russian gas, has been giving Germany a taste of what life might be like, should Moscow play nasty. It recently halved the amount of gas sent through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, using bogus technical excuses. Germany, which still relies on Russia for more than

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

East Germans still find it hard to see Russia as the enemy

Not all of Germany is against Vladimir Putin. Sahra Wagenknecht, a Left party MP, recently defended him, saying he is not ‘the mad Russian nationalist’ of caricature and sending weapons to Ukraine was a ‘US-driven policy’ which played a role in provoking his invasion. Her views are quite common in East Germany and not only among the left. The far-right party Alternative for Germany, which has most of its support in the East, opposes sanctions and providing weapons. A recent opinion poll asked whether Berlin should ‘be tough on Russia’: half of West Germans agree, but just a third of East Germans do. Some 58 per cent of East Germans

Monday

Katja Hoyer

Germany is failing Ukraine

‘A giant step for German and European security,’ is how Chancellor Olaf Scholz described his government’s €100 billion cash injection for the country’s depleted military. But while Germany’s newfound commitment to its own defence is welcome, its commitment to Ukraine’s is still questionable at best.   Over the weekend, the German newspaper Die Welt reported that it had seen documents showing that Berlin had reduced military support for Ukraine to ‘a minimum’. According to inside sources, only two German weapon deliveries have reached Ukraine since the end of March. Both contained light equipment such as mines, hand grenades and spare parts for machine guns. The last delivery of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry dates back

Thursday

Wolfgang Münchau

Are sanctions making Russia richer?

Before the invasion of Ukraine, it was by no means certain that there would be a united response from the West. The sanctions imposed on Russia after Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 were fairly limited, especially from the European Union. Germany pressed on with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Russia. But now, America, Europe and much of Asia have been united in applying severe sanctions against Russian banks, companies and oligarchs. Three months on, it’s time to ask: are the sanctions working? The answer from the Bank of Russia’s balance of payment data for January to April isn’t reassuring. It showed that the sanctions are emphatically

Wednesday

The Spectator

Sanction Gerhard Schröder

From the start of the war in Ukraine, the democratic world has shown striking unity in the economic boycott of Russia. But sanctions are always a blunt instrument: aimed at the regime, they end up harming the whole population. Ordinary Russians, too, are victims of Vladimir Putin’s corruption and misrule. Far better to target the Kremlin and those close to it. The system of targeted sanctions on named individuals is one way of doing this. Action has now been taken against 1,086 people, with assets suspended and travel bans imposed. To go after the rich and powerful is always a test for democracies, especially if such people are generous in

Monday

Wolfgang Münchau

Olaf Scholz is tanking

North-Rhine Westphalia is Germany’s largest state, almost as large as the Netherlands. It was a traditional SPD fiefdom during the time of Helmut Kohl, but in 2005 it became a CDU state. Surely, if the SPD was on the march, ready to turn Germany’s regional politics red as it did the chancellery in last year’s election, a state like North-Rhine Westphalia would return to the party? But the big news from yesterday’s federal state elections is that the SPD, the party of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, scored its worst-ever result in Westphalia: less than 27 per cent of the vote. The CDU won with 35.5 per cent and will probably