Scholz’s kowtow

A weekly newsletter on German politics, with news and analysis on the new government.
By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG
with NETTE NÖSTLINGER
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Remember when Germany was a functioning country? When its economy was the envy of Europe, its relationship with France a picture of harmony and its leaders weren’t at one another’s throats? 
‘Twas far from perfect, to be sure, yet to quote the legendary Cinderella (the 80’s glam-metal band, not the maiden), “Don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone” 
Death watch: Rarely has that sense of loss been more profound than this week. Nary a day passes that coalition leaders, still reeling from their shellacking in recent regional elections, don’t cast doubt on the coalition’s future — “At some point, the government itself can be part of the problem,” FDP leader Christian Lindner, who is also finance minister, said in an interview on Wednesday. 
As if to prove the point, Chancellor Olaf Scholz decided to go to the mattresses with the Greens, his other coalition partner, over the question of whether the EU should impose punitive tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in response to alleged uncompetitive practices. 
To review: Scholz and Lindner have been under immense pressure from the German auto industry — which made the monumental mistake of becoming dependent on the Chinese market — to block the tariffs. The Greens, in particular Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, favor a harder line on China in general in the face of its malevolent behavior towards its neighbors and its own people. The Greens also don’t like being the odd man person out in the EU. 
Berlin brouhaha: According to our colleagues at Bild, the most reliable source of goss on the cabinet, passions flared between Lindner and Baerbock (Scholz, as ever, maintained his composure) over the issue during a meeting this week with the finance minister suggesting his colleague visit a BMW factory with him to see how much support there was for the Greens’ hard stance.  
Nuclear option: With the Greens sticking to their (tariff) guns, Scholz decided to drop the big one on them and use something the Germans call Richtlinienkompetenz, the executive fiat that allows the chancellor to overrule ministers. 
Virtue signaling? The question is why Scholz, who knew the nays didn’t have enough votes to block the duties in Brussels, decided to make a spectacle of the whole thing anyway. Was he trying to show that he was on China’s side in the hope that Xi Jinping won’t come down hard on the German carmakers? If so, Scholz really went for it, locking arms with Central Europe’s leading populist agitators — Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Slovakia’s Robert Fico — in opposition to the move. 
Cliffhanger: The EU pushed forward with the planned duties on Friday, despite Germany’s last-minute end run. But as ever in the EU, that’s not the end of the story. There’s still another month until implementation, a window Scholz will doubtless use to try to keep Germany’s car industry from veering off a cliff. 
Austro-vulgarian: Austrians rarely fail to meet the lowest of democratic expectations, as they proved again Sunday by vaulting a party full of Nazi sympathizers into first place in their federal election. The final result for the so-called Freedom Party (FPÖ) was even a bit stronger than the polls predicted. Nearly 30 percent of Austrians voted for the party, handing it a record result at its first-ever win in a national election. 
What happens now?  Unclear. Even with the top spot, the FPÖ has only one potential coalition partner — the establishment People’s Party (ÖVP), which currently leads the government and finished second.
Kickl and screaming: “What we said before the election also applies after the election. There will be no coalition with [Herbert] Kickl,” Austria’s foreign minister, Alexander Schallenberg, told reporters in Berlin this week. ÖVP leader Karl Nehammer, the current chancellor, has refused to enter a coalition with FPÖ chief Kickl, a hard-right ideologue with a history of antisemitic and Islamophobic rhetoric. Not that the FPÖ’s extremist tendencies have stopped the ÖVP from collaborating with them before. The center-right led coalitions with the FPÖ in both 2000 and 2017 and more recently at the regional level. The history of those partnerships has been, to put it kindly, tumultuous.
Another option would be a three-way coalition between the ÖVP, aka “Cosa Nostra,” the Social Democrats and the liberal Neos. Given the ideological divide between the parties, such a constellation would be unwieldy, as the Germans have discovered the hard way with their so-called traffic-light coalition, which is currently in the process of disintegrating.
What say Brussels? Not much. The EU, which has become accustomed to dealing with extremists, more or less ignored the results.
That won’t last for long if Kickl somehow manages to become chancellor. While still a longshot — in particular because Austria’s president has signaled he wouldn’t accept him — it’s in the realm of the possible. And even if the FPÖ managed to nudge Kickl aside and field another chancellor, the party would be a disruptive force. Like any Russia-friendly party worth its salt, the FPÖ opposes aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Moscow. On migration, the party has said it would create a “Fortress Austria” and simply ignore EU law. 
In denial: The country’s foreign minister meanwhile dismissed the possibility of Austria bringing any turbulence to the EU level. “The future Chancellor will also be called Karl Nehammer, that’s what I strongly assume,” Schallenberg said in Berlin. “There will be no change regarding Russia, regarding European integration, regarding the Middle East, regarding Israel, regarding strategic partnerships with the United States.”
Accepting the inevitable: Austrians were pioneers of right-wing populism in Europe which makes the country a perfect place to examine the long-term effects of far-right politics. 
We had the opportunity to do just that for several days after the election and couldn’t help but notice the strong sense of resignation among many Austrians who had opposed the FPÖ. “Sooner or later,” one 90-year-old who lived through the Nazi period told us, “Kickl will be chancellor.”
Rhinoceros vibes: What most surprised us was how Austria’s institutions are starting to fall into line, much like the characters in Ionescu’s Rhinoceros, an absurdist play on how easily authoritarianism can take hold. (“Every human being would be proud to be a rhinoceros. If not proud, then at least relieved. When you turn into a rhinoceros, you’re safe from all the anguish and suffering caused by reasoning.”)
Austria’s ORF public television went full-Rhino on Sunday, inviting one of the most prominent extreme right-wing figures in the country, former FPÖ MEP Andreas Mölzer, to discuss the election results on its premier politics news program in prime time. 
A self-described German nationalist, Mölzer is notorious for reviving the word “Umvolkung,” a Nazi term often used today in extremist circles to describe the white replacement theory.  He drew headlines last year for traveling to Kabul and meeting with the Taliban on a quixotic mission to try and win the release of a fellow right-wing extremist who had been arrested there.
How democracies die: In the introduction to the interview, the public-TV reporter made no reference to Mölzer’s past extremism or even the positive comments he has made about the Taliban since his trip to Kabul, describing him simply as a “long-serving MP.” Mölzer was granted several minutes to offer his unfiltered view of the lay of the land. Ionescu would be proud.
FRANCO-GERMAN RIFT PART X: The clashing worldviews of the leaders of the EU’s two biggest economies, revived again as French President Emmanuel Macron visited Berlin this week. Macron and Scholz diverged on key topics including proposals for joint EU borrowing, duties on imports of Chinese vehicles and trade talks with South American countries, our French colleagues Clea Caulcutt and Giorgio Leali write in their report.
At loggerheads: The clash dramatizes the protectionist versus free trade dilemma facing the bloc’s 27 governments at a highly sensitive moment for global trade. The U.S. presidential election is on a knife edge and could see Donald Trump reelected in one month’s time. He has past form playing hardball with the EU on trade and has proposed sweeping new tariffs if he wins back the White House for the Republicans.
HISTORY LESSONS: As Germany celebrated 34 years of unity on Thursday, key politicians from eastern Germany called for an international alliance to bring Russia to the negotiating table. “Without the Poles’ struggle for freedom and the support of the USA, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and other partners, unification would not have been possible,” the state leaders of Saxony and Brandenburg, Michael Kretschmer and Dietmar Woidke, and the (very probably so) soon to be state leader of Thuringia, Mario Voigt, argue in a commentary for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Key moment: The call, although not new, comes at a time when coalition negotiations are under way in all three eastern German states, where elections were held in September. The populist-left Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a new party named after its founder, a leftist icon who started out in politics as a member of East Germany’s communist party, took third place in all three states, becoming kingmaker as all other parties ruled out a coalition with the far-right Alternative for Germany — the other big winner. Members of the BSW have since stated they won’t form a coalition with partners that support the presence of U.S. missiles in Germany or do not openly state their support for peace negotiations with Russia.
SPD <3 TURKISH OPPOSITION: The leadership of Scholz’s SPD teamed up with Turkey’s main opposition force, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), this week. Erdoğan’s time “will certainly come to an end soon,” Lars Klingbeil, one of the SPD’s leaders, said on the Berlin Playbook podcast before departing on a three-day visit to the country. “Our sister party has good alternatives. We want to support them and expand our cooperation,” he added. Klingbeil and CHP party leader Özgür Özel signed a partnership agreement on Monday in Ankara. The SPD delegation then traveled on to Istanbul to meet mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who is expected to challenge Erdoğan in the 2028 presidential election.
Campaigning abroad: The SPD’s move to align itself with Turkey’s opposition forces might not go down well with parts of its own electorate. Among the 1.5 million Turks living in Germany, Erdoğan comfortably won the last presidential election, finishing with 67 percent of the vote. That was well above the overall result, in which he received around 52 percent. “Germany has failed to make Turkish guest workers and their offspring feel they are an important part of society,” Betül Yilmaz-Bergk, a researcher at the university of Mainz, said. “Erdoğan’s AK Party has instrumentalized that feeling and is targeting these voters through state media channels.”
LUNCHING WITH ECONOMY CHIEFS: Scholz is meeting the leaders of the five major international economic and financial organizations (the International Labour Organization, the International Monetary Fund , the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Trade Organisation, and the World Bank) on Tuesday for lunch.
COSTA IN BERLIN: António Costa, the incoming European Council president, will meet Scholz on Thursday in the Chancellory for a bilateral conversation expected to center on the political priorities for the coming years and future cooperation in the European Council.
BIDEN’S GOODBYES: U.S. President Joe Biden will arrive in Germany for a three-day goodbye visit next Friday. The President will reinforce the U.S. and German commitment to democracy and countering antisemitism and hatred, strengthen the enduring people-to-people ties between both countries, and advance cooperation on economics, trade, and technology, the White House said in a statement. Over the weekend, Biden will convene a leader-level meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at the U.S.-run Ramstein Air Base to coordinate the efforts of the more than 50 countries supporting Ukraine.
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