Germany

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 a third of its gas, is now realising it may have to cope with a total gas embargo – and a cold winter.

‘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.

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 form a coalition with the Greens.

Angela Merkel left the German chancellery at the end of last year with a bunch of flowers, a standing ovation in the Bundestag, a fist bump from her successor Olaf Scholz, and an approval rating of 68 per cent. Rarely for a national leader, she left office on her own terms, remaining Germany’s most popular politician until the week she stepped down, set to become the country’s elder stateswoman. Less than three months later, Russia invaded Ukraine – immediately throwing her legacy into doubt. The 21st-century Germany she built is extraordinarily dependent on Russian energy thanks to years of dovish engagement with Vladimir Putin’s regime, placing German business interests firmly above concerns from eastern EU allies.

Berlin, Germany Germans have a complex relationship with their Erinnerungskultur, or ‘culture of memory’. Whenever the word appears, it almost invariably refers to how the country thinks about its difficult past. Determined never to forget the horrors of the Nazis, Germans have spent decades reflecting on the evil that their forbears unleashed upon the world. And yet this process isn’t helping us understand our present. As a German-Canadian whose grandparents spent their childhoods in bomb shelters, I’ve long respected German memory culture. But events in Berlin on VE Day this past Sunday have shaken my faith. Today, Ukraine is revealing how little we actually understand about our history in Germany.

Journalists rarely had it so easy as when it came to writing up the final result of the French presidential election on Monday morning. The copy almost wrote itself: the triumph of moderation, demonstrated by a convincing win for centrist Emmanuel Macron over his far-right challenger Marine Le Pen; the clear defeat of disruptive extremist politics that might otherwise have threatened European stability; and the return to EU business as usual, with euroscepticism once again off the table and the re-establishment of a stable Franco-German axis in charge of Brussels. Easy, but ultimately unconvincing. Centrists who can be trusted not to be too radical may indeed be in power in France, as they have been in Germany since the installation of Olaf Scholz as Chancellor late last year.

Just what exactly is going through German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s head? ‘Russia must not win this war’, he says. But it is less certain about who Scholz wants to be the victor. Publicly, the Chancellor says that he is giving Ukraine the ‘strongest possible support’. But in a highly anticipated speech last week, he once again refused to deliver the heavy weapons Kyiv has been asking for. Many in Berlin were left wondering why Scholz chose to do the speech at all given that he had nothing new to say. He was disingenuous in his excuse that the G7 had agreed that the Ukrainian army needed Soviet-era technology. The Netherlands, Canada, the UK and US have all said they would provide western artillery or armoured vehicles.

When Volodymyr Zelensky told the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier yesterday that he did not want to see him in Kyiv, it hit his delegation like a slap in the face. The political class in Berlin still underestimates the depths of mistrust caused by Germany’s Russia policy. Whether trust with Eastern Europe can be rebuilt will depend on Berlin’s support for Ukraine – and certainly not on empty words, gestures and visits. Steinmeier had been on a state visit to Poland when Zelensky’s message reached him. He had travelled there in order to meet with President Andrzej Duda – in itself no easy encounter. Tensions between the two countries run higher than many in Germany realise.

Just three weeks after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would directly arm Ukraine, Europe’s economic powerhouse is running out of weapons to send. 'We’re delivering Stingers. We’re delivering Strelas. The Defence Minister has looked at what we can deliver but honesty also requires us to say: we don’t have enough,' Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the Bundestag last week. 'If we could conjure up more weapons to send, then we would.' Scholz then appeared to revert to an old German habit: trumpeting the importance of diplomacy as an end in itself.