Jörg Luyken

Jörg Luyken is a journalist based in Berlin.

Sunday

Jörg Luyken

The AfD’s unlikely conversion to Merkelism

From our UK edition

It is hard to keep count of the German orthodoxies that have died a long overdue death on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Annäherung durch Handel, the claim that government lobbying for German industry in Moscow and Beijing would moderate those capitals by tying them to our trade interests. That didn't work. Building a gas pipeline from St Petersburg based on a mission to make up for historic war crimes, even after the Russian army had annexed 10,000 square miles of a neighbouring country? It turns out that pacifist gestures are only taken seriously at one end of the pipeline. Refusing to send weapons to a war zone over fears that you might end up escalating the conflict? Well, brutal autocrats don't need much encouragement if they plan on flattening a city.

Monday

Jörg Luyken

How long can Olaf Scholz last?

From our UK edition

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.