Wolfgang Münchau

Sixteen years after Angela Merkel became Chancellor, Germany will have a new leader next week: Olaf Scholz. We might expect Scholz to enact a few domestic reforms but do little to change the country’s foreign policy — as is the tradition for a new German government. But this time, the consensus behind the country’s foreign policy has broken down. Relations with Russia are at a delicate phase and things might be about to change rather a lot. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz (Getty Images) Scholz is from the centre-left Social Democratic party and both of his coalition partners, the Greens and the liberal FDP, are pushing for reform.

An iron curtain has descended on Europe, and once again, it goes right through the middle of Germany. The average national infection rate is currently exploding, but the real story is not the average, but the vast gap between east and west, with another gap between the north and south. The north-west of Germany is like the rest of the western EU, cases growing but not at such an alarming rate. But the south-east is like central and eastern Europe. Hospitals are overflowing. Berlin has ceased all non-emergency operations. Germany’s formidable and numerous intensive care units are now for the first time in the pandemic experiencing bottlenecks, for which they have made no emergency planning. The politics behind this is potentially quite dangerous.

Nato and the EU are fearing a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. They have reason to be concerned, given that Russia would not blink to escalate while the West is still fumbling around on how best to respond. Brussels and Washington are in firefighting mode, while Russia chooses the when and the where. Annexation in the east, meanwhile, is already happening — not by force but through civil and economic ties. Military mobilisation looks like a sideshow, a distraction from what is really happening already: a slow annexation of the eastern quasi-independent republics. The pro-Russian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence from Kiev in 2014 but have never been recognised by Ukraine.

Until yesterday, it was possible to imagine that there would be a political solution to the standoff between the EU and Poland. Poland would reform the disciplinary chamber for its judges, and the EU would be satisfied that its principal grievance had been addressed. The Polish government had already promised to reform its disciplinary chamber, but it was unable to set a binding timetable, as it relies for its majority on United Poland (UP), a small, deeply anti-European party. Zbigniew Ziobro, the leader of UP, is also justice minister. The EU used to be quite adept at handling political impasses like this one, through diplomacy rather than full confrontation. But this time is different.

The EU is notoriously bad at learning from its own mistakes, mostly because it is unable to recognise these mistakes in the first place. A notable exception is austerity. There is now a consensus that it was a disaster, which blighted Europe’s economic resilience for a generation. A mistake the EU has not recognised yet is its role in Brexit: how it negotiated with David Cameron, and how it sided with the second referendum after the election, thus helping to create the political backlash that has destroyed even the faintest hope of a rapprochement with the UK. In what may be her last European Council, Angela Merkel yesterday spoke truth to power when she warned her fellow leaders not to treat Poland in the same way.

The results of the German election have shifted somewhat since last night's exit poll. What we know for sure is that a red-red-green coalition — between the centre-left SPD, far-left Die Linke and the Greens — is short of a majority, which is contrary to what every single opinion poll projected in the last few weeks That is the single biggest news from the German elections. It deprives SPD leader Olaf Scholz of what he would have needed to force the free-market liberals of the FDP and Greens into a coalition, also known as the traffic light coalition. A coalition involving Die Linke could have been leveraged to sharpen minds, the threat of socialists and anti-capitalists having access to the chancellery. That threat is now gone and Scholz's negotiating position is weakened.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the so-called Aukus alliance between the US, the UK and Australia — and the implicit geopolitical disaster for the EU. The alliance is the culmination of multiple European failures: naivety at the highest level of the EU about US foreign policy; Brussels’s political misjudgements of Joe Biden and his China strategy; compulsive obsession with Donald Trump; and the attempt to corner Theresa May during the Brexit talks. If you treat the UK as a strategic adversary, don’t be surprised when the UK exploits the areas where it enjoys a competitive advantage. The EU has outmanoeuvred itself through lazy group-think.

As the floods which have devastated homes and caused over 150 deaths recede in the Rhineland, three types of political implications have already emerged. People are talking about climate change – for the first time during the campaign. Armin Laschet, Merkel’s successor, failed to rise to the occasion when he was caught laughing as the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier addressed grieving families in the Rhineland. And it also emerged that flood warnings were issued, but were not passed on to the population. Germany is still in shock, especially because other parts of the country have since flooded. South-eastern Bavaria has now suffered the worst floods ever recorded, with massive destruction of infrastructure.

Just in time for the football final, Italy’s Five Star party reached a deal. Giuseppe Conte, a former prime minister, has agreed to take on the leadership of the party, but only on condition that he will be fully in charge of the politics of the movement and of the parliamentary party. Beppe Grillo, the party’s founder, agreed to those conditions, which reduces his hold. This compromise may not last. Many details have yet to be agreed. But Conte is in a strong position because the majority of parliamentarians and voters are behind him — a powerful combination.