Wolfgang Münchau | The Spectator columnists & writers

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

How Boris can cling on

What is happening in the UK right now is similar to the later Berlusconi years, the opera buffa phase of Italian politics with bunga-bunga parties, and worse. Readers may remember Berlusconi’s infamous put-down of recession warnings in 2009, when he remarked that he was not worried because the restaurants were still full. I remember having a conversation with a senior minister in his cabinet at the time, who said it was absolutely clear that Berlusconi had to go, and it was just a matter of time. It took another three years. And it was the euro crisis that did it, an event still unforeseen in 2008. History never quite repeats itself. But the events of the last few days in the UK bring up some memories of that episode.

What makes the EU think it can run an army?

The German political economist Benjamin Braun recently made an astute observation about the editorial position of a German newspaper - in fact, it is an observation about the German policy consensus in general. “Eurobond? Never, it’ll kill us all. Eurobomb? Bring it on.” Incomprehensibly, the EU is now discussing yet another field of political integration: a defence union. But the big task it set itself 20 years ago remains (to put it politely) incomplete. Amongst other things agreed in the recent two-day EU summit was the need to press ahead with defence strategic procurement and coordinating capability. There is a ‘Strategic Compass’ plan for an ‘EU Rapid Deployment Capacity of up to 5,000 troops’ and much more besides.

How Russia wins

It is still too early to predict the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Russia has certainly solidified its position in the east and is making small military gains. What's become clear over the last few days is that Russia may, after all, be able to achieve at least some of its military goals.Here is an interesting, albeit disturbing, political scenario by Sabine Fischer, a senior fellow at a German foreign policy tank. She notes that the mood in Moscow itself has shifted. It is the Kremlin’s political calculation that the western nations will not sustain their massive financial and military support for Ukraine. The longer the war drags on, the more tired Europe will become. By the autumn, just before the start of the winter, the Europeans' priority will be to secure gas from Vladimir Putin.

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 not working, at least not in the way that they were intended.

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 form a coalition with the Greens. The FDP, the free-market liberals that form the third leg of Scholz’s national coalition, also lost badly, down 7 per cent to just over 5 per cent.

Olaf Scholz is becoming Putin’s most valuable ally

If you think that Boris Johnson’s parties in Downing Street constitute a serious matter of state, you might want to take a look at what is happening in Germany right now. Olaf Scholz has been caught red-handed misrepresenting facts about weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Behind the scenes, he is busy frustrating efforts to help the country, while pretending to be outraged about Vladimir Putin’s aggression. Double games work until they don’t. His policies are now being exposed by the media. Scholz said on Tuesday that Germany and Ukraine went through a list of weapons deliveries, and that Germany planned to pay for them. Ukraine denied this. It said that there were no weapons on the list that it needed right now. Bild managed to get hold of the list, and was shocked to find that the original list of 48 pages had been shrunk in half.

How Putin wins the war

There was a revealing comment yesterday from Robert Habeck, the German economics minister. It is a comment that inadvertently suggests how Vladimir Putin will end up winning the war. Habeck said Germany would not agree to an import ban of Russian gas, oil and coal, because this would endanger the social peace in Germany. It is not clear whether he spoke for himself or the government. But as of now, we have reached the limits of meaningful sanctions. Germany ended Nord Stream 2 unilaterally. Germany raised its defence budget to 2 per cent of GDP, plus extra investments, again unilaterally. Germany reluctantly agreed to what turned out to be very limited sanctions on Russia’s exclusion from the Swift payment communications system.

Germany’s attitude to Russia is changing. Does it go far enough?

It’s hard to overstate the pace of the change now under way in Germany. A country that had been defined by its reluctance to deploy military force is now sending lethal weapons to Ukraine and promising €100 billion more in defence spending. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would have ferried more Russian gas to Germany, has been abandoned. Germany has accepted Russia’s exclusion from the Swift banking system, in spite of the collateral economic damage. All of this adds up to the biggest policy shift that I can remember. Perhaps the most significant change is in the tone of German public debate. Take last weekend’s gathering of 100,000 on Berlin’s streets: it was not your usual anti-war protest. There was outrage against the Kremlin and placards saying ‘Better a cold shower than Putin’s gas’.

Europe is painfully reliant on Putin

Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine in the early hours of this morning, starting with a massive air attack from the north, south and east, targeting military and civilian infrastructure. This is the worst-case scenario. Putin's speech on Monday set the ideological groundwork. This morning he spoke again, calling Ukraine ‘our historic lands’. He said he was launching what he called a ‘special military operation’ with the goal, not of occupying the country, but of ‘demilitarising and de-Nazifying’ Ukraine. And Putin spoke too to us here in the West:To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: if you do, you will face consequences greater than any of you have faced in history. All relevant decisions have been taken.

Sanctions won’t stop Putin

The Lithuanian prime minister, Ingrida Šimonyte, put it well yesterday: 'the way we respond will define us for the generations to come'. The invasion of Ukraine started last night with Vladimir Putin’s order to send troops into eastern Ukraine. He had earlier recognised the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which together constitute the Donbas region, as independent republics. The two self-proclaimed states declared their independence — something neither Kiev nor any other third country save Russia has yet recognised — following 2014 following the Maidan revolution. The US, UK and EU say they will announce fresh sanctions as early as today. What we know is that the technicalities have been drawn up. Ursula von der Leyen revealed that Russia will be cut from the global financial markets.

How the Ukraine crisis ends

Vladimir Putin does not think in the way the West does. Of course sanctions will hurt. But so what? He may be wrong in his strategic calculations, but he is not, as Boris Johnson claimed over the weekend, irrational. Putin is an old-school strategist. This is one of the reasons that sanctions will not have the desired impact. An import ban on Russian gas would definitely hurt the Russian economy, but that seems highly unlikely. Italian President Mario Draghi said on Friday that we should not touch gas. It is now the guy who sits in Moscow, rather than Draghi, who is willing to do ‘whatever it takes’. An import ban on the latest iPhones does not have the same deterrent effect as a continental gas shortage. Don’t fool yourself about the impact of sanctions.

Blair is right: Boris doesn’t have a plan for Britain

What can Boris Johnson and the Tories learn from Tony Blair? While Labour's former leader remains deeply unpopular – and indeed ultimately fell over a grave misjudgement – he was the UK’s last successful prime minister. Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and, now, Boris Johnson exist in his shadow. The PM would be wise then to look to Blair's rise to power – and his strategic approach to government – to learn some lessons. In a speech yesterday, Blair warned that: 'There is a gaping hole in the governing of Britain where new ideas should be.' Blair is right. While Partygate continues to dominate the headlines, the real failure of Johnson's administration is not bad behaviour or Downing Street festivities, but the lack of a political strategy to prepare the UK for the future.

In the pipeline: would Germany side with Russia in a conflict?

If Russia were to invade Ukraine, would Germany side with the Russians? For most of our post-war history, that would have been an absurd question, but things are changing fast in Europe. In the wake of recent events, it would not be irrational for Vladimir Putin to bet that if push came to shove, he could count on German neutrality — or even support. The Ukraine crisis continues apace, with up to 100,000 Russian troops now gathered near its border. The obvious question is: what would happen if Putin were to invade? It would split the EU, exposing its energy dependence on Russia, ruin what is left of transatlantic relations and force Germany to choose sides. Officials in Kiev are convinced that this choice has already been made and that Germany is actively colluding with Russia, as witnessed by the construction of the massive Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Why Omicron may overwhelm the NHS

What we know from the imperfect data we have is that Omicron is vastly more infectious but less virulent than the Delta variant. If the UK Health Security Agency is right in its modelling estimate that as of last Sunday, there were already 200,000 cases of Omicron in the country, compared to 60,000 confirmed and 40,000 suspected cases, we cannot exclude a mass pandemic of Omicron infections in the new year. At this rate, even a much milder virus would still overwhelm our hospital capacities. A study by Discovery Health, a South African private health insurance administrator, based on 211,000 positive test results, showed that the hospitalisation rate of Omicron is 30 per cent less than the previous variants.

Spectator Out Loud

Wolfgang Munchau, Andrew Watts, Hannah Tomes

19 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Wolfgang Munchau, Andrew Watts, Hannah Tomes

19 min listen

On this week's episode, we’ll hear from Wolfgang Munchau on the political situation in Germany. (00:49)Next, Andrew Watts on his year long battle against a parking ticket. (11:01)And finally, Hannah Tomes on her love of Baileys. (15:33)Produced and presented by Sam HolmesSubscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher:www.spectator.co.uk/voucher

The many challenges facing Germany’s new Chancellor

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. They disagree with him over the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Russia, which they think is symbolic of Germany’s subservient relationship to Moscow.

Covid could paralyse the new German coalition

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.

Ukrainian annexation is already happening

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. Already there are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians with Russian citizenship.

What is the Bank of England playing at?

Last week, the Bank of England sent a number of confused messages. One was almost shocking: Andrew Bailey said that it isn’t his job to steer markets on interest rates 'day by day and week by week'. But as economic commentator Matthew C. Klein dryly noted this is literally his job. It is debatable whether the Bank of England needs to manage the entire yield curve (ie, buying and selling bonds in an attempt to set interest rates years into the future) but the central bank should be in charge of the short end. Those opposing an interest rate rise say that central banks should never shock markets. The Bank of England should copy the ECB, it’s argued, and start giving guidance on interest rate rises months in advance.

The EU is driving Poland away

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 European Court of Justice yesterday rejected Poland’s appeal against a €1m-a-day fine imposed by the Commission.

Merkel knows how to stop Polexit. The EU won’t listen

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.

Who will succeed Merkel?

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.

The stalemate election: can Germany move beyond Merkel?

Germany’s election campaign has taken many unexpected turns. In January, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), were leading by about 20 percentage points. By April, the Greens were ahead. By July, the CDU/CSU had bounced back, and then all of a sudden, the Social Democrats (SPD) came out of nowhere to a solid lead by last weekend. The gap has since closed a little ahead of Sunday’s election — and the joyride is still not over. What is also different about these elections is that, based on current polling, four, five or even six coalitions might be arithmetically possible. So the real battle will likely start only after the election. One plausible scenario to watch out for is a majority for the three parties of the left — the SPD, the Greens and the Left party, the successor of the former East German Communist party, in which case, Olaf Scholz, German finance minister and the SPD’s candidate, will have a good chance of succeeding Angela Merkel as the next German chancellor.

Aukus is a disaster for the EU

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. While German political parties are still discussing the pros and cons of Nato, the Biden administration is moving beyond Nato towards a multipolar defence strategy.

How the pandemic pushed up inflation

Eurozone core inflation came in at 1.6 per cent in August, while headline inflation hit 3 per cent. In Germany, at least, the all-important national metric went up by a notch — to 3.9 per cent. The recorded inflation data are, to some extent, a bounce-back recovery effect — coupled with the rise in German VAT — which will distort inflation numbers from July until December. But there has been a 2.7 per cent rise in industrial goods, minus energy, which is partly a supply chain effect that could prove persistent. Food, alcohol and tobacco are up 2 per cent but services only 1.1 per cent. It is services that are keeping inflation numbers pinned down — for now, anyway. Interestingly, both France and Italy are registering inflation rates of over 2 per cent.

The vaccination campaign is making the same mistakes as Remain

One of the great cautionary tales of the last five years is how political campaigns can start off with what looks like a strong case and end up losing with 48 per cent of the vote. What happened to the Remain campaign is now happening to the campaign to deploy vaccines – and in several countries. Governments are telling anti-vaxxers that they are stupid; they are exaggerating their case like the French education minister, who suggested that vaccination means that you can no longer infect others. Or they are lecturing people, saying that they should listen to the experts. And when things get really bad, they are talking about compulsion. Compulsory vaccination is the second referendum of our time. Vaccination is one of the great success stories of modern science.

Could Germany’s flood disaster have been prevented?

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.

Germany’s flood disaster could trigger a political upheaval

There is an interesting history to the politics of floods in Germany – and a possibility that history might be repeating itself. The official death toll in Germany has risen to 93 this morning, but 1300 people are still reported missing in the region of Ahrweiler, in western Germany. This is without a doubt the most extreme natural disaster that has hit Germany in living memory. We should not at this point draw any hasty conclusions about the political impact. It is possible that it will benefit the Greens because climate change is back on the political agenda. Historically, floods have benefited incumbent governments. In 1962, a giant storm over the North Sea lead to the flooding of Hamburg after dykes broke. The population received no warning because phone lines had been cut, and because the authorities underestimated the likelihood of a North Sea storm affecting Hamburg, which is 60 miles inland.

Today

Tuesday

Friday

Monday

Thursday

Monday

Thursday

Friday

Thursday

Thursday

Tuesday

Monday

Friday

Thursday

Wednesday

Saturday

Thursday

Tuesday

Thursday

Saturday

Thursday

Friday

Monday

Thursday

Friday

Wednesday

Friday

Tuesday

Friday