Seventy-three years ago, on Monday, Adolf Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker alongside his wife of one day, Eva Braun. With the Red Army closing in, their bodies were hastily burned and buried in a shell crater in the nearby garden. That’s the official story anyway.
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With a wayward president at the helm in the United States, the world has become a more dangerous place. In response, though, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is once again steering Germany to the foreign policy sidelines, clearing the way for French President Emmanuel Macron.
On April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell, a leading member of the Conservative Party in the British parliament, made a speech that would imprint itself into British memory—and divide the nation with its racist, incendiary rhetoric. Speaking before a group of conservative activists, Powell said that if immigration to Britain from the country’s former colonies continued, a violent clash between white and black communities was inevitable.
Throughout the negotiations, the EU has consistently been several steps ahead of Britain. Whereas the British cabinet has not even discussed the future relationship, Brussels has already prepared its position and is now issuing its negotiating guidelines. Indeed, Mrs May’s notion of Brexit red lines was always misconceived. Just as the EU sets the terms when countries apply to join the club, it also has the upper hand when a country decides to leave.
It’s impossible to know what the coming year holds for the European Union. But one thing is certain: The bloc’s leaders will spend much of the next 12 months wrestling with its future. That’s why Christian Lindner tops our list of the 28 people who will shape Europe in 2018. The pugnacious liberal leader occupies a key place in Germany’s politics: at the head of a conservative, Euro-cautious segment of the electorate. By pulling the plug on coalition talks in November, Lindner cast his country into political turmoil and ensured his place at the centre of the ensuing debate.
With coalition talks having collapsed, the country and the continent are now wondering what happens next. Blame is being heaped on the FDP, but the party could end up suffering mightily. Germany and Europe, meanwhile, are the biggest losers.
Let’s take another look at his file: just three years ago this young man was totally unknown to the general public. By contrast, he was very well known to a small Parisian milieu in which politics, finance and the media are almost incestuously intertwined. In this milieu – which he looks down on today, as if he had never belonged to it at all – everyone prides themselves on being his friend, having his mobile phone number, and getting upbeat text messages from him in the middle of the night.
Angela Merkel will serve as Germany’s chancellor for a fourth term, but Sunday’s win comes at a high price. The right-wing populists are now the third-strongest party in parliament and her negotiations to create a new government are likely to be complicated.
Also Read: Angela’s ashes: 5 takeaways from the German election
Angela Merkel, The Most Powerful Woman in a World of Unstable Men
Last year’s Brexit vote followed by the election of Donald Trump resulted in the idea that populism was sweeping the West. Elections were scheduled in 2017 for Austria, the Netherlands, France, and Germany, leading to fears among the establishment in those countries that the center-left-center-right consensus that had dominated politics for much of the past half century was in peril. The results so far have brought relief to the establishment in those countries.
Donald Trump is a symptom of the larger crisis that has been brewing for NATO ever since the Cold War ended. Alliances are first and foremost a collective response to threats, and NATO’s primary rationale disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. Attempts to give NATO important new missions “out of area” did not go well, whether one looks at Libya or Kosovo or Afghanistan, and some of America’s other initiatives — most notably the invasion of Iraq — did considerable damage to transatlantic solidarity as well.
