The COVID-19 crisis has pushed Europeans’ strategic thinking about China – already shifting because of three developments – past the tipping point. After years of pursuing closer bilateral economic ties, Europeans suddenly realise that they have become dangerously dependent on Chinese trade and investment.
Markus Soder’s political instinct combined with his charismatic media appearances make him a qualified prime candidate for Germany’s conservatives at next year’s election. There are just a few hurdles in sight. Most importantly, Soder is ‘only’ chairman of the CSU, representing one federal state while the CDU is present in the other 15. Both parties run together at general elections, but only twice did a CSU leader serve as the joint candidate for chancellorship.
Bergamo is the epicenter of the hardest-hit province of Italy’s hardest-hit region, Lombardy, the site of hundreds of coronavirus deaths. Families here are deprived of a bedside farewell with virus-stricken loved ones, or even a traditional funeral, and the cemetery is so overwhelmed by the number of dead that military trucks transported 65 bodies to a neighbouring region for cremation this week.
It took COVID-19 several weeks to mass migrate from China to Europe, but the continent is now awash in the virus. The pandemic has fully arrived in Italy and Spain. Other nations await the disease, hoping to slow its spread. It will kill many Europeans. It also might kill the European Union, at least the idea of a European community in any meaningful sense.
Just the other day, Armin Laschet, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, stood in a cage on a podium in his native Aachen, wearing a funny hat and doing his best to be, you know, hilarious. That’s one of his roles in German politics. It was also his job that day, because he was receiving an award for levity (yes, there’s such a thing)…Could this be Germany’s next chancellor? According to one scenario, he might be, especially if there’s any basis to rumors of a possible backroom deal to clarify the country’s leadership succession.
To understand why, Europeans and Americans need to address three elephants crowding the room of European security — some familiar, some less so. As so often with indoor pachyderms, they irritate, as they confront us with our inability to address them and our tendency to tiptoe around them. The three European security elephants will resonate differently depending on which side of the Atlantic you reside. But they need to be seen, and tackled, together.
From the beginning to the end of the war that he and his government had launched, Hitler and his associates concluded that their paranoid fantasy of an international Jewish conspiracy was the key to contemporary history.
The coming of 2020 marks not just a new year, but a new decade. This random artefact of an arbitrary calendar system cries out for predictions of the events and trends that will shake the world in the 2020s. But, honestly, even the next year is something of a mystery – never mind the next decade.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomes German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel at the President’s House in New Delhi on November 1, 2019. Photo/PIB
Two things make Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany look like an exemplary head of government: Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Measured against the poorest of benchmarks, Ms. Merkel’s chancellorship, even after 14 years in office, appears stable, wise and exemplary. Measured against the leadership Germany and Europe need, it lacks all of the above.
Grandeur, however, has been denied the former Gaullist Jacques Chirac, who died this week. In the cascade of eulogies following his death, the man who not only served twice as president of France but also as prime minister and mayor of Paris, was rarely called a great man. This is not a matter of ideology or politics. That Chirac’s former opponents on the left would refuse him greatness is not surprising, but what is more surprising, perhaps, is that few of Chirac’s former colleagues and friends have insisted on his greatness either.
