Germans overwhelmingly would like Hillary Clinton to be the next president of the United States. Some 90% voted for Clinton, a major public-opinion organization reported in mid-October, while only four percent favored Donald Trump.
But Brussels and Merkel got spooked when a fresh round of sanctions ordered on Russia by the Obama administration was voted down in the EU Council this week.
To add insult to injury, Vladislav Surkov, a Russian regime figure who has been barred from entry into the EU since 2014 following Russia’s incorporation of Crimea, attended a meeting Wednesday in Berlin between president Vladimir Putin and Merkel to discuss Ukraine.
According to German press reports, Surkov had received a “special dispensation” from the leader of the United States’ most important ally.
Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen have been under attack, but Bundeswehr units supporting the US-led coalition in Irag persist in avoiding lethal action. And the bad news is that a pro-Russian right-wing party is likely to enter the Bundestag in 2017.
While Clinton is perhaps not so unpopular, the chancellor’s relative fragility is increasing. It therefore remains an open question if a Clinton presidency would be able to urge Merkel to take a tougher stance that would represent Germany reuniting with its Atlantic instincts, the Wall Street Journal worries.
The US is desperate for the German chancellor to renounce the construction of Nord Stream 2, the second Russia-to-Germany direct undersea natural-gas pipeline. Scheduled to come online in 2019, it’s backed by Gazprom and five European minority investors, two of them German.
Nord Stream 2 would seal Europe’s and Germany’s dependency on Russian-sourced natural gas to 80% and 60%, respectively. The pipeline replicates the Baltic Sea track of Nord Stream 1, which currently operates at only 70% of its intended capacity.
Clinton had warned in 2009, as the designated US Secretary of State, that Russian control of European energy supply was “a challenge we ignore at our peril”. Clinton has Manfred Weber, who heads the Christian Democrat political grouping in the European Parliament, in her corner and to the left, Reinhard Bütikofer, who is chief of the Greens’ delegation.
Weber, the head of the Conservative European Peoples party group in the European parliament, declared: “Appeasement of Russia has failed. He cannot be a partner.”
Norbert Röttgen, the Christian Democratic president of the Bundestag’s foreign-relations commission is also on Clinton’s side: “What we need is a transatlantic relaunch helping to redefine the German-American approach to an aggressive Russia,” he told the WSJ.
The pipeline is a private, commercial project. And the 90% of Germans supporting Clinton’s candidacy against Trump won’t get Hillary elected. It is therefore a given that Russians gas is Germany’s effective neutralization while German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, decribed as pro-Russian, has skillfully negotiated ceasefires, troop withdrawals and access for medics while Germany is engaged directly and indirectly in a good half-dozen combat zones.
In the US and Europe, the question about what to do with Russia is far from settled. In Germany, where the contest over Russia and sanctions has been most intense, divisions remain over Russia if not over Clinton.
The SPD, the junior partner in the coalition, is being seen as the party of detente, knowing this will be electorally popular, particularly in the old East Germany. As the Guardian reported, Rolf Mützenich, the party’s deputy floor leader in the Bundestag and an opponent of Nato’s buildup against Moscow, harshly criticised SPD “rapprochement romantics” last year and warned against the “misconception that old-style Ostpolitik”.
The Greens’ foreign policy spokesman, Omid Nouripour, meanwhile has also called for the end of Nord Stream 2 as well as sanctions against the bosses of Rosneft and Gazprom, the two firms that will benefit from the pipeline’s construction.
