Is
Germany, Europe’s Rock, Starting to Crumble?
German
Chancellor Angela Merkel saved the eurozone this summer. But a number
of homegrown issues are straining her leadership.
BY DAVID
FRANCISNOVEMBER 10, 2015
When Greece teetered
on the edge of bankruptcy last summer, Germany provided the stern
leadership that kept Athens in the eurozone only after it gave into
strong austerity demands. It’s a role Berlin, Europe’s economic
engine, has played throughout the five-year sovereign debt crisis.
But now, mere months after that victory, a number of crises are
testing German Chancellor Angela Merkel and raising concerns that
Berlin — Europe’s rock — is starting to crack.
Hundreds of
thousands of asylum-seekers, many of them Syrian, have flooded
Germany, and Merkel’s ruling conservative coalition is divided over
how to handle them.
The Volkswagen
emissions scandal, which spread from diesel cars to now
gasoline-powered vehicles, has heaped accusations against one of
Germany’s most successful brands and symbols of national industry.
German soccer
officials are under investigation for bribes connected to the 2006
World Cup, part of the larger inquiry into FIFA officials around the
world.
And there are new
allegations that German foreign intelligence spied on allies far more
than originally thought — a concept not likely to sit well with
German citizens, who still bristle from World War II and Soviet-era
privacy violations.
“There is a sense
of embarrassment in Germany,” Joerg Wolf, editor of the
Berlin-based online think tank Atlantic-community.org, told Foreign
Policy. “The German economy, regulators, and judicial system have
to work hard to reduce the long-term damages to Germany’s
international reputation and soft power.”
The refugee crisis,
in particular, has made Merkel vulnerable to the cracks that are
forming in her coalition.
As recently as last
month, Merkel was widely considered to be a candidate for this year’s
Nobel Peace Prize, which ultimately went to the National Dialogue
Quartet for fostering democracy in Tunisia. She is currently the
longest-serving elected leader in the European Union and is ending
her 10th year as chancellor. But Merkel’s critics now are
challenging her authority to pluck out refugees from the larger pool
of migrants who are flooding Germany.
In doing so, the
Social Democrats, Merkel’s junior partner in government, seek to
prove she was not prepared to accept the refugees who rushed to
Germany’s open doors.
Vice Chancellor
Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democrat, rejects Merkel’s plans to set up
so-called “transit zones” and screen out refugees who have little
chance of getting asylum. Gabriel has declared he’ll challenge
Merkel in Germany’s next federal election in 2017 and has
criticized the chancellor for what he described as her changing
positions on how to handle the migrants.
“Every time we
reach an agreement, shortly thereafter there’s a new proposal that
wasn’t on the table before,” Gabriel told German television.
“That leads to a situation in which Germans get the impression that
the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing in the
government.”
How refugees would
be resettled within Germany led to a new round of strain last week
within Merkel’s once unshakeable coalition government.
On Friday, Interior
Minister Thomas de Maizière said refugees would only be given
restricted asylum, in the form of a one-year renewable residence
permit, and would not be allowed to bring relatives to Germany for
two years. Merkel’s chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, made it clear
that the plan had not been run by the chancellor before de Maizière
announced it.
Members of Merkel’s
sister party, Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union, said
they backed de Maizière’s plan. Bavarian governor Horst Seehofer
told Sueddeutsche Zeitung that Germany should review the “refugee
status of every Syrian carefully” and check whether they personally
faced persecution. Wolfgang Schaeuble, Germany’s finance minister,
also said he backed the interior minister. Some 758,000 refugees and
other migrants arrived in Germany between January and October.
“Our capacity to
take in [people] is not unlimited; and because of that it is a
necessary measure that we examine cases individually and for it to be
clear in Syria that not everyone can now come to Germany,”
Schaeuble told German television.
Markus Knauf, a
spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington, told FP the
government “is working very hard on the goals that Chancellor
Merkel has mentioned publicly” — that is, assistance to refugees,
ensuring orderly migration, and working to end the conditions that
brought asylum-seekers to Germany in the first place.
Knauf said
“comprehensive asylum policy measures” went into effect last
Thursday.
The growing
disagreements within the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, comes as
the inquiry into the Volkswagen emissions scandal continues,
something that could damage a major trade deal that has been under
negotiation for years.
The cheat, revealed
in September, has cost the company billions of dollars and CEO Martin
Winterkorn his job. Volkswagen recently reported a quarterly loss of
$3.9 billion, its first quarterly loss in 15 years. Winterkorn was
replaced by Porsche boss Matthias Mueller, who is now being dragged
deeper into VW’s mess by new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
revelations that Porsche diesel engines also willfully violated
emissions rules when he was in charge.
Even more damaging
than financial losses for the iconic German carmaker, said consultant
Patrick Hillmann, is the fallout that could hurt Europe’s standing
in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
Hillmann said
malfeasance by VW could give the United States leverage in the trade
talks between Europe and the United States that have been ongoing
since 2013. A series of high-profile actions in Brussels against
Google, which is the subject of EU anti-trust inquiries, has been a
sticking point in talks. Hillmann said U.S. negotiators could use the
emissions scandal to get the EU to turn down the heat on Google.
In April, the EU
accused the U.S.-based Internet search engine of directing users to
Google’s shopping service. At the same time, the EU opened a second
anti-trust investigation into whether Google steered users to favor
the company’s services and apps in its Android phone, the most
popular smartphone operating system. In August, Google denied the
charges, setting up a prolonged legal fight.
“This might end up
being too enticing an opportunity to gain leverage of the EU’s
handling of American firms,” said Hillmann, a vice president at the
communication firm Levick, who has helped guide foreign heads of
state and Fortune 500 companies through crises.
Both the Volkswagen
scandal and the rift in Merkel’s government are playing out against
the backdrop of another inquiry: whether officials with the German
Football Association, the DFB, handed out bribes to win the 2006
World Cup.
The homes of three
current and former high-ranking DFB officials have already been
raided. Senior state prosecutor Nadja Niesen said the raids were part
of an investigation into ”the awarding of the football World Cup
2006 and a transfer of 6.7 million euros [$7.4 million] made by the
organizing committee to FIFA.” On Monday, Wolfgang Niersbach,
president of the DFB, resigned.
And in a more recent
controversy, a Der Spiegel report last weekend revealed that Germany
spied on EU member states, including Poland, Austria, Denmark, and
Croatia. The newspaper reported that German intelligence monitored
diplomats’ email addresses, telephone numbers, and fax numbers, and
also snooped on nongovernmental humanitarian aid organizations.
The surveillance
appeared to be directed by Berlin, and not partnered by the U.S.
National Security Agency, Der Spiegel reported. In the past, Merkel
has been indignant about U.S. snooping — “Spying among friends?
That’s just not done,” she said in 2013 after discovering the NSA
tapped her own phone line — but has downplayed Germany’s spying
on Turkey, a NATO ally. Merkel’s government has yet to respond to
the Der Spiegel report.
Officials in
Washington have long wanted Merkel to step up and take a firm grasp
of the European leadership, a role the chancellor has been reluctant
to fill. Wolf, the think tank editor, said the White House often
overestimates the ability of the German government to solve problems,
both across Europe and within German borders.
“The U.S. looks to
Berlin for leadership as German politics and economy appear much
stronger than the French and British,” he said, “but our
government’s capacity for problem solving has been exaggerated for
years.”
“Don’t count too
much on Berlin,” Wolf said.
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