5
reasons Germany’s influence is fading
Voters
abandon the center, alliances turn regional — and Merkel stands
alone.
By FLORIAN EDER
1/15/16, 5:30 AM CET Updated 1/15/16, 7:13 AM CET
Germany’s sway
over Europe is fading, for all its economic might and the honors
heaped on Angela Merkel, and the evidence of its declining influence
can be seen in the changing fortunes of the European People’s Party
(EPP).
Usually, Christian
Democrat leaders grouped in the EPP gather in Brussels a few hours
before EU summits to make decisions they will foist on other European
governments. At the last summit, however, they didn’t pre-cook the
summit’s conclusions because the center right — and Germany
itself — is losing influence.
Here are five reasons why:
Voters vacate the
Center
The latest EPP
meeting, before the European Council meeting in December, wasn’t
exactly a waste of time for reporters. They could hear from Nicolas
Sarkozy’s advisers about his plans to return to power, listen to
Spanish conservatives fret about Mariano Rajoy’s chances of
surviving the general election or see the European Commission defend
its refugee strategy.
But the extent to
which the EPP was weakened by a series of punishing election outcomes
across the region in 2015 was clear.
The Greeks chose a
far-left alternative to Antonis Samaras and his New Democracy,
Portugal punished Pedro Passos Coelho and his Popular Party allies
for their austerity drive, after the Finnish elections EPP stalwart
Alexander Stubb was demoted to finance minister from prime minister,
and the Poles rejected a coalition made up of EPP members Civic
Platform and the Polish People’s Party. A few days after the
summit, Spanish voters would deprive Rajoy and his Popular Party of a
majority.
That leaves Angela
Merkel as the only remaining head of government of a major country
within the EPP political family. Her ideological partners are
disappearing, as is the backing for her policies.
New alliances arise
Assuming, of course,
that there is still a desire for common European policy or the
chancellor’s leadership, which is increasingly questioned. In
December’s EPP meeting, Merkel and Viktor Orbán of Hungary
represented opposing arguments in the refugee debate, with Irish
Taoiseach Enda Kenny as the only other national leader with a hope of
influencing the proceedings.
Although the bloc
came up with joint declarations on refugees, Merkel and Orbán were
still diametrically opposed in their views, with the Hungarian and
his allies rejecting Merkel and Commission President Jean-Claude
Juncker’s insistence on finding common solutions.
In this crisis —
as opposed to the economic challenges that have dominated the EU’s
agenda in recent years — regional allegiances rather than party
loyalties are proving decisive. The influx of refugees has
consolidated the Visegrád Group, bringing together the
national-conservatives of Poland, Slovakian leftist Robert Fico,
Czech Social Democrat Bohuslav Sobotka and Orbán.
While Brussels has
the legal means to respond when, for instance, a member country
doesn’t comply with an EU directive on waste, it is powerless in
the face of policies that undermine fundamental EU beliefs, as with
Orbán’s vision of “illiberal democracy” which is being taken
up by the Law and Justice party led by Poland’s Jarosław
Kaczyński.
The Commission, in
response to Poland’s reforms of the constitutional court and the
media, launched a “rule of law mechanism,” but this rebuke risks
fitting perfectly with Warsaw’s current narrative of the EU as an
alliance of left-wing weaklings under German leadership.
Independent
institutions
If conventional
party political alliances across Europe have been diluted at
Germany’s cost, the evolution of the European Commission and
Parliament under the leadership of Juncker and Martin Schulz has also
boosted the institutions’ independence from Berlin and Paris.
Juncker’s avowed
aim of a “more political” Commission unsettles the German
government, which wrote to the country’s MEPs before Christmas
saying the Commission could not be both a political actor and an
impartial guardian of the European Treaties.
Parliament’s
priority under Schulz’s leadership is to seek support for the
Commission’s program, even in the face of resistance from national
capitals. Without tampering with the Treaties, the Commission has
been transformed into a government controlled by a Parliament
dominated by a “grand coalition” of Christian and Social
Democrats.
This declaration of
independence was the fruit of the political instincts and legal
expertise of two Germans: Klaus Welle, secretary general of the
European Parliament, who pushed the idea of Spitzenkandidaten (“top
candidates”) in the last European elections; and Martin Selmayr,
Juncker’s formidable chief of staff.
Eurocrats loyal to
Brussels
These Germans do not
take their orders from Berlin. Selmayr was openly cursed by Wolfgang
Schäuble last year for what the German finance minister clearly saw
as interfering in the Greek debt negotiations. Schäuble, who was
under pressure to accept a third bailout for Greece which Berlin
would have to bankroll, said Juncker’s chief of staff had
overstepped his remit.
Selmayr’s
instincts are far from infallible: In December he published data
about a supposedly sharp drop in illegal migration to Europe,
apparently to show Turkish-EU cooperation in a better light, but the
numbers he used were highly selective and did not reflect reality.
However, the
incident demonstrated beyond any doubt where the loyalities of the
Germans working for the EU lie: not with Berlin, but Brussels.
Lonely at the top
These are tough
times for a leader who excels at building consensus: Merkel
emphasizes at every opportunity that the refugee crisis is a European
problem that requires a European response, but she currently lacks
powerful partners to help her strike workable compromises.
Unchallenged as
Europe’s unofficial leader — unless you count Italian Prime
Minister Matteo Renzi’s apparently serious ambitions regarding that
title — Merkel suffers from a lack of serious high-level
interlocutors: François Hollande is unpopular, Rajoy may have lost
his job already and David Cameron has his own agenda when it comes to
the EU and migrants.
The lack of
leadership became glaringly obvious as the number of fruitless EU
summits on the refugee crisis escalated in the second half of last
year.
The rise of Islamic
State, the terror attacks in Paris, the unsolvable war in Syria, the
New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne: everything is linked,
nothing can be split into manageable issues, and with nobody to help
her cope with an ocean of crisis, Merkel risks shouldering the blame
alone.
Florian Eder,
managing editor for expansion at POLITICO, writes a weekly column for
Die Welt.
Authors:
Florian Eder
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