I know: You missed me, right? It’s been a busy several weeks since the last post. I spent part of it retooling an earlier post for IP Quarterly, which you can check out here.
But, hey, the longer you wait, the more there is write about.
“Scholz sounds like he’s going to war,” a journo friend wrote me.
I wasn’t watching at first. I had no paying reason to and thought I might, for a change, treat that Sunday like most normal people do, and catch the top lines thereafter. Unless the Scholz-O-Mat was malfunctioning, Germany’s chancellor was unlikely to make sparks fly. After all, Russia launched the largest war in Europe since the Big One, and Olaf Scholz’s initial response was, essentially, “I’ll check in on the weekend.”
It wasn't called the “Zeitenwende” speech when I belatedly decided to tune in. The rest, as they say, is history present: Reaffirming a reversal on weapons for Ukraine; diversifying energy supply (with conspicuously little mention of renewables); and, in case you missed it, €100 billion extra for Germany’s sorry military.
That sound you hear is history’s guffaw — and NATO weeping for joy. Not to mention the arms industry.
So that’s how it started.
How’s it going? More than three months later, Ukraine may be faring better against Russia on the battlefield than Germany is against its own idiosyncrasies. Scholz has been slammed for poor communication, at best — and infidelity, at worst. His initial bellicose boil is now more of a slow-cook simmer.
Heavy weapons or not, what kind and from whom? Did the Ukrainians ask for said equipment, or is Germany just dumping whatever on them? Will there be ammo, and training, coming along with those tanks? Is Scholz really in it to win it, or just that Russia loses it? Why won’t he go to Kyiv, or at least meet Ukrainian officials here? And perhaps my favorite exercise in inward-looking angst: What does international law have to say about the difference between supporting a party of war and becoming one yourself? Because the intricacies of legal theory are for sure going to factor into Vladimir Putin’s strategic thinking.
The casual observer of German politics can be forgiven for at times wondering if the Russian invasion has been more of a struggle for German Officialdom than for Ukrainian sovereignty and livelihoods.
The question of support is mixed — and, as is often the case, a matter of expectations. If the baseline is where Germany has historically been on hard power, then the change is a significant one, at least rhetorically. Until Feb. 24, pacifism may not have had many, if any, red lines, but German military hardware killing Russian troops was one as big and bright as a fire engine. Hearing a German chancellor boast about soon having the “largest conventional army in NATO Europe” would not long ago have had the Versailles signatories turning in their trenches graves; now it’s a talking point Scholz can’t stop repeating, to much applause.
Yet if the baseline is what Germany could do, in back-of-the-napkin economic terms, the response has been underwhelming — to put it mildly — and certainly nowhere near what Scholz claimed last week in Lithuania.
In both absolute and GDP-relative terms, other countries are ahead of Germany on financial and military support for Ukraine. In a recent response to a parliamentary inquiry, the government reported that it’s approved €350 million worth of weapons in all. But “approved” does not mean delivered, and that it’s been a chore to suss out the difference is reason enough to raise an eyebrow at government claims.
If the chancellor has any concerns about how his “dithering” may look to voters and allies, he hasn’t shown it. Scholz appears comfortable sticking to the historical baseline, rather than real-world potential, even as public support for his conservative opponents grows and his approval falls behind that of his allies. A shame for the Greens that the war didn’t come six months sooner: Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister (and could-have-been chancellor) Annalena Baerbock look to be running the campaign now that they failed to figure out when it counted last year.
Of course, it’s easier for Scholz to remain sanguine and the Greens to get loud when there is no election to win. With nothing at stake, German voters can let themselves get carried away by the latter’s bravado. They face no danger of actually having to decide anytime soon if that’s the kind of politics they really want leading the country — the public opinion equivalent of “supporting the troops” from the safety of your SUV’s bumper sticker.
This is a good time to remember that election from September and the preceding campaign. Security and foreign policy barely factored into it. Russia was hardly mentioned. Germany’s responsibility to the European Union, and a democratic Europe more broadly, was largely a pro-forma catchphrase, because every serious party here likes to think that Europe has no better friend than Germany, and they trip over each other trying to prove who’s the Europe-friendliest of them all.
Instead, the campaign mostly came down to who could best serve as Merkel’s fifth term. Scholz built an entire public persona around his Merkel-esque credentials: continuity, stability, and consistency, while keeping it broad and saying as little as possible.
Like a German Pils: It may be bland and uniform, but you know exactly what you’re in for. No surprises or deviations, which is what most German beer drinkers voters want. Granted, only about 25% of them ticked the box for Scholz and his Social Democrats — in an election that may mark the end of big-party politics in Germany — but add to that the roughly same amount who went for the conservative flavor of the same thing and you have at least half the German electorate choosing the devil they know over the one they don’t.
I will not pretend to be deeply steeped in the history of political philosophy, but I do know the quote from the 19th century’s Joseph de Maistre:
Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite.
Every nation gets the government it deserves.
Germany’s drivers may feel the need for speed when it comes to their autobahn, but when it comes to their leaders, Germany’s voters want to stick to the slow lane. That’s what we got with Olaf Scholz; it was right there in the product description. So all the upset, especially coming out of the Twitterverse and Wonk World, that he’s not acting bolder or moving faster is rather curious.
A minivan is not a sports car.
There are times Scholz can come off seeming quite pleased with himself just for saying something bold, and then a bit miffed when critics don’t applaud him for it, and instead ask where the verifiable policy action is to complement the value statement. More than once recently he has generously offered to “correct your false impression” of things.
Schönen Dank, as he would say.
Thoughts-and-prayers are common to politics everywhere, but the inability to see the expectation to act is a reflex of a country that does not understand itself as big enough to matter. As Germany-watching think tankers note, the success of Zeitenwende will not be measured in how many more helicopters can fly and rifles can shoot, but in how much Germany can demonstrate to allies — and adversaries, for that matter — that it is reliable and serious.
That said, let’s not give up on Scholz, or Germany, just yet. The world’s most bashful superpower may finally be finding its geopolitical groove, even if too slowly for many given the war on that is moving faster. The arc of sloganeering seems to be bending towards Joschka Fischer, who more than two decades ago dared to refine the absolutism of German pacifism’s “nie wieder Krieg” with the caveat, “nie wieder Auschwitz.” That is, peace is ideal, but sometimes it demands defending.
Scholz’s €100 billion is a down payment to that end. It took three months to figure out how to make it happen, and the terms are telling. They clarify some of the symbolic and mathematical confusion Scholz’s initial announcement sowed, namely that the money can help Ukraine (it can’t really) and whether it’s part or on top of ticking NATO’s 2% box.
Now, with the help of some basic arithmetic, we know:
German GDP: €3.6 trillion
German annual defense budget: €50 billion
2% x 3.6 trillion: €72 billion
Gap to reach NATO 2% guideline: €20 billion
€100 billion / 5-year legislative period: €20 billion
*All numbers approximate
See what they did there? Add the extra to the existing — et voilà! — you more or less reach the magic 2% figure. That pleases the United States and NATO. And all without raising taxes, which pleases the laissez-faire Free Democrats who control the finance ministry, or touching “real” spending, which pleases most everyone else.
With the opposition’s blessing, the government will borrow the extra money. Taking on debt is no small feat for Germany — there’s a reason a debt brake is baked into the constitution — so the fuzzy math should give skeptics some cause for optimism, albeit the cautious kind. Only a superpower can do that kind of accounting with a straight face and get away with it.
Military procurement and planning people will have to figure out what to do with all the new eurobucks, and grapple with what happens when this chunk of change runs out. Five years is long in politics, but short against the 40-year lifespan of a next-generation fighter.
Whether the political will and public support are still there by then for Germany to borrow, tax or reshuffle its way to defense competency is likely a question for the next government. Much will depend on how receptive German voters are to trading in their Transporter for a Porsche.