Top EU politicians avoiding Scholz – German opposition leader
EU leaders are avoiding German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who either sits silent or tries to lecture them, his main political rival Friedrich Merz has claimed.
Merz, who heads the country’s largest opposition party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and will be its candidate for chancellor in the next election, launched an attack on Scholz in his MerzMail newsletter on Sunday.
The current German government’s EU policy has been a “total failure,” resulting in the chancellor being politically isolated in the bloc, he wrote.
“Regrettably, it should be said so: the majority of European politicians simply do not want to meet anymore the German Chancellor, who either sits silent for hours or lectures the world,” the CDU’s head stressed.
The latest example of Scholz’s isolation was the visit of French President Emmanuel Macron to Poland this week, during which the two NATO allies discussed policy with regards to Ukraine, he said. “The German Chancellor was not present again,” Merz noted.
According to the opposition leader, Scholz had been invited to the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral earlier this month, which had been attended by Macron, US President-elect Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, “but he apparently had no desire to travel to Paris.”
Merz has been a proponent of an increasingly tougher stance on Moscow, saying, among other things, that if he is elected, he will allow Ukraine to use German-supplied weapons for strikes deep into Russia.
Despite Berlin being the second-largest supplier of arms to Kiev after Washington under Scholz, the chancellor has repeatedly ruled out the delivery of his country’s long-range Taurus missiles. “Be careful! You do not play Russian roulette with Germany’s security,” he said last month.
Herein is the real story - Deep State (read NATO) has decided they can move more inventory under Merz than under Scholz. They are already working, it appears, to undermine Scholz. Their greed and insanity know no bounds.
After Kiev used US-made ATACMS missiles to strike Russia’s internationally recognized territory for the first time in November, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that Moscow reserves the right “to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow the use of their weapons against our facilities.”
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German right-wing leader questions NATO membership
Germany must ask whether NATO membership “is still useful for us,” Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Tino Chrupalla has said, arguing that the US-led military bloc forces Europe to act in America’s interests.
”Europe has been forced to implement America’s interests. We reject that,” Chrupalla told German daily Welt on Sunday.
”NATO is currently not a defense alliance,” he continued. “A defense community must accept and respect the interests of all European countries, including Russia’s interests. If NATO cannot ensure that, Germany must consider to what extent this alliance is still useful for us,” he explained.
West Germany joined NATO in 1955, at the height of the Cold War. Accession to the bloc meant that Bonn could focus its spending on post-WWII reconstruction and welfare while outsourcing defense to the US. However, NATO’s first secretary general, Britain’s Lord Ismay, reportedly remarked that the bloc’s purpose in Europe was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
While the AfD’s platform has never called for an outright withdrawal from NATO, Chrupalla has previously argued that the bloc’s confrontational stance toward Russia was “driving a wedge into the continent of Europe” and precluding reconciliation with Moscow, which, he said, would be vital “to ensure lasting peace and prosperity” on the continent.
With snap elections in February looming, the AfD is currently polling at around 18%, ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ Social Democrats at 15% but behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) at 32%. However, even if the AfD were to emerge as the largest party after the vote, all of Germany’s other mainstream parties have ruled out entering a coalition with the right-wingers.
Wise and intelligent Germans are finally catching on to NATO's real
raison d'etre - a storefront for America's war industry.
Unfortunately, most Germans can't see it yet, or refuse to see it.
The AfD nominated co-leader Alice Weidel as its candidate for chancellor earlier this month, marking the first time in its 11-year history that the party has put a name forward for the position.
Speaking to reporters after the nomination, Weidel promised to introduce drastic immigration restrictions, to roll back Scholz’s climate policies, and to cut off military aid to Ukraine.
“We want peace in Ukraine,” she said. “We do not want any arms supplies, we do not want any tanks, we do not want any missiles.”
Speaking to Welt, Chrupalla said that “Russia has won this war,” and that “reality has caught up with those who claim to want to enable Ukraine to win the war.”
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Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the German parliament on Monday, putting the European Union’s most populous member and biggest economy on course to hold an early election in February.
Scholz won the support of 207 lawmakers in the 733-seat lower house, or Bundestag, while 394 voted against him and 116 abstained. That left him far short of the majority of 367 needed to win.
Scholz leads a minority government after his unpopular and notoriously rancorous three-party coalition collapsed on November 6 when he fired his finance minister in a dispute over how to revitalize Germany’s stagnant economy. Leaders of several major parties then agreed that a parliamentary election should be held on February 23, seven months earlier than originally planned.
The confidence vote was needed because post-World War II Germany’s constitution doesn’t allow the Bundestag to dissolve itself. Now President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has to decide whether to dissolve parliament and call an election.
Steinmeier has 21 days to make that decision — and, because of the planned timing of the election, is expected to do so after Christmas. Once parliament is dissolved, the election must be held within 60 days.
In practice, the campaign is already well underway, and Monday’s three-hour debate reflected that.
Scholz, a center-left Social Democrat, told lawmakers that the election will determine whether “we, as a strong country, dare to invest strongly in our future; do we have confidence in ourselves and our country, or do we put our future on the line? Do we risk our cohesion and our prosperity by delaying long-overdue investments?”
Scholz’s pitch to voters includes pledges to “modernize” Germany’s strict self-imposed rules on running up debt, to increase the national minimum wage and to reduce value-added tax on food.
Center-right challenger Friedrich Merz responded that “you’re leaving the country in one of its biggest economic crises in postwar history.”
“You’re standing here and saying, business as usual, let’s run up debt at the expense of the younger generation, let’s spend money and ... the word ‘competitiveness’ of the German economy didn’t come up once in the speech you gave today,” Merz said.
The chancellor said Germany is Ukraine’s biggest military supplier in Europe and he wants to keep that up, but underlined his insistence that he won’t supply long-range Taurus cruise missiles, over concerns of escalating the war with Russia, or send German troops into the conflict. “We will do nothing that jeopardizes our own security,” he said.
Merz, who has been open to sending the long-range missiles, said that “we don’t need any lectures on war and peace” from Scholz’s party. He said, however, that the political rivals in Berlin are united in an “absolute will to do everything so that this war in Ukraine ends as quickly as possible.”
Polls show Scholz’s party trailing well behind Merz’s main opposition Union bloc, which is in the lead. Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck of the environmentalist Greens, the remaining partner in Scholz’s government, is also bidding for the top job — though his party is further back.
The far-right Alternative for Germany, which is polling strongly, has nominated Alice Weidel as its candidate for chancellor but has no chance of taking the job because other parties refuse to work with it.
Germany’s electoral system traditionally produces coalitions, and polls show no party anywhere near an absolute majority on its own. The election is expected to be followed by weeks of negotiations to form a new government.
Confidence votes are rare in Germany, a country of 83 million people that prizes stability. This was only the sixth time in its postwar history that a chancellor had called one.
The last was in 2005, when then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder engineered an early election that was narrowly won by center-right challenger Angela Merkel.
(AFP, AP)
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Hungary reacts to Kiev’s ‘unprecedented gesture’
The Ukrainian leadership turned down a phone-call request from Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban in an “unprecedented” manner, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has revealed. The rebuff followed an hour-long conversation between Orban and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In an interview with public broadcaster Kossuth Radio on Sunday, Szijjarto said that he had approached Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrey Sibiga and Vladimir Zelensky’s top aide Andrey Yermak, asking for the authorization of a telephone conversation between Orban and the Ukrainian leader.
”In a gesture that was quite unprecedented in diplomacy,” the request was refused in “a somewhat strained” manner, Szijjarto said, as quoted by the Magyar Nemzet newspaper. Hungary’s top diplomat did not elaborate on the exact wording used by the authorities in Kiev.
Hungary has tried “everything” during the six months of its EU presidency to use it “for a good cause, to initiate a ceasefire and peace negotiations,” Szijjarto noted. Budapest has held the rotating presidency of the EU Council in the second half of this year.
Earlier this week Orban said he’d put forward a proposal for a Christmas ceasefire and a major prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine.
”One side accepted it, the other rejected it,” the Premier told Kossuth Radio on Friday.
Zelensky, in turn, claimed that the Hungarian leader was only trying to “boost personal image at the expense of unity” in the EU in terms of supporting Ukraine.
The unity of the EU with regard to Ukraine is to support NATO's goal of moving as many weapons from Western war industry inventories as is possible. This, of course, rules out any idea of peace and threatens thousands of lives, mostly in Ukraine.
The authorities in Kiev have sent mixed messages about their readiness for negotiations with Russia.
On Wednesday, Zelensky’s top adviser Mikhail Podoliak said Kiev could engage in talks with Moscow if they are not based on Russia’s conditions.
Andrey Yermak said on Friday that Ukraine was not ready to start any talks with Russia as there is insufficient support from the West to conduct negotiations from a position of strength.
Moscow has repeatedly stressed that it’s ready to resume the negotiations. It has urged Kiev to accept the new realities “on the ground,” with President Vladimir Putin citing the complete withdrawal of all Ukrainian forces from all Russian territories as a key prerequisite for peace talks.
Withdrawal of all Ukrainian forces from all Russian territories as a key prerequisite for peace talks will prevent any peace talks. Withdrawal as a result of negotiations is more realistic. Ukraine has to have some bargaining chips or there will never be any peace talks without totally destroying the country.
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