© REUTERS/Annegret Hilse

British Prime Minister Theresa May, fresh from surviving a no-confidence vote called by disgruntled members of her Tory party, left for Brussels on Thursday morning to seek assurances that the UK will not be trapped in the “backstop” her government agreed to in November.

But she’s not likely to come back to Westminster with much in hand. EU leaders such as Council President Donald Tusk made clear earlier this week that, while the EU could offer Britain some (legally non-binding) assurances that the backstop is not the desired long-term outcome, there is no room whatsoever for renegotiating the agreed legal text.

The EU’s biggest member-state is now hammering that point home.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said he was relieved to see Theresa May survive the no-confidence vote within her party. But he sees no room for reopening negotiations on the already agreed divorce deal, in particular on the Irish backstop.

Those sentiments were backed by the chairman of the foreign policy committee in the Bundestag, Norbert Röttgen of the CDU, who said that EU negotiators had already worked for months on the current deal and that “all possibilities have been exhausted. There’s nothing left.” And a few hours later, the German Bundestag passed a motion asserting that the Brexit divorce deal could not be revisited.

(Merkel herself already told her CDU colleagues on Tuesday that she opposes renegotiations.)

The central sticking point for Theresa May and her government is the backstop, a safety-net provision meant to prevent the return of a hard border in Ireland: if no UK-EU trade deal has been agreed by the end of the transition period in December 2020, the backstop will keep Northern Ireland in parts of the single market and the whole of the UK in the EU customs union. This is anathema to both unionists in Northern Ireland, who don’t want the region to be treated differently from the rest of the UK, and euroskeptic MPs, who fear the backstop will leave Britain indefinitely subject to EU rules and unable to sign new trade deals.

Neither side can dissolve the backstop unilaterally, but only the EU would be comfortable letting trade talks drag on while the UK remained indefinitely bound by rules in which it had no say. So May is looking for a legally binding commitment from the EU that the backstop is temporary. And she is particularly keen to do so because the DUP, Northern Ireland’s unionist party, is propping up her shaky government and has threatened to pull out of the coalition if its concerns are not addressed.

As May seems incapable of getting her deal through the British parliament, there seems to be a growing consensus in Berlin that only two viable options remain: a no-deal, hard Brexit, which all sides are keen to avoid, or a second referendum.

And Norbert Röttgen has voiced his support for the latter, saying in a post on his Facebook page:

“The no-confidence vote didn’t change anything much. There is still no majority in parliament for the Brexit deal. Therefore, the only logical way out of the chaos that I can see is a second referendum on the future of Great Britain.”

The EU will continue to discuss Brexit at a summit in Brussels. But the ball is in Britain’s court.

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© Landesvertretung Baden-Württemberg

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers exciting potential but also requires policy oversight—the kind of policy oversight that, unfortunately, no government can realistically provide on its own. When Volker Ratzmann, state secretary for the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, opened the Aspen Institute’s “Humanity Disrupted: Artificial Intelligence and Changing Societies” conference at Baden-Württemberg’s representative offices in Berlin, he started with what would become an oft-repeated theme.

“AI presents huge challenges that we have to manage and regulate together,” Ratzmann said. “No country can manage this individually.” Kent Logsdon, the American Embassy’s chargé d’affaires, echoed this sentiment, saying that while governments should not centrally direct AI, there are also “serious issues to be discussed, and many will require leadership to seize benefits while managing risks.”

Over two days, a mix of researchers, industry representatives, and policymakers returned again and again to what humankind could achieve with AI and machine learning over the next several decades —the potential advances in medicine, transportation, and manufacturing, to name only a few—but also to the dangers it could unleash if left unregulated.

Joanna Bryson, a professor at the University of Bath and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, emphasized the complete decoupling between productivity and wages that technology has contributed to, pointing out that as tech disassociates work from the location it is performed in, it will have to be regulated more by international treaty than national regulation. Nicola Beer, a German lawmaker and secretary general of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), added that AI would create as many jobs as it destroyed—or even more—but that it would also call into question the most basic functions of government, changing how we look at concepts like taxation and finance.

But oh, those self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles also took center stage in several discussions. Anne Carblanc, the head of the OECD’s Digital Economy Policy Division, noted that self-driving cars could cut transportation costs by 40 percent, but will endanger 2.2 million to 3.1 million jobs in the US alone over the next two decades. From the industry perspective, meanwhile, Jeff Bullwinkel, an Associate General Counsel with Microsoft Europe, said the international computing giant shares these concerns—is optimistic that, with proper oversight, the benefits could be enjoyed even as the trade-offs are managed.

It was unclear, however, how exactly that oversight would work, or where it would come from. The researchers working on AI pointed out that artificial intelligence is itself only a tool, and that its ramifications will depend largely on how human beings apply it; in other words, AI doesn’t displace people, people do. Thus, it would be essential that policymakers take the lead on monitoring the development of our increasingly automated society and ensure that any threats that arise are addressed.

The policymakers, on the other hand, often pushed the same responsibility back to the tech sector, saying that it was the duty of companies to regulate their technological advances, and the responsibility of researchers to build accountability into their machines.

The Innovation Gap

In a panel titled “Driving Innovation: Autonomous Vehicles and the Future of Rail and the Open Road,” the consensus—as one might expect from a panel composed of AI researchers and transportation specialists—was that machine learning will dramatically enhance the efficiency of transportation networks. Yet Magnus Graf Lambsdorff, a partner at the venture capital company Lakestar, said he was less worried about the ramifications of autonomous vehicles and more worried that Germany, famous for its automotive industry, will not be the primary beneficiary: “The amount Germany invests [in AI research] is vanishingly small compared to in France or the United States.”

That was a sentiment heard often at the conference—Germany in particular has the skills to be a major global player in AI but, as a late adopter to all things digital, has failed to invest funds, time, and energy in the field. In a panel titled “Is Germany Ready for the AI Revolution?” there was much hand-wringing over why Silicon Valley and China have surpassed Berlin in shaping the technology of the future (and present, for that matter). MP Thomas Jarzombek noted that Germany lags behind in data processing and knowledge transfer, adding: “The problem is Germans love hardware. We’re a great engineering country but we’re behind on software.” (sic)

That might be headed for change on the European level, at least. A European Union representative delivered the news that the Commission will set up a European AI alliance as a multi-stakeholder forum, hoping it will become a global platform that will, among other developments, generate a comprehensive set of ethical guidelines for deploying AI. How to implement those guidelines (and get all 27 EU members to sign on) is another question.

In one of the more ominous sessions, a panel of defense representatives and researchers discussed whether AI has brought about the third revolution in warfare; Toby Walsh, a professor of computer science at the University of New South Wales, warned of the dangers of allowing “stupid machines the right to decide over life and death,” adding that autonomous weapons systems will be weapons of terror: “You can ask them to do anything, however evil.”

Both the head of the German military’s future analysis branch, Olaf Theiler, and Frank Sauer, a researcher at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, appeared to agree that the use of AI in analyzing data or visualization was welcome—anything beyond, however, including operational decisions and tactical planning, needs humans to play an active role. It remains to be seen how governments like Germany can and will react when adversaries—whether they be non-state actors or other governments—choose to employ autonomous weapons systems and other AI applications in conflict and warfare.

There was broad consensus, across all the discussions and panels, that AI has already become a part of our lives—think search engines, as Joanna Bryson pointed out, or transcription software. Now it will take inclusive dialogue between society, politics, research, and industry to decide what we want to do with artificial intelligence, and quickly. Because as Frank Kirchner of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Bremen put it: “There is no law of nature that says that robots can’t become more intelligent than us—we have to make sure we don’t become less intelligent.”

NB. Berlin Policy Journal was a media partner for the Aspen AI2018 Berlin conference.

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Leave it to Benjamin Netanyahu to save the drama for the last day of the Munich Security Conference. Netanyahu, taking the stage for the first time at the MSC, brandished a long, rusted piece of metal in the middle of his speech to participants—a piece, he said, of a drone that entered Israel from Syrian airspace last week, sent by Iran.

“Mr. Zarif,” he called, referring to the Iranian foreign minister, not in the room but due to speak later in the day. “Do you recognize this? You should—it’s yours,” he challenged. “Do not test Israel’s resolve.”

Netanyahu appealed to participants to see Iran as the nefarious threat to global security he believes it really is; he denounced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear agreement with Tehran, as dangerous appeasement, drawing a parallel to the 1938 Munich agreement that gave Hitler free rein (noting that there were indeed many differences between Iran and Nazi Germany). He pulled out a second prop as well—a map to show participants his perspective of Iran’s steady march of domination across the Middle East.

In a clear shot at the conference participants, European delegations in particular, the Israeli leader added that if Washington does not certify the nuclear deal, countries must choose who they want to do business with—Iran or Israel.

A stony-faced John Kerry, one of the chief architects of the JCPOA, struck back in the following session on the stage, saying the deal was working and calling Netanyahu’s assessment “fundamentally inaccurate;” if your house is on fire, he asked, would you put it out in 15 years or put it out now and ensure it doesn’t catch fire again?

Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who shared the stage with Kerry on a panel on the Middle East, blasted Washington’s support of Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria with training and weapons: “Supporting one terrorist organization to fight against another terrorist organization is a big mistake,” he said. “This is outrageous.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif later denied any desire on Tehran’s part to become the hegemonic power of the region. Rather, he proposed a step-by-step approach to build an “inclusive” security architecture for the Gulf region—but not inclusive of Israel, though. Zarif sidestepped an opportunity to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist in a response to a question. Immediately after Zarif’s speech, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir called upon the world “to extract a price from Iran for its behavior.”

These sessions wrapped up an otherwise muted weekend in Munich, with world leaders, ministers, and dignitaries grappling with questions that resembled the previous gathering on European and global security—with little focus on the main stage on the opportunities and risks technology will pose in those very challenges.

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© MSC/Kuhlmann

Ask Sergey Lavrov what he thinks of the news that 13 Russians were indicted in the US Friday for election meddling in America’s election and his answer, as might be expected, is unequivocally dismissive: It’s “just blabber,” he said, until the facts are presented (the documentation supporting the indictments doesn’t count, apparently).

Lavrov took the stage on Day Two of the conference to deliver a speech very much reminiscent of those he has given at previous MSC gatherings, accusing the West of peddling anti-Russian propaganda and lamenting its inability to accept a resurgent Russia. He referred to the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine as an internal battle, one where the Kremlin was a force of good in trying to find a resolution, adding that Ukrainians had been given a “false choice” between the EU and Russia.

Fittingly, Lavrov was followed directly by US National Security Advisor HR McMaster, who said there was no “incontrovertible proof” of Moscow’s meddling in the US election. When asked if Washington would be ready for cyber dialogue with Russia, he quipped “I’m surprised there are any Russian cyber experts available, based on how active they have been in undermining our democracies across the West.”

McMaster also sought to reassure Europeans that Washington was not turning its back on the transatlantic alliance and its commitment to global security, despite numerous signals from the current president last year indicating the opposite. He highlighted the shared values, freedom, and rule of law that bound Europe and the US but reserved harsh words for Iran and what he sees as a deeply flawed nuclear agreement.

Curiously, when asked how his support for European partnership squared with his very own Wall Street Journal op-ed last May, where he and Gary Cohn described the global community as a dog-eat-dog, zero-sum world, he insisted the dogs on either side of the line were democratic and non-democratic countries, not Western allies.

Steel Tanks, Not Think Tanks

The second day, devoted to “the future of Europe,” as MSC Chairman Wolfgang Ischinger said, launched a marathon of nine speeches from leaders and ministers – and it was thorny at times, revealing the rifts and departures in the European and global community. Here are some of the highlights:

– Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, who took the stage after the news Friday that German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel had been released from custody after being held for a year without trial in Turkey, bristled at questions over Ankara’s crackdown on journalists. He argued that Turkey is “a state of law just like Germany and the US,” adding: “Nobody has the right to question the state of law in another country (sic).”

– Sebastian Kurz, Austria’s new chancellor, expressed the need to reform and improve the EU while making a clear overture his far-right partners in government, speaking of strengthening “Europe’s Judeo-Christian traditions” (an interesting preview of this summer when Austria assumes the presidency of the EU Council).

– Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki triggered consternation when he defended his country’s deeply controversial Holocaust bill (which made it illegal to accuse Poland of complicity in the Holocaust) by arguing that there were “Polish perpetrators as there were Jewish perpetrators.” On defense, his quip that Europe needs “steel tanks, not think tanks” is also not likely to go down particularly well among a crowd comprised of quite a few think tankers.

– Theresa May arrived at the conference after having met with Chancellor Merkel for what appeared to be polite yet not particularly fruitful talks in Berlin. May doubled down on the UK’s deep commitment to European and global security, but also her government’s commitment to honoring the Brexit decision. She proposed a EU-UK security treaty that ensured close cooperation on security and intelligence after Brexit, adding, somewhat ominously, that a failure to nail down a bespoke deal would have “damaging effects for both sides.”

– Germany’s foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel opened the day’s roundup of speeches pointing to China as one of the largest challenges facing the West, warning: “China is developing a comprehensive alternative system unlike ours that is not based on freedom, democracy, and human rights.” While emphasizing the irrefutable importance of US partnership in forging a stable global community, he added: “Nobody should try to divide the EU – not China, not Russia, but also not the US.”

Looping the US in with Russia and China is a telling indication of how wary Germany and indeed Europe are of Washington’s true objectives. It’s interesting to note that Gabriel might well have been re-applying, in a way, to keep his job, or paying farewell. The post of foreign minister in the next German government is very much up in the air.

We’ll have a wrap up of the final day of the MSC tomorrow.

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© MSC/Kuhlmann

If the previous year’s Munich Security Conference was a sober reckoning after the election of US President Donald Trump, Brexit, and populist challenges across Europe, this year’s conference is nothing short of an alarm bell.

“The warning signs are flashing in bright red,” said MSC Chairman Wolfgang Ischinger in his opening remarks, adding that there have never been as many serious international challenges facing the world—and that the risk of conflict between great powers is very real.

It was his question posed to the audience—nearly two dozen heads of state, more than 70 defense ministers, hundreds of advisors, dignitaries, and strategists—that underpinned a central focus of the gathering: “Are we proud enough as Europeans to make sure Europe will be able to contribute to shaping the future of the international order instead of being shaped by it?” asked Ischinger.

Franco-German Lockstep

The symbolism of the French and German defense ministers opening the conference was no accident—last year, it was the American and German heads of defense, after all. Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen and France’s Florence Parly both waved the banner for deeper Franco-German, but also pan-European integration on defense, pointing to the recent EU defense pact PESCO as a milestone and blueprint.

“I believe we also need a PESCO in foreign policy – and a common strategic culture. There is no military short-cut to a sustainable order of peace,” said von der Leyen.

But the German defense minister, while thanking US defense secretary Jim Mattis for America’s partnership and the strength of the transatlantic alliance, sent a shot across the bow as well, saying: “We observe with great concern that some of our partners are systematically cutting back funding for diplomacy,” especially the United Nations. Von der Leyen emphasized the fundamental importance of pairing more military capability with development, adding all of Europe “is responsible for this.”

Parly, meanwhile, praised the Franco-German lockstep on defense, values, and vision for the future; she made an urgent appeal for the need to “wake up” and defend Europe at home, adding “Europe is not a luxury, it is a must.”

Harmony and Divergence

Despite the show of harmony, there remain small points of divergence between Berlin and Paris on the controversial question of regulating national weapons exports (made apparent after a question from the audience) and readiness to engage in military missions (Germany, as one participant pointed out, still requires parliamentary approval for Bundeswehr missions).

Still, the ability and willingness of Europe—and therefore the Franco-German tandem—to take charge on the global stage looks set to be a touch point at this year’s MSC. It is interesting to mark the notably absent (no Chancellor Angela Merkel and no President Donald Trump, though the latter was highly unlikely from the beginning) and, perhaps more importantly, no weighty focus on the emergence of China as a partner or challenger to Europe’s influence and security. Indeed, the MSC curtain-raiser report pointed out “China has increasingly presented its mix of autocratic leadership and capitalism as an appealing alternative to the Western model and cleverly stepped in where the US made room.”

There was little mention of the myriad political and defensive challenges the EU has failed to surmount in eastern Ukraine, where the conflict with Russian-backed separatists continues. But with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko speaking tonight, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also attending, there could well be movement in bilateral talks over the weekend.

There was audible relief across German circles to the news that German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel, who had been held without trial in Turkey for a year, would be released—perhaps a sign that Berlin’s all-out diplomatic campaign in recent days, including Chancellor Merkel’s talks with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Thursday, might have worked. And that German-Turkish relations could just be on the mend.

Stay tuned for a round-up of Day Two on Saturday.

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Our colleague and friend, Sylke Tempel, passed away on October 5, 2017, at the age of 54. She was struck by a tree and killed in Berlin during Xavier, a flash storm. Tempel served as editor-in-chief of Internationale Politik since 2008 and founded this publication, the Berlin Policy Journal, in 2015.

Tempel was one of Germany’s most prominent foreign policy thinkers. She was a regular guest on the political talk show circuit; she moderated panels at conferences across the world; she lectured students at Stanford University’s Bing Overseas Studies Program in Berlin; she worked with leading policy-makers on shaping international relations; and she chaired the German chapter of Women in International Security (WIIS).

Her sharp intellect and critical thinking resonated on the global stage. She thrived in debates, engaging opinions from across the political spectrum and fearlessly confronting high-ranking politicians, thinkers, and analysts. She loved a good argument, but she was never intransigent. She did not waver on her values – staunch advocate of democratic ideals and open, tolerant societies that she was – yet she listened to and engaged with other views.

Sylke Tempel was not merely erudite; she was also able to communicate complex topics to a broad audience in straightforward, unambiguous language, free of the jargon that so often clouds political discussions.

“She always thought about how to communicate the debate surrounding foreign and security policy here to a wider audience, not just in Germany but also abroad,” said Thomas Bagger, Director of Foreign Policy in the Office of the Federal President and a former director of the Federal Foreign Office’s policy planning staff. “Her ability to view things from the outside, to understand what people saw and expected of Germany, earned her particular prominence because there are so few in Germany who do so.”

Emily Haber, State Secretary in Germany’s Interior Ministry and a friend of Tempel’s over many years, recalls her immense desire to examine an issue from all sides – not to reaffirm her own beliefs, but to truly understand intricacies and nuances. It was a trait that set her analysis and coverage of Israel apart, for example. Her deep love and sympathy for the country did not prevent her from taking account of the various perspectives of the region’s political struggle, or building close friendships on all sides of the conflict.

“She wasn’t able to lie to herself. She wasn’t able to embellish things if they weren’t there to be embellished. She was extremely honest,” said Haber.

•••

Sylke Tempel was born May 30, 1963, in Bayreuth in northern Bavaria. As a young woman, she aspired to study medicine in the city of Augsburg. She was waitlisted, however, and enrolled at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians University instead. It was there that her love for history, political science, and Israel blossomed. She wrote her thesis on “The Reparations Question: Relations between the German Democratic Republic and Israel between 1945 and 1988.” She never did return to medicine.

After receiving a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation, Tempel conducted research for two years at Columbia University in New York – freelancing for the German-Jewish Aufbau – and then completed her Ph.D. on “The Relations between Jewish-American Organizations and the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945” at the University of the Armed Forces in Munich.

She moved to Israel where she would spend more than a decade reporting on the Middle East for various German, Austrian, and Swiss publications, including Die Woche and Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s leading national Jewish weekly. Fluent in Hebrew, she covered a vast range of stories in the region, including the Oslo Peace Process and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Tempel authored six books, including Freya von Moltke: Ein Leben. Ein Jahrhundert, a portrait of an anti-Nazi resistance fighter, and Wir wollen beide hier leben. Eine schwierige Freundschaft in Jerusalem, featuring letters of correspondence between an Israeli and Palestinian student. She was honored with the Quadriga Prize for the latter.

She was also a dedicated transatlanticist, contributing to numerous American and international publications and lecturing at the Institute for German Studies at Stanford in California. Just before her death, she joined a group of leading German foreign policy experts to pen a transatlantic manifesto titled “In Spite of it All, America.”

“She had strong faith in her values,” said Joachim Staron, an editor at Internationale Politik. “Not even Donald Trump could shake her belief that the transatlantic relationship was fundamentally important.”

“A German With a Sense of Humor”

Throughout her life, Tempel remained passionately curious. She was a voracious consumer of books, articles, and films on the most varied of topics, from ancient history to contemporary satire, Harry Potter and the latest Tarantino movie. She drew upon a rich reservoir of knowledge, making her one of the most sought-after moderators and commentators in her field.

Despite the prestige and many honors bestowed upon her, Tempel also remained unfailingly kind, generous, and funny – so very funny, in a disarming, mischievous way. Her broad smile and warmth filled the room, and even the busiest of days were punctuated by the sound of laughter emanating from her office. She delighted in silly YouTube videos that she circulated among her colleagues and Loriot sketches she would recall in editorial meetings – and the Minions, a particular favorite. She drew parallels between Asterix and Obelix and Mickey Mouse and mankind’s most fundamental conflicts with a twinkle in her eye.

“She said it was always her advantage to be a German with a sense of humor because no one expected that,” said Rachel Tausendfreund, editorial director at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, who worked with Tempel at Internationale Politik. “She was elegantly charming.”

Tempel had a penchant for jewel-toned jackets and brightly hued purses and shoes, a jolt of color in the often-drab foreign policy world of black and gray suits. Of her many projects, one was to update the IP and BPJ offices on the top floor of the German Council on Foreign Relations. When renovation work unexpectedly stalled (after a week, inexplicably, only two of six doors had been sanded and painted) she and her colleagues rolled up their sleeves and went to work painting themselves.

She ensured that all birthdays were celebrated with singing and generous portions of cake. She treated her colleagues’ children as her own, welcoming them to spend time in the office and share in her appreciation for Donald Duck. And she actively mentored younger colleagues, serving as a role model particularly for women trying to find their feet in male-dominated domains like foreign policy or defense.

Her long-time colleague, Uta Kuhlmann, said Tempel remained so firmly grounded due to her upbringing in the countryside in southern Germany and her close relationship with her family. She built her life upon three pillars: friends, family, and work. If professional commitments grew difficult, she would draw joy from her private life, surrounded by a small circle of good friends, her parents, her godchildren, or her partner.

“Sylke was just happy. She chose what she surrounded herself with in life, and she managed to do so because she was so clever and smart and optimistic,” said Kuhlmann.

Despite her professional commitments and busy travel schedule, Tempel was also deeply devoted to her nephew and her godchildren. She and her partner spent hours helping with homework assignments and traded in their convertible for a family car. Tempel also served as a reading ambassador, reading to students in a Berlin school in the morning before going to the office. She was generous with her time and attention, regardless of her audience.

“Sylke would completely concentrate on the person she was talking to at the moment. She gave you all her attention and concentrated on what linked her to you, and what would interest you,” said Emily Haber. “She would get the best of people because she took interest in what they could offer. That’s rare.”

Tempel led the push to turn Internationale Politik into a leading political affairs magazine, growing the brand and sharpening its profile to include IP Wirtschaft, or IP Business, in 2012. She had been working with the head of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), Daniela Schwarzer, on plans to restructure the think tank as well. She was also selected to be among the first class of Thomas Mann fellows, a program bringing leaders from across German society to the US to foster dialogue and exchange with intellectuals and institutions in the US.

Sylke Tempel is survived by her parents, her sister, her nephew, her partner, and her friends and colleagues.

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It is with great sadness that the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) and the German Foreign Office report the death of Dr Sylke Tempel, Editor-in-Chief of the DGAP journals INTERNATIONALE POLITIK and BERLIN POLICY JOURNAL. She died in an accident on October 5, 2017.

Dr Sylke Tempel was an extraordinary person who influenced the debate on foreign policy in Germany and far beyond. She shaped the public discourse on international affairs in the media, as an expert at political and public events, and was also a sought-after commentator on German foreign policy. Through her work, she helped many inside and outside Germany gain a better understanding of German foreign policy.

Since 2008, Dr Sylke Tempel reimagined the DGAP’s foreign policy journals and turned them into important reference points for those interested in international affairs.

Dr Arend Oetker, President of the German Council on Foreign Relations: “In Dr Sylke Tempel, the German Council on Foreign Relations loses an outstanding member of the German media and political community. As a commentator and academic, she significantly influenced national and international debates and was a key sparring partner on German policy issues.”

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel: “We are mourning a good friend and a passionate foreign policy advocate. Her death is a heavy loss for us in Germany and far beyond. Those who have followed Dr Sylke Tempel’s path, her analyses, and her contributions to debates and discussions over the years, hugely treasured her brilliance and her warmth, her subtlety and her political acumen.“

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch – The poster reads “Burqa? We like bikinis.”

The storm began brewing long before members of Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) arrived at the Maritim Hotel in Cologne in late April. For two days, delegates from across the country gathered to settle on a platform for the election campaign and choose their lead candidate for the race. This was meant to be the party’s moment of strength and unity. But an undercurrent of discord spoiled the show. Two factions emerged – one more populist and conservative, the other more nationalist and far-right – and they were both vying for power.

Frauke Petry, the chairwoman and internationally known face of the party, wanted delegates to vote on a motion that would have shifted the AfD into the mainstream. It’s not that Petry was softening her right-wing views; she wanted to make her party a real, viable opposition force in the next Bundestag – and perhaps even a possible coalition partner for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU.

The delegates chose to go in another direction. Petry’s motion was neither accepted nor denied, but rather completely ignored. Meanwhile, national spokesman Jörg Meuthen delivered a stinging rebuke to the moderates, rejecting any discussion of factions or the possibility of working with the likes of Merkel. “We won’t join any coalition with those people!,” he shouted to jubilant applause.

Petry, blinking and visibly uncomfortable, was sidelined. The delegates chose Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland to represent them in the election campaign, the latter a clear nod to the nationalist wing. This was more than the tempestuous confusion of a young party finding its identity – it revealed the struggle the party is facing to forge a common vision.

The AfD shocked the establishment in 2016 with a series of successes in regional votes, winning 14 percent in Berlin’s election last September. Since then, however, it has seen its poll numbers fall steadily to around eight percent in recent surveys. Now, some analysts believe the AfD has reached an impasse; its future as a unified movement may be at stake.

“I think that in the long run the divide between the civically-minded, conservative branch and the ethnically-minded, nationalist branch is too deep, I don’t think it’s sustainable,” says Melanie Amann, a journalist for Der Spiegel magazine and author of the book AfD: Angst für Deutschland (or “Fear for Germany”). “I think the party is heading for a split.”

Anti-immigration, Anti-Islam

To see where the AfD is going, it is important to understand where it began. The party was founded in 2013 on a starkly euroskeptic, populist platform. As debt-laden Greece teetered toward bankruptcy, the European Union organized a large-scale bailout. The AfD cried foul over profligate Greeks squandering hard-earned German taxpayer money. The eurozone debt crisis began to stabilize in 2014, and public indignation subsided.

Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders  to Syrian refugees came as a stroke of luck for the AfD. With nearly a million asylum-seekers and migrants entering Germany that year, the party seized on a rising tide of anger and fear to shift to an anti-immigration, anti-Islam platform. At the same time, the anti-Islam Pegida movement (“Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West”) was drawing tens of thousands to the streets.

“The discussion back then was so polarized, it was very emotional – it drove a wedge through entire families, where you had supporters and opponents of the government’s policy,” says Oskar Niedermayer, political scientist and professor at Berlin’s Free University. “The AfD received more protest voters than any other party then. These were people who were not necessarily supporters of the AfD, they just wanted to send the mainstream parties a message.”

Part of the problem is that to some voters, Germany’s mainstream parties share more or less the same view on immigration, says Niedermayer. Even Merkel’s opponents, the Greens and the SPD, have stood behind the chancellor’s original decision in 2015 to open Germany’s doors. The only substantial criticism of that policy has come from the AfD.

“The belief is that the CDU left too much space on the right, and the AfD just slid in. But that is not the core of what truly happened,” said Marc Jongen, the AfD’s spokesperson for the southwestern state of Baden-Württemburg. “Over the last few years and decades, all of our main parties, with the exception of the Left Party, have moved closer and closer together, and they’ve become a cartel. It’s simply one big party.”

Throughout 2016, it seemed a rising number of German voters agreed. But a series of key factors has begun to erode the AfD’s popularity.

Too Right, Too Soon?

First, the refugee crisis faded. Merkel, watching her popularity plummet, rapidly began working to ensure there would be no repeat. She signed key agreements with governments in transit or origin countries like Egypt and Morocco to stem the flow of migrants; she pushed a landmark (and highly controversial) deal with Ankara to stop illegal migration through Turkey into Europe; and the government passed legislation to increase deportations and make family reunification more difficult. Together, Berlin’s package of measures has slowed the flow of migration considerably. According to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, the agency received 13,685 new asylum applications in June of this year, an 81 percent drop year-on-year.

Second, and more significantly, the party’s rising far-right nationalist faction bubbled to the surface. The AfD’s leader in the state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, delivered an inflammatory speech to young party members in Dresden in January, demanding a break with what he called Germany’s culture of guilt. Germans, he added in a reference to Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of its capital.”

Höcke was blasted by politicians from across the spectrum, and some members of his party launched a petition to revoke his membership. It appeared he had crossed a line in disparaging Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture. Yet now, months later, he is still a leading member of the party. He was reprimanded with regulatory measures, but not more.

“That really was a turning point for the AfD,” says Amann. “It was a moment where Höcke’s thoughts were revealed, unfiltered and crude, and it was clear that if the party tolerated it – which it did – it would become too much for the moderate conservative wing.”

Marc Jongen, often referred to as the party’s intellectual leader, insists the AfD has taken a clear stance on Germany’s past. “Within the scene of the intellectual right there have always be quarrels over how to deal with radicalism – where to draw a line, or if a line should even be drawn. But everyone we have involved is very clear that we categorically reject anti-Semitism, or dreams of another German Reich and similar ‘old right’-stuff. That is all gone,” he says.

Anti-foreigner sentiment is not, however. Alexander Gauland, one of the party’s two main candidates, came under fire in May 2016 for targeting football star Jerome Boateng, a German of Ghanaian descent: “People like him as a footballer. But they don’t want Boateng as a neighbor.” Now Gauland has once again drawn ire after lashing out at Turkish-German SPD politician and state minister Aydan Özoguz, who said in a speech that there is no specific German culture aside from the language. At a campaign rally in Thuringia, Gauland taunted Özoguz, saying they would be able to “dispose of her in Anatolia, thank God.”

In the east of the country, the AfD’s regional and state chapters are visibly far-right. There, the lines between the AfD and the Identitarian Movement (a right-wing populist youth movement), the intellectual Neue Rechte (New Right), and even radical extremist elements are blurred, say analysts. In early May, the AfD held its first joint rally with Pegida as well.

“They have stuck to their strategy of trying to reach as many voters as possible, from the moderate conservative to the right-wing extreme,” said Niedermayer. “I think the moderate conservative voters see a red line has been crossed – they say ‘I can’t vote for a party that has these people in its ranks.’”

“The tone will become rougher”

Despite declining numbers and internal turmoil, the AfD is a remarkable success story. In just four years, it has won seats in 13 of Germany’s 16 state parliaments, the most ever for such a young party. Barring an upset, the AfD will win seats in the Bundestag at the end of September. Melanie Amann believes the current poll numbers, placing the AfD around 8 percent, are likely too conservative, especially as many voters are still undecided.

The question remains just how the party plans to wield its new power in the federal parliament – as opposition or a force of disruption. The AfD’s record in state parliaments so far have been mixed. But analysts point to the party’s list of candidates to fill seats in the Bundestag. There, the far-right nationalist wing is in the majority.

“I think we are going to have to brace ourselves for a much sharper tone, a more aggressive opposition position,” said Amann. “If you want to give it a positive spin, we will see sharper debates, but if you want to look at the negative outcome, the tone will become rougher, more uncivilized.”

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