Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

After almost a decade in office and 14 years at the helm of his party, the liberal-conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), Prime Minister Mark Rutte remains the dominant figure in Dutch politics. Each of his governments have had a completely different make-up. The first was a minority government together with the Christian Democrats (CDA), the second a grand coalition with the center-left Labor Party (PvdA), and the current is a four-way center-right coalition. In each case, however, Rutte managed to keep everyone together by networking incessantly, deploying his disarming smile and willingness to compromise. The question now is whether he will run again next year or whether he will, for instance, take on a high-level position in the EU instead.

A Bit Boring

Mark Rutte was born in The Hague in 1967, the youngest in a large family. As a child he spent a lot of time playing the piano and even dreamed of attending a conservatoire.  But by the age of 16 his interest had shifted to politics and he joined the VVD’s youth organization, the JOVD, although by his own account he wasn’t a convinced liberal yet (this came later). Studying history at Leiden University, he gradually worked his way up in the JOVD and spent three years as its national head, learning the art of managing many and varied stakeholders along the way.

After belatedly graduating—due to all his political activities, it took him eight years to complete his studies —Rutte went to work for Unilever, in the human resources department. In his early years in politics he would pride himself on having strong opinions about the best laundry detergent brands and would quip that he would go back to the peanut butter factory if his political career didn’t work out.

He is a life-long bachelor who describes himself as “a bit boring” and, surprisingly for someone who leads a party that stands up for the entrepreneurial class, has little interest in material possessions, often proclaiming that “possession is ballast.” His personal life was a talking point only during his first election campaign in 2006, when there was some media speculation about his lack of a partner. Since then, it has mostly vanished as a topic of discussion.

Political scandals never seem to do him much harm, even the significant number revolving around cabinet members from his own party. His jovial mannerisms—one of his catch phrases is pointing out how much of a cool country the Netherlands is—his willingness to deflect incoming attacks by rapidly apologizing for any wrongdoing, and his debating skills have meant that any difficulties usually slide off him. He has earned the nickname “Teflon Mark.”

Fragmentation Manager

The political system in the Netherlands fragmented earlier than in many other countries: the Dutch have experienced the decline of traditionally dominant mainstream parties, the rise of right-wing populism, and an increasingly volatile electorate since the 1990s. As a result, large coalitions, often consisting of ideologically disparate parties, are common. Rutte has thrived in this political environment.

Straight after he was plucked away from his desk at Unilever and installed as state secretary for social affairs and employment, he demonstrated his political skills by using his charm and willingness to engage directly with political opponents in order to push through controversial social welfare reforms. Putting his apparently infinite energy to good use in a strategy that would become his hallmark, he spoke to everyone involved and used his jovial style and approachability to get people on board through constant engagement with all stakeholders.

Even political opponents rarely leave a room after a meeting with Rutte without the feeling that they have built a special relationship with him. He subsequently cultivates these relationships by staying in touch with a large number of people he has met over the years, spending more time on his phone than the average teenager.

Following a stint as state secretary for education (a pet portfolio), he ran for the party leadership in 2006 against the popular minister for integration and asylum affairs, Rita Verdonk. The support he had built up within the party through the years of networking helped him win the nomination.

However, it took him until the election of 2010 to  craft a political profile that resonated with Dutch voters. Having initially charted a more progressive course, including a political strategy dubbed “GreenRight,” referencing the name of the Dutch green party GreenLeft, he moved his party to the right. Setting personal ideological considerations aside, he made the VVD the largest political force in the Netherlands, winning just over 20 percent of the popular vote. This pragmatism would become the hallmark of his political career.

The Wilders Challenge

He managed to become the first liberal prime minister of the Netherlands in almost a century by creating a minority government with the CDA, supported in parliament by the far-right populist Party for Freedom (PVV), led by Geert Wilders. Cooperating with Wilders, who had broken away from the VVD in 2004, led to severe criticism, both domestically and internationally. With the PVV refusing to take on government responsibility, it also meant having to placate Wilders all the time. Eventually, the government fell when the PVV refused to accept a new budget, Rutte turned to the centrist opposition and successfully passed a spending plan including significant cuts and tax increases before the next election.

The subsequent election turned into a contest between Rutte and the leader of the center-left PvdA, Diederik Samson. Voters on the left flocked to Samson, hoping to keep Rutte out of office, while those on the right opted for Rutte over Samson. The end result was a coalition of the two main protagonists. As Rutte’s VVD was still the largest party with a (by Dutch standards) whopping 26 percent of the vote, he remained prime minister. Although his coalition had a solid majority in the lower chamber of parliament, its lack of a majority in the upper chamber meant passing legislation still required constant deal-making with the opposition. Rutte’s interpersonal skills and, possibly even more importantly, his ideological flexibility and willingness to compromise made it happen.

Managing a difficult coalition has become even more important during his current term. In the 2017 election campaign he fought off the challenge from Wilders, whom he described as representing the “wrong kind of populism.” He did so by moving further to the right on issues such as integration and immigration. After 225 days of government-building talks, he formed a four-party coalition, resting on a one-seat majority. In part thanks to the rise of a second right-wing populist challenger, the Forum for Democracy (FvD) led by Thierry Baudet, Rutte’s new coalition lost its majority in the upper chamber halfway through its term. This has forced him to again use all his process management skills to get anything done and keep his government together until the next election in 2021.

European Player

Rutte’s political style is one that could be taken as a model for many other European leaders faced with increasingly fragmented political systems. According to his biographer, Dutch columnist Sheila Sitalsing, he manages the decline of previously dominant mainstream parties of the center-left and right by taking the ideological contest out of politics. He combines a willingness to compromise with an ability to push through large chunks of his party’s program at the expense of coalition partners—something the PvdA can attest to after losing three-quarters of its seats in 2017 because it was seen as having enabled VVD policies. Rutte, meanwhile, retained his core support.

Within the EU, Rutte has played less of a connecting role. He has always been a soft supporter of European integration, preferring to focus on the economic benefits it brings, and he has often relied on his finance ministers to act as the bad guys in Brussels for him. More recently, he moved himself into the firing line by seeking to prevent any significant further integration and especially any fiscal transfers.

Following the Brexit vote, the Dutch realized that they were about to lose an important liberal and pro-free trade ally within the EU, one that the Dutch have often hidden behind. In response, they are now taking the lead at the helm of a group of fiscally conservative countries, the so-called New Hanseatic League. This group played a large role in torpedoing the introduction of a eurozone budget, which France had pushed for, after suggestions that Germany might back the idea. Recently, Rutte became the informal leader of the even more pithily named Frugal Four, a group of net contributors to the EU budget (the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, and Denmark) that opposed higher spending.

His often controversial positions within the EU notwithstanding, there was much speculation last year that Rutte could be in line for an EU top job. As a liberal from one of the Benelux countries, who is held in high regard by many colleagues, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he appeared to be perfectly suited for Council president in particular. However, the fact that early on he put his weight behind compatriot Frans Timmermans for the commission presidency suggested Rutte did not actually want the job.

This would fit with Rutte’s earlier claims that he will leave politics behind after his stint in the “little job”—as he likes to refer to the Dutch premiership. However, it would not be the first time that he has changed his mind if he does eventually decide to leave The Hague behind for Brussels, possibly after the election in 2021.

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

The New Year has just started, and Croatia’s Prime Minister Andrej Plenković finds himself confronted with a pile of difficult tasks. As president of the Council of the European Union, three hot topics have landed on his lap: the EU’s long-term budget, forging a Brexit deal, and EU enlargement. “Our presidency is coming at a crucial time for Europe, but also for a world,” Plenković said in late October 2019 when presenting his priorities for the country’s EU six-month presidency. The fact that it’s the first time ever that Croatia, the youngest EU member, having joined in 2013, is holding that office doesn’t make things easier.

Krešimir Macan, a former Plenković advisor and now a political marketing expert, believes it will be an “extraordinary presidency.” According to Macan, Plenković will make a special effort to solve the issue of EU enlargement, which is on hold after French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to block Albania and North Macedonia’s EU membership bids.
“If there is anything I believe he will do very well, it will be the [EU] presidency, because it is his great ambition—the desire to show off in front of his European counterparts. I think he has invested a lot in the preparations,” Macan told the Berlin Policy Journal.

Plenković himself rarely misses an opportunity to emphasize that the EU presidency holds the promise of a great diplomatic success and is also “a great opportunity for Croatia to affirm itself.” Critics, however, say that the EU presidency is overrated, and that it is just a matter of rotation between the member states.

“This is not a success by itself, but it is a chance to do something. Plenković hoped to enter the presidency in a quiet period, but he is entering in it in a very unpleasant period, with two huge problems, namely Brexit and the seven-year budget plan,” Žarko Puhovski, a veteran political analyst from Croatia, told the Berlin Policy Journal.

European Ambitions

Plenković was born in Croatia’s capital Zagreb to a university professor father and a cardiologist mother, and studied law at his hometown’s university. Foreign and European affairs have been close to his heart since the start of his political career. Shortly after completing his studies, in 1994, he got a job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an associate in the Department for European Integration. In 2011, he joined the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), a conservative party that has ruled Croatia for most of the period since the country gained independence at the beginning of the 1990s. He became a lawmaker in the Croatian Parliament, and, in 2013, he was elected as one of the first twelve Croatian MEPs to the European Parliament.

In 2016, after his predecessor Tomislav Karamarko resigned over a conflict of interest, Plenković, not burdened by corruption scandals, became HDZ leader. This moderate pro-European was a perfect fit for party leader, especially after Karamarko had moved the party to the right—occasionally the far right—following the lead of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom Karamarko admired and whose authoritarian and nationalist politics he copied. Under Plenković’s leadership, HDZ, which is a member of Europe’s largest center-right political bloc (the European People’s Party, or EEP), has stepped back into the political center and renounced the party’s authoritarian tendencies under Karamarko.

During the last year’s wrangling about the set-up of the new European Commission, some Croatian media speculated Plenković could end up with the top job: commission president (the job went to Ursula von der Leyen). But Plenković never confirmed the speculations; rather, he stressed his support for EPP parliamentarian leader Manfred Weber, the former EPP’s Spitzenkandidat, who was subsequently blocked.

Two Goals: Schengen and the Euro

From the moment he took office as Prime Minister in October 2016, Plenković has called for deeper integration into the EU, emphasizing two important goals: joining the EU passport-free Schengen travel area, and becoming a member of the eurozone.

After sending a letter of intent to the European Central Bank last year to join the European Exchange Mechanism, or ERM-2, Croatia is now in a “waiting room” for countries that want to adopt the euro. It is unclear how long it will stay there, but Plenković wants the period to be as short as possible.

As for Schengen, the European Commission announced in October 2019 that Croatia had “taken the measures needed to ensure that the necessary conditions for the full implementation of the Schengen rules and standards are met.” Although Plenković presented this as a big step forward, the commission’s evaluation of Croatian technical preparedness was only the first step.

Additionally, the issue of Schengen and border regulation is very controversial in Croatia because for over two years, non-governmental and international organizations have been warning about human rights abuses at Croatia’s state borders, which are also the EU’s external borders. According to their reports, Croatian police frequently repel migrants and refugees who are trying to cross the border from neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, sometimes resorting to violence.

While countries in the Croatian neighborhood, such as Slovenia and Hungary, decided to “defend” themselves against migrants by sealing their borders with ever higher wires or fences, Croatia, according to the prime minister “was in a position to raise the wire at the border, but chose to strengthen the police instead.”

At the same time, Croatian authorities deny the claims about violence, pointing out that they have been praised many times in the EU for safeguarding its external borders. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel has expressed her support of Croatia’s efforts a couple of times.

Pressure from the Right-Wing

While European leaders have only words of praise for Plenković, the situation looks quite different in his home country.

November 2019 saw the biggest protest yet during his tenure. The issue of the demand for higher wages for teachers, who went on strike nationwide for more than a month, brought tens of thousands of protesters to Zagreb’s main square, not only educators and members of teachers’ unions, but also people who were generally dissatisfied. Plenković eventually agreed to most of the unions’ demands and bought himself some peace. The magnitude of the protests, however, revealed a high level of social discontent in the country.

At the same time, the prime minister’s centrist course is strongly criticized by the right end of the political spectrum. In some right-wing circles, Plenković was even described as “the new leader of the left.” In March 2018, thousands of people gathered in Zagreb to protest the parliament’s ratification of the Council of Europe’s so-called Istanbul Convention. The non-EU body, which includes Russia and Turkey, is intended to combat domestic violence against women; the right-wingers claimed, however, that Plenković’s government was promoting “gender ideology.” The convention was ratified in the end, but many HDZ supporters were disgruntled, believing that Plenković had betrayed them.

The pressure from the right has not stopped since. Plenković’s government is often criticized for being supported by representatives of the Serb national minority. Since Croatia’s 1990s wars against the combined forces of the (former) Yugoslav Army and rebelling Croatian Serbs, intolerance toward the Serb ethnic minority has been very strong, and the right is constantly using it for political purposes.

This puts Plenković in an unenviable position, as he has to find a balance between the hard right and the center. He doesn’t want to lose more conservative and nationalist voters. At the same time, he is struggling to preserve the image of a statesman who cherishes European values such as diversity and tolerance.

His Biggest Threat: His Party

Plenković, whose favorite word is “stability,” actually has a hard time keeping control, especially in his own party. Because the HDZ was unable to form a government on its own, it was forced to enter a coalition. Its junior coalition partners are constantly raising new demands, having threatened to leave the coalition on many occasions. But since the 2020 budget was passed by parliament in November 2019, experts consider the relationship between coalition partners is stable—for now.

Observers agree that Plenković’s biggest challenge is to hold on to the leadership of the HDZ, since a considerable part of the membership, the hard-liners in particular, is not happy with his politics. Macan, Plenković’s former advisor, says that the way the prime minister is leading his party is causing the greatest disagreement.

“He directs it as a ‘normal,’ Christian democratic, center-right party, like the German CDU. But until recently the HDZ was a de facto movement, a broad tent that included people from the center to the far-right,” Macan said.
Intra-party elections are due to take place this year, and the big question is whether a strong personality, someone able to unite all the malcontents, emerges and challenges Plenković for the party leadership. Some party functionaries from the so-called right-wing faction have already publicly stated their intention to run against the prime minister.

Timing is important: will the intra-party elections take place in the spring, as announced earlier, or in the fall, after Croatia’s next regular parliamentary elections? If his party wins the parliamentary elections, it will be easier for Plenković to retain his position in the HDZ.

Puhovski, the analyst, says that the period before the intra-party elections could affect Plenković’s conduct of politics and his managing of the EU presidency. “He will not be able to devote himself to the relations among European countries as much as he wants to. With one eye at least, he will look at the internal affairs of the HDZ,” Puhovski predicts.

The post Close-Up: Andrej Plenković appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

On the morning Phil Hogan was nominated as the EU’s next trade commissioner, he told Ireland’s public broadcaster RTÉ his priority was “to get Mr. Trump to see the error of his ways.” The US president should abandon his “reckless behavior” when it came to China and the EU.

His remarks did not go unnoticed. EU diplomats in Washington reported back immediately that there was outrage in the White House. “We were told it was fortunate that John Bolton [the hawkish former National Security Adviser] had just been fired the same day,” recalls a close aide, “or that the president himself might have tweeted his reaction.”

Trump didn’t tweet, but his ambassador Gordon Sondland delivered the message to Politico, accusing Hogan of a “belligerence” that would lead to an impasse between the EU and US. “Then people start to do things that you don’t want them to do.”

It was a combative start, confirming Hogan’s reputation as a political bruiser with a sharp tongue. However, many in Brussels felt Hogan was right. The US was waiting for the new EU executive to take office, and Hogan was reminding the world who the new interlocutor would be.

His timing, however, may have been unfortunate. The next day, the WTO ruled in a decades-old dispute with Boeing that Europe had granted illegal subsidies to Airbus. As a result, Trump was expected to announce up to $10 billion in tariffs on European products.
Making the Strategic Case for Trade

All told, the 59-year-old, hailed by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as a “brilliant” and “firm” negotiator, could not have taken up his post at a more turbulent time. The United States and China are locked in a trade war, China is accused of wholesale technology theft, Trump is threatening more tariffs on European goods, and Brexit is sapping the EU’s energy.

European efforts to sail above the turbulence as the self-identified defender of the rules-based global order are limited. “So far, the EU has benefitted from the turmoil created by Trump’s trade war,” says Sam Lowe, a research fellow with the Center for European Reform (CER), “which provided the political impetus to conclude trade agreements with Japan, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, and Vietnam; but the waters ahead look choppy.

“Phil Hogan will need to make the strategic case for a resilient trade policy. But he will face a European Parliament looking for greater reassurance that the EU’s trade policy complements its environmental ambitions, and an inwardly focused European agriculture lobby.”

That lobby has been up in arms over Hogan’s role in negotiating the EU-Mercosur trade agreement as agriculture commissioner. South American farmers will enjoy increased access to the EU, but the access for beef―an annual quota of 99,000 tonnes―has enraged farmers, not least in Hogan’s home country.

The Irish Farmers Association claims Mercosur beef will cost European farmers €5 billion annually, compounded by a lack of traceability, food safety, animal health, and environmental controls. Hogan hit back: “There will be no product that will arrive in the EU from the Mercosur countries without complying with existing EU food safety standards.”

The Road from Kilkenny

Hogan was born just outside Kilkenny in south-east Ireland to a small-holder farming family. He followed his father into politics and won the parliamentary seat for the center-right Fine Gael party that had always eluded his father.

He was a junior finance minister in 1994 in the Fine Gael-Labour coalition, but was forced to resign when a staff member accidentally leaked details of the annual budget. Observers say Hogan nursed a longstanding grievance at his premature fall and was determined to make a return to ministerial politics.

It started by being appointed party chairman. “This put him in a position of extraordinary influence,” says a longstanding associate. “He got to know the organization intimately. He became director of elections, selecting candidates, placing candidates.”

Hogan honed his skills as a ruthless political operator. When in 2010 a minister attempted a coup against Enda Kenny, the party leader turned to his longtime friend Hogan for advice. Hogan told him to sack the entire shadow front bench.

Kenny promptly did so the next morning. While 15 rebel MPs assembled in front of the Irish Parliament to declare the revolt, Hogan rounded up 40 loyalists and sent them to the same spot. The coup was over as soon as it had begun.

Happily Unpopular

But Hogan soon made a bigger impact on Irish politics. In 2011, Fine Gael swept to power following the collapse of the Irish economy due to the banking and sovereign debt crisis. Hogan was appointed environment minister.

Under the advice of the EU-IMF troika administering the bailout, the government established a new state utility, under Hogan’s direction, which would introduce water charges in Ireland for the first time.

Hogan insisted the new charges would cost as little as €2 per week, but there was a backlash when he warned that those who did not pay would see their water supply “turned down to a trickle for basic human health reasons.” To many reeling from the austerity of the bailout years, this was callous in the extreme.

The theory is that Hogan took on the poisoned chalice of water charges because he knew Kenny would appoint him Ireland’s Commissioner three years later. “There was a neat choreography,” says one source close to Hogan. “Kenny needed someone with balls to do the job, and who was also happy to be unpopular because they weren’t going to be around.”

Journalist Michael Brennan, who has just published a book on the affair, In Deep Water, says, “It was one thing to take a bullet for other people. It’s another when you’re casual about doing it, knowing you have the job in Brussels sown up. He had to convince people this was a charge worth paying and he failed to do that. Within months of his going to Brussels, they had torn up the Hogan plan and came up with a very different approach.”

Negotiating Brexit

But Hogan had other things on his mind when he arrived in Brussels. Within two years the United Kingdom launched its Brexit referendum. Hogan was the only senior EU official given a license to make the case to remain, travelling to farm meetings and agricultural shows around the UK.

“He spoke very well about the importance of the EU for farmers,” recalls a senior European Commission official, “both in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and in trading opportunities. But he spoke as an Irishman as well, in terms of keeping the UK and Ireland together in the EU. He made a real contribution. He might even have swung quite a number of votes.”

That Hogan, a searing critic of Brexit, will be Brussels’ top negotiator when the future EU-UK trade talks start has not been lost on Boris Johnson’s government.

Going the Extra Mile

He is described as a tough negotiator. Despite the hostility of the farming lobby, Hogan’s supporters say he went the extra mile to limit the access of South American beef, holding up the Mercosur talks and irritating member states keen to get the deal over the line.

“Mercosur would not have been done without him,” says one EU source. “He doesn’t hold back in protecting Europe’s defensive interests. Farming often ends up as one of the final issues, and depending on your desire to close a deal for the sake of it, people can be more amenable at the last minute. He would step in and say, we won’t give on that.”

Hogan will have his work cut out for him. He is said to have a reasonable relationship with US Trade Secretary Robert Lighthizer dating back to when they negotiated the EU-US hormone-free beef deal. But he will have to tread carefully when it comes to the problem of how to resolve disputes between WTO members. The US has declined to appoint judges to the Appellate Court until the matter is resolved, but has been slow to suggest solutions.
The EU and Canada are working on a mechanism that would bypass the WTO, but a broader framework will be needed to uphold the multilateral rules-based order the EU wants to spearhead.

Lads, Give Us Five Minutes

“Bridge building will be the immediate challenge for Hogan,” says Peter Ungphakorn, a former senior WTO official. “If WTO members feel the US is undermining multilateralism, some kind of alliance could be forged between the EU and China to break this. That is definitely a possibility.”

That will require the ability not just to reconcile the interests of the US and China power giants, but to understand the nuances of diplomacy.

Hogan, who enjoys life in Brussels and can often be seen in one or two of the city’s fabled Irish pubs to watch rugby or Gaelic football, has, say his aides, the skills needed, including for one-on-one encounters.

“I’ve seen him in various places where there are two delegations,” says one aide, “and he’ll say, ‘You might give us five minutes, lads,’ and we’d leave. You’d be amazed at what can happen between two politicians in five minutes.”

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Christine Lagarde is not making any public statements at the moment. She doesn’t want to risk any controversies in the run up to the EU summit in October, at which she is to be finally appointed president of the European Central Bank. Every word would be scrutinized and also interfere with the work of the current ECB president, Mario Draghi, who remains in office until the end of October.

Lagarde had been expected to attend the largest French economics conference in Aix-en-Provence shortly after the European heads of state and government agreed on nominating her at the beginning of July. She cancelled her conference appearance, though she still went to Aix-en-Provence but only to attend the opera, which she loves. Her younger brother Olivier, who is a well-known baritone, often accompanies her on such visits.

The 63-year-old Frenchwoman did, however, send a message to the disappointed conference organizers—it’s the only statement she has made since her appointment. Referring to the conference topic of “regaining trust,” she wrote: “With trust, the child takes its first steps, the lovers exchange rings, the entrepreneur invests, the banker gives credit, the citizen gets involved. I am convinced that your conference theme is the first condition for the world to meet the challenges it faces.”

At the ECB, too, her first task will be to build trust—in her own leadership and in the ability of the central bank to set the right framework conditions for the economy and thus prepare the European Monetary Union for the future.

Expectations are especially high in Germany, where there is the most hostility to the ECB’ low interest rate policy. The opening of the monetary policy floodgates was met with harsh criticism here because it harms savers, burdens banks, and thus triggers the feeling that Germans are paying for others. Can the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) smooth the troubled relationship and successfully guide the ECB through the next eight years, years that may become turbulent?

A Well-Liked Dove

Lagarde is certainly well liked among the main players of the financial markets. Experts like to divide central bankers into “doves,” advocates of a loose monetary policy, and “hawks,” advocates of a restrictive monetary strategy. While Jens Weidmann, for example, the president of the Bundesbank and defeated candidate for the ECB job, is seen as a hawk, Lagarde is regarded as a dove. “She’s probably even more of a dove than Draghi,” bond manager Ben Lord of the British finance company M&G Investments told the Financial Times. While that may not be the consensus view on the financial markets, many do see Lagarde as at least being in line with Draghi.

Lagarde expressly welcomed the ECB president’s announcement in July 2012 that he would defend the euro with “whatever it takes,” thus creating a protective wall around the common currency. As a result of this guarantee, the ECB massively bought up government bonds issued by European governments. Lagarde was even “an early supporter” of this “quantitative easing,” says Andrew Benito of Goldman Sachs.

The ECB hopes that this will bring the stubbornly low inflation rate in Europe closer to the prescribed target of “close to two percent.” The glut of money is therefore likely to continue under Lagarde for some time. She recently warned that the global economy was entering rough waters and recommended that the central banks maintain their loose monetary policy. On the day of her nomination in early July, European government and corporate bond prices jumped. Investors continue to expect high prices for the bonds which implies low interest rates.

A Keynesian Worldview

Lagarde’s time at the helm of the IMF would seem to indicate that she is not an “ultra-liberal,” the derogatory term used in her native France to describe economic liberals. Traditionally, the fund has dealt with topics such as currency issues, imbalances in international trade, and major macroeconomic indicators such as public debt and growth. Lagarde expanded the spectrum to include social inequality, gender discrimination, climate change, energy policy, anti-corruption, and financial stability.

As a result the IMF no longer has shed some of its image as a hard-hearted neo-liberal institution. There has always been a range of thinking among the well over 1,000 IMF economists, but under Lagarde the focus changed: countries with fiscal leeway were advised more strongly than before to increase public investment. Savings programs should not be too harsh, capital market controls, which had previously been taboo, became socially acceptable, while privatization was no longer regarded as a panacea. Under Lagarde, the Keynesian worldview has to some extent become the norm at the IMF.

While the anti-Keynesians at the fund may blame her for this change, overall there is no doubt about her popularity with the staff there. Lagarde is considered capable of compromise and a team player. She includes rather than excludes. “Building consensus is one of her outstanding skills. She listens to the opinions of everyone involved, even a young economist who joined the IMF just six months ago,” Bruno Silvestre, who worked for many years as her spokesman in Paris and Washington, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Team Player with Charisma

She gained respect because she increased the fund’s financial resources and thus its firepower. This also reflects her negotiating skills with the 189 governments represented in the IMF. Her charm has also been good for the IMF. Lagarde, who loves jewelry and is always elegantly dressed, has a winning charisma that is effective. The fact that she is also known to be “as tough as nails” doesn’t have to be a contradiction.

The network that she has built up over the years plays a central role here. During the financial crisis, she often exchanged ideas with Henry (“Hank”) Paulson, the then US treasury secretary, whom she knew from their Goldman Sachs days. She was and is personally known to numerous important CEOs because she advised them as a star lawyer. Since her time as French finance minister, she has also got on very well with her former German counterpart Wolfgang Schäuble.

This helped her when in 2010, against German resistance, she called for Greece to be helped out of its existential economic crisis. Later, she advocated a restructuring of Greece’s debt with easier conditions for the government in Athens. The relationship with Schäuble was not damaged. The same applies to her rapport with Angela Merkel. There’s a mutual respect there marked by the fact both have succeeded in what is still a male-dominated world.

The Spiral of Cheap Money

But does the ECB need someone quite so political at its helm at a time when the independence of central banks around the world is threatened? In the United States, President Donald Trump is putting pressure on the Federal Reserve, in Europe the ECB has fallen into a spiral of cheap money, which spares countries with lax financial management like Italy the necessary reforms. So far, the ECB has not been able to escape this spiral, because abandoning this policy could endanger the entire monetary union. The ECB has thus made itself vulnerable to blackmail.

Can Lagarde stand up to governments in this context? Some doubt it. Yet as IMF chief she proved her independence from the German government when she and the IMF withdrew from the third rescue package for Greece in 2017 against Berlin’s wishes. Behind the scenes, she fought fierce battles with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras over austerity programs and credit conditions. Recently, she also warned of the debt mountains piling up around the world.

Then again, she still has to prove her independence from the French government. Yet she is less embedded in the French establishment than it might first appear. Even as a young woman, Lagarde was more attracted to America. She failed the entrance test to get into the classical elite school, the ENA. Instead, she made her career with the American law firm Baker McKenzie, one of the largest in the world, where she stayed for 25 years.

She later joined the French government, appointed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy as finance minister. However, she has never been a politician who sought a popular mandate from the electorate, being more attracted to the wider world.

An episode as French finance minister also left a bitter aftertaste: an affair involving French entrepreneur Bernard Tapie. On her watch, the French state paid more than €400 million as compensation to Tapie in connection with the opaque sale of Adidas in the 1990s. It’s still not clear exactly who gave the instructions for the payment of such a huge sum; a French court found her guilty of “neglecting” her official duties, but imposed no punishment.

The Eternal First

Throughout her life she’s been something of a pioneer—in terms of her gender, her nationality, and her education. She was the first woman and the first non-American to head Baker McKenzie, as well as the first woman to serve as French finance minister, head of the IMF, and now president of the ECB. All of that demands a lot of assertiveness.

As the eldest of four siblings, she grew up with her three brothers in a middle-class family in the port city of Le Havre. Her father was a professor of English, her mother a teacher. Politics was always present in her family; her parents knew leading politicians like Pierre Mendès France or the later President of the EU Commission, Jacques Delors, who were visitors to the family home.

When she was 12 years old, she took up synchronized swimming. Three years later she was on the national team and a silver medal winner in her age category. She has displayed both discipline and the ability to integrate ever since. But when she was 16, her father suddenly died. The family had less money and Lagarde had to go to work as well as attend school.

When she was 18, she spent a year in the US on a scholarship, attending a high school in Maryland, and she also interned on Capitol Hill as a parliamentary assistant to William S. Cohen, later secretary of defense in the Bill Clinton administration.

Christine Lagarde, the eternal first. She will also be the first ECB president not to have a degree in economics. Her economic background had already been an issue when she was at the IMF. “I can understand what  people talk about,” she told The Guardian in 2012, “I have enough common sense for that, and I’ve studied a bit of economics, but I am not a super-duper economist.” At the ECB, of course, this could become a problem, because the job is more technically challenging than at the IMF.

Fishing in a Larger Pond

In times of crisis, central bankers often have to react quickly. They  need not only the right instinct, but also the technical knowledge. At the same time, Lagarde is not a novice. Anyone who headed the IMF for eight years and was French finance minister for four years has enough knowledge of the economic context. Nevertheless, many observers believe that Lagarde must draw on the ECB’s expertise more than her predecessors. The top expert there will be Philip Lane, the bank’s chief economist, who comes from Ireland.

Decision-making at the ECB should in any case have a broader basis. Draghi took decisions with a small group of his closest confidants or even alone. Lagarde is likely to fish in a larger pond and at the same time change the ECB’s external image. Her proven communication skills, which Draghi lacks, are one of her greatest assets.

After spending the last eight years in Washington, the first lady of the financial world is returning to Europe. When it comes to her private life, the move to Frankfurt will be far more convenient: She can now see her partner, a French entrepreneur from Marseille, and her two adult sons living in France without needing to take a transatlantic flight.  

The post Close-Up: Christine Lagarde appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Just hours after the result of the United Kingdom’s June 2016 Brexit referendum had been confirmed, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, declared that the differential result—in which Scotland voted Remain but the UK as a whole opted for Leave—meant all options were once again, as she put it, “on the table.” That included, predictably, independence for Scotland.

It has been the defining issue of Sturgeon’s life. Her politics and her being are inextricable. She joined the Scottish National Party when she was just 16 years old and first stood as a candidate for election when she was 22. She was elected to the first Scottish parliament upon its establishment in 1999 and has served in government ever since the SNP came to power in 2007. She is not yet 50—she turns 49 in July—but has been a fixture in Scottish public life for so long, she seems improbably young.

When she joined the party, activists were in the habit of celebrating opinion polls suggesting one in ten Scottish voters backed the SNP. The party, which exists to promote the cause of independence, celebrated occasional by-election victories but seemed an impossible distance from real power. Few careerists joined the SNP in the 1980s.

Thirty years later, the SNP is the dominant political power in Scotland. It has run Scotland’s devolved government for the last twelve years, and Sturgeon, having previously served as health minister and deputy to Alex Salmond, the party’s former leader, will in November celebrate the fifth anniversary of her becoming first minister. Since supplanting the Labour Party which had dominated Scottish politics for the previous half century, the SNP has become Scotland’s natural party of government: a social democratic party that recognizes few, if any, boundaries of class or geography.

“Normal” Nicola

Sturgeon herself is a figure with whom many Scots can identify. She is as “normal” as any leading politician is likely to be. A product of the aspirational working class, she was born in Ayrshire in 1970. Her parents were the first in her family to own their own house and she and her sister the first to attend university. Sturgeon read law at Glasgow University.

“I was quite an introverted child,” she told one interviewer, recalling that, “At my fifth birthday, I hid under the table reading a book while all the other kids played.” But she was always driven, always aware that she had “something” inside her that would commit her to a life in politics and a career of public service.

“[Margaret] Thatcher was the motivation for my entire political career,” she has said. “I hated everything she stood for. This was the genesis of my nationalism. I hated the fact she was able to do what she was doing and yet nobody I knew in my entire life had voted for her.” At a time when most politically-aware Scots her age joined Labour, Sturgeon opted for the SNP, determining that only independence could satisfy Scotland’s political and social aspirations.

A Return to the Family of Nation

At her selection as an SNP candidate in 1991, she was introduced as the lady who “will be the first female leader of the SNP one day,” a prediction which embarrassed Sturgeon at the time but proved unusually accurate. In the aftermath of the 1992 general election, Sturgeon reminded her compatriots of her party’s mission: “We will turn Scotland from the invisible nation of Europe into a nation which plays a full part in Europe and contributes to the great international issues.”

Some things in politics are constant, and this is one of them. Returning Scotland to the international “family of nations” remains Sturgeon’s ambition and the purpose of her political life. Brexit has convulsed British politics these last three years but, viewed from Scotland, it is part of a much larger question: should Scotland be an independent country or not?

When that question was asked in 2014, the answer was a clear, but hardly resounding “No”—with 55 percent of Scots opting to remain a part of the United Kingdom while 45 percent voted to leave. The issue remained unsettled, and there was, regardless of individual preference, an awareness of this being an argument only half-completed. The national question had been asked but not settled or answered in a decisive matter.

Even so, there seemed little plausible prospect of it being asked again any time soon. Sturgeon herself had argued the 2014 referendum was a “once in a generation” opportunity to strike out in a new direction. Outside events, determined elsewhere, would be required to revive the independence question.

Lifeboats for Scotland

Enter Brexit. Even if Sturgeon had wished to avoid reopening the national issue, there would have been no way of avoiding it. Even so, Sturgeon finds herself caught in a particular paradox: Brexit is a disaster for the UK, but an opportunity for Scotland. Leaving the EU—especially, as seems increasingly plausible, without an agreement that would pave the way for an orderly transition period—risks all but incalculable damage to the UK, and the Scottish, economy. It is, Sturgeon believes, an act of self-harm, promoted by “charlatans” whose chutzpah is as great as their lack of credibility.

But it is also an opportunity. Britain might be sinking, but there are still lifeboats available to Scotland. The fact that Scotland’s preference to Remain in the EU is trumped by the weight of numbers for Leaving elsewhere in the UK creates a powerful political narrative for Sturgeon: the only way to secure Scotland’s future is to put that future in Scotland’s hands. Time and again, she has despaired that Scotland faces “being dragged out” of the EU against its will, and this constitutes the “material change in circumstances” she believes justifies revisiting the independence question that was answered, but not settled, five years ago.

A new referendum, however, requires the agreement of the UK government in London, and hitherto that agreement has not been forthcoming. Sturgeon, as a consequence, is reduced to being a spectator as Britain’s great Brexit tragicomedy is played out. Suggestions for a “compromise” approach made by her government—which would, in essence, have seen the UK remain a member of the single market—were ignored in London. That in turn has prompted Sturgeon to harden her position: she now favors a second Brexit referendum that must include the option of remaining in, or rejoining, the EU.

The Paradox of Independence

Stubbornly, however, the opinion polls have barely shifted since 2014. Brexit may make the political argument for independence more intuitively plausible and even appealing, but it also complicates the practical meaning of independence. What currency would an independent Scotland use? (Sturgeon favors using sterling before moving to a distinct Scottish currency; the euro is not considered a viable option). How would the Anglo-Scottish frontier be managed? (A question which makes the arrangements reached between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic a matter of singular, exemplary, concern for Scotland). Would Scotland enjoy an easy admission process to the EU, and if so, on what terms? (Probably, but not all the terms would be easily met.)

There is this, too: if, as Sturgeon insists, it is a ruinous mistake for the UK to leave a political union with its largest trading partner, how could it not be—as an economic matter—a self-inflicted error for Scotland to do likewise, given that 60 percent of all Scottish exports go to the rest of the UK (and just 18 percent to the rest of the EU). Moreover, if Brexit is difficult and complicated, how much more difficult and complex might negotiating the break-up of Britain be?

Those are hard—and live—concerns. The shape of independence cannot be ascertained until there is some clarity on the shape, and meaning, of Britain’s EU exit. It may simplify Sturgeon’s message but it unavoidably complicates the practicalities of independence. Which is one reason why Sturgeon sincerely wishes it had never happened. It also means that her demands for a second referendum now have been rebuffed by the UK government. No fresh plebiscite is likely until after the next Scottish parliament elections in 2021.

Trials and Tribulations

Another cloud looms, too. Later this year, Alex Salmond, Sturgeon’s predecessor as party leader and first minister, will appear in an Edinburgh court room to face more than a dozen charges of sexual assault, including two of attempted rape. It is difficult to estimate in advance the likely fallout but equally impossible to avoid the fact the trial will have major ramifications for Sturgeon, the SNP and, indeed, Scotland itself. Salmond was for years Sturgeon’s mentor; the figure to whom, more than any other, she owes her career. Unavoidably, his trial has the potential to more seriously threaten her political future than anything her opponents have hitherto been able to muster against her.

Such is the state of British politics at present, however—simultaneously in flux and stuck in the Brexit doldrums—that anything and everything seems possible. Brexit may yet be the end of the United Kingdom: the catalyst for a break-up that would once have seemed unthinkable and yet to many Scots now seems the most natural thing in the world.

Nicola Sturgeon has been waiting her whole life for that moment; if she needs to wait a little longer, past experience suggests she can.

The post Close-Up: Nicola Sturgeon appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán does not like to talk to the independent press, preferring more managed media appearances. However, in November 2018, followers of his Facebook page were made privy to a video he made with the action star Chuck Norris. “I’m a streetfighter basically,” said Orbán, as he drove by Budapest’s Heroes’ Square, the setting for his epochal “Russians go home” speech in 1989. “I’m not coming from the elite, I’m coming from a small village.”

Orbán’s PR was canny as ever. Norris is a cult figure in Hungary and the memory of Heroes’ Square is a gift that keeps on giving, even three decades on. But he was also showing a self-awareness that is not always apparent to Hungary observers. “Orbán loves to fight,” his biographer Paul Lendvai told the Berlin Policy Journal. His Fidesz party and Orbán project themselves as the only real genuine fighters for the national interest, for Christian values, against the barbarian invasion,” Lendvai added.

The Viktor Orbán story is one of ambition and opportunism. It began with opportunism, too. It began in 1989 with a speech that Orbán made to some 250,000 people at the symbolic reburial of Imre Nagy, the martyr of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Orbán decried the Soviet Union and called for the withdrawal from Hungary of Soviet troops. It was an opportunistic move—the speakers that day had allegedly agreed to demur on the topic of Russia’s departure—but with it, he entered the history books. As one of his biographers Jozsef Debreczeni described it, “it was the meeting of an extraordinary luck with an extraordinary talent.”

Orbán has been a legacy politician from the start, even though a video from around that time shows him denying any interest in a political career, saying he would rather be a professor. Yet one of his university teachers has recalled having to break the news to a young, crestfallen Orbán that he would never fulfil his ambition to become US president, because he was not born in the country. His years in liberal circles left Orbán with a bitterness from being mocked by Budapest’s intellectuals. But if he was outclassed on an academic level, his political instincts have helped him prevail.

“He Has Become Illiberal”

Given his current dominance of Hungary’s political landscape, it is easy to forget that Orbán failed to gain an outright majority in Hungary during the first 20 years. However, since 2010 he has won three supermajorities that have allowed him to rewrite and amend the constitution at will. After three decades in politics—Orbán, now 55, has been at Hungary’s top table since he was 26—voters want him because of his personality.  That’s how the one genuine pretender to his crown, János Lázár, a leading member of Fidesz, has described Orbán’s enduring success.

According to political scientist and researcher Zoltán Gábor Szűcs, “Orbán is smart, self-reflective (but not a philosopher), aggressive, manipulative. I’m not sure if he knows that people are not just his means and instruments,” he added. Orbán always wants to win and he’s simply unable to play by the book. Through all the ideological about-turns—since 1989 Orbán has changed his stance on liberalism, the clergy, Russia, and Europe—it is relentless ambition that has been the common thread that runs through his career. What motivates him is “winning, crushing his rivals,” said Szűcs. “He is always pushing the boundaries. Usually it works for him. During his first term (from 1998-2002) he was much less relevant than now. It was a different time, a different Europe, and Hungary was not in the EU,” Szűcs added.

Orbán’s early academic ambitions are still manifest in his willingness to meet star intellectuals. The latest academic to receive an audience with Orbán was French liberal philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who said after a coffee with him this month that he had “deciphered Orbán’s secret.” Lévy recalled that he met Orbán 30 years ago as a member of President François Mitterrand’s delegation.  “Orbán was completely different. A liberal, anti-totalitarian person,” Lévy said. “He has become indeed illiberal.”

Razor-Wire For the Borders

Since 2015, Orbán has made immigration a signature issue. He has called migrants “a poison,” and has said that “Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work, or the population to sustain itself, or for the country to have a future.” However according to Szűcs, the rise of Orbán on a European level was as much down to the lack of reactions of his political opponents, as the speed with which Orbán himself acted.

“He was incredibly cynical and also extremely lucky that neither his opposition nor the EU were able to take advantage of his shocking mismanagement of the migration crisis. It was a total failure, a complete meltdown of the Hungarian administration,” Szűcs said.

“For months they were paralyzed. But still the opposition missed this unique opportunity just like the EU did. Ever since then the migration issue pays off for him way more than he could have reasonably expected when he started this whole gamble.”

So, while Orbán built razor-wire fences along Hungary’s southern borders with Serbia and Croatia, an inactive EU allowed him to set the agenda, which Orbán will seek to profit from in the European Parliament elections at the end of May.

In a Favorable Position

Orbán’s turn to the right has seen Fidesz suspended from the major center-right group in the European Parliament, the European People’s Party. It remains to be seen whether the party will make amends with its EPP allies or seek other alliances after the European elections in May.

Europe is increasingly important to him. “He is not endangered on the home front. He plays it by ear; that is, if the radical right from Matteo Salvini to Marine Le Pen and Austria’s FPÖ is strengthened, he is in a very favorable position,” said biographer Lendvai. Fidesz will then likely forge an alliance with those who think similarly to the Hungarian governing party, and fight for a ‘Europe of nations,’” he added.

“I guess his most optimistic scenario is that the status quo will end for good and he can profit from the subsequent chaos,” Szűcs said. “Maybe he can strengthen his position in the EPP, maybe he can find new friends. Perhaps his worst-case scenario is that the EPP won’t need him anymore. Anyway, as long as his position in Hungary is stable, he has plenty of time to wait for the next opportunity.”

The post Close-Up: Viktor Orbán appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Robert Habeck would hate this article. Or at least he would say he does. The high-flying head of the German Green party, aware that nothing kills a politician’s career quicker than hype, often appears to be deflecting his popularity. But in these past few months, no other political figure has caught the attention of Germany’s media more effectively than the smooth and casual 49-year-old intellectual from the Danish borderlands.

Habeck’s slightly grumpy charisma is infectious. The weekly carousel of German political talkshows (Anne Will, Maybrit Illner, Maischberger and hart aber fair) can’t get enough of his unshaven, tousle-haired charm: a count by the newspaper network RND found that in 2018, Habeck made the most appearances on the four TV staples of any German politician: 13 in all.

As if all that publicity weren’t enough, just last month he was anointed “politician of the year,” along with Green party co-leader Annalena Baerbock, by Politik & Kommunikation, a media trade magazine that felt the need to celebrate the pair after the Green party’s spectacular autumn. In October’s state elections in Bavaria and Hesse, the left-liberal environmentalists carved large slices out of the two major political parties, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the tailspinning Social Democratic Party (SPD), and made themselves the second-biggest force in both state parliaments.

Don’t Call Us a Volkspartei

Politik & Kommunikation’s laudatory editors said that, under Habeck and Baerbock, the Greens were “on the way to becoming a Volkspartei.” But that word, meant to invoke an exalted status, might have set Habeck’s teeth on edge. Literally “people’s party,” a Volkspartei is what Germans like to call the CDU and the SPD, the pragmatic centrists that encompass swathes of sensible citizens from many social strata. For decades, the two parties could put as much as 80 percent of the electorate under their umbrellas, steering Germany across a serene ocean of Realpolitik.

But things have changed. The political landscape is flattening out as people disperse to different camps. Established broad churches aren’t providing the succour they once did, and apart from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), no one appears to have benefited from this fragmentation more than the Greens. This is not to say that German voters have become deranged idealists chasing populist visions, but it does mean that Merkel’s political bloc no longer has a monopoly on conservatism. That became most clear in the aftermath of the Bavarian election, when surveys found that, as well as the 200,000 votes the Greens had stolen from the Social Democrats, the Greens had poached some 170,000 from the Christian Social Union (CSU).

This is significant: tens of thousands of people who had previously identified with an overwhelmingly Catholic conservative party with a hardline anti-immigration stance shifted to a former protest party with an ecological, migration-friendly agenda. The CSU’s election campaign, much like its governing policy in Bavaria for the past three years, was a desperate attempt to head off the threat from the AfD by relentlessly attacking Merkel for letting in too many refugees. That allowed the Greens to appear reasonable, to insist on the rule of law, and allowed the conservative Bavarian voter to find a serious alternative without having to associate with the stuffy leftism of the Social Democrats and (God forbid) Die Linke.

This isn’t all Habeck’s doing, obviously, but he is alert enough to believe that this is why, even though the Greens have now overtaken the SPD in the polls, a Volkspartei is exactly what he doesn’t want them to become—or be seen as becoming. In a society divided and (very slowly) bringing its diversity into its politics, the idea that a substantial part of the population will identify with any major political party is emphatically dead. The basic math supports the point: the Christian Democrats are only just clearing the 30-percent mark, and the Social Democrats can barely muster 15 percent of voters (as late-January polls show)—in other words, the political center can no longer count on the majority of the population.

When explaining this, Habeck occasionally coughs up a soundbite that flirts with meaninglessness, (“We don’t need the lowest common denominator, we need higher common goals,” he told one public broadcaster), but it speaks of optimism and strategic acumen that he sees this growing instability as an opportunity. “Volatility also means there’s a fair chance of winning majorities,” he told Der Spiegel magazine in December. “The loss of old certainties is at the same time the winning of new possibilities.”

Only Squares Join a Party

Habeck also appears to be alive to another aspect of this fragmentation. The whole idea of a political party, with its formalities, hierarchies, and laboriously set-out agendas is starting to weary voters, and German politicians are beginning to do what might be called the Emmanuel Macron En Marche thing: play the anti-elitist outsider and start a political movement from scratch. The most obvious parallel in Germany is the socialist Aufstehen organization, started by Sahra Wagenknecht, who has somehow managed to remain Die Linke’s party leader.

Habeck has ruled out going that far, but his interactions with the Green party suggest that he is carefully nurturing an aura of independence. He’s quite open about technological advances in agriculture, for instance, even if that defies traditional party wisdom.

This much is reflected in his precipitous rise: the son of pharmacists, Habeck grew up in Heikendorf, outside the port city of Kiel. Apart from marrying and raising children, he spent the 1990s producing literary translations, partly in Denmark, and writing a doctorate on literary aesthetics. But by the time he reached his 30s, he switched track. In 2002, he joined the Green party, and by 2004 he was its leader in his home state of Schleswig-Holstein. Even as he ascended the ranks—by 2012 he was the state’s minister for agriculture and environment—he continued as an author, publishing novels together with his wife Andrea Paluch and non-fiction that largely reflected his undergraduate passion for philosophy.

His most recent book, Wer wir sein könnten (“Who we could be”) from October 2018, examines the relations between democratic and totalitarian language, but his 2010 work Patriotismus: Ein linkes Plädoyer (“Patriotism—a left-wing appeal”) might be a better clue to understanding Habeck. It reads as an earnest and pragmatic attempt to reconcile the looming political splits that occurred in the second half of this decade. Still, a vestige of this approach is noticeable in the tour of Germany Habeck undertook last summer, during which, between political engagements, he visited spots that marked milestones in Germany’s path to democracy, such as the Hambacher Schloss, opening debates on how to “own” a left-liberal patriotic mythology.

A Serious Faux-Pas

Such noises have inevitably stirred unrest among the Green party’s ranks, though Habeck and Baerbock’s successes mean they have walked that awkward tightrope well: keeping the core voters on their side while reaching out beyond. For one reason or another, the Greens appear to be the only German party that is not either desperately searching for a new direction or in open conflict with itself. In fact, Habeck’s air of independence, and his close cooperation with Baerbock, have managed to quell the endless conflict between the party’s conservative “realos” and its left-wing “idealos”. For what it’s worth, Habeck is definitely a “realo”: he brought the Green party into coalition with the CDU and the neo-liberal Free Democrats in Schleswig-Holstein, but he’s still in favor of a basic income, or at least ending sanctions on Hartz IV unemployment benefits.

But the bigger test to that inner harmony will come this autumn, when three elections in Germany’s least Green-friendly regions loom: Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. The omens so far are not good: Thuringia was the scene of Habeck’s biggest mistake to date in early January, which resulted in his rather drastic renunciation of social media. In a video tweeted by the state’s Green party, Habeck told voters that his party “would do everything to make sure Thuringia becomes an open, free, liberal, and democratic state.”

It was an impromptu video message delivered in a noisy conference room, but that “becomes” was a significant faux pas: a grave insult to Thuringians, made worse by the fact that the Greens already are in the state’s government. Habeck’s statement also played to the prejudice that many Germans have about the Greens: that they are urban smart-asses who want to tell you what to do. For a second, Habeck’s composure, and his ability to speak to non-Green party voters, had slipped. It might yet prove a fateful signal.

The post Close-Up: Robert Habeck appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

The mayoral election in Warsaw on October 21, 2018, was really between two candidates: Rafał Trzaskowski and PiS’s candidate Patryk Jaki, a bold 33-year-old deputy minister of justice. Despite Jaki’s energetic campaign, Trzaskowski won with over 56 percent of the vote, compared to Jaki’s 28 percent. That Warsaw chose the more liberal candidate is itself not surprising. Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the city’s mayor since 2006 who decided not to run for a fourth term, was also a member of the liberal Civic Platform (PO) party. Yet the scope of Trzaskowski’s victory was unexpected; earlier, polls had suggested that he would need a second round two weeks later to beat Jaki.

His victory was greeted as a sign that PiS has reached a limit, at least in urban areas. PiS came first in the country’s sixteen regional assemblies, ahead of the PO-led centrist coalition. Yet it did poorly in the major cities, including Warsaw.

“A certain type was stopped,” Trzaskowski told Berlin Policy Journal in an interview, speaking English (one of his many languages) with an American accent. “People thought that PiS is indestructible, so this gave people a sense of empowerment, a sense that their vote counts. There was an incredible mobilization.”

Indeed, the voter turnout in Warsaw was almost 67 percent, compared to 47 percent in the previous local elections in 2014, and 54.8 percent of voters in Poland overall. That means that 250,000 more people voted this time. This record turnout reflects the sharp polarization between PiS and PO and the high stakes in Warsaw, both practical and symbolic. After the president, the post is the most high-profile directly elected post in Poland. Indeed, Lech Kaczyński—the late twin brother of PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński—served as mayor of Warsaw from 2002 until 2005 before being elected president of Poland.

A Warsaw native, Trzaskowski grew up in an intellectual household in the city’s Old Town. His father, Andrzej Trzaskowski, was a jazz composer, and his great-grandfather Bronisław a 19th century linguist. The young Trzaskowski studied English and International Relations at Warsaw University. After a Masters at the College of Europe’s branch in Natolin, Warsaw, he worked as a lecturer and wrote his PhD on the European Union. In the run-up to Poland’s EU accession in 2004, he was an adviser to the secretary of the European Integration Committee’s Office and then to PO’s delegation to the European Parliament.

High Achiever

His political debut came in 2009, when he was elected as an MEP. He stepped down in 2013 to become a minister in Tusk’s government, responsible for administration and digitization. When Tusk left for Brussels in 2014, Trzaskowski became deputy foreign minister for European affairs. But one year later, PiS won the parliamentary elections, forcing Trzaskowski and PO into opposition. While PiS busied itself overhauling the Polish public media and judiciary, Trzaskowski found that he could now do relatively little as an MP.

“My decision to run for mayor of Warsaw was simple. I was in parliament for three years. It was incredibly frustrating, with the government just disregarding the opposition,” he says. “I am in politics because I want to change the reality. I’m not there just to wander around the corridors or be on TV. So, I decided that if you want to change reality, you’ve got to be where the fight is.”

As mayor, Trzaskowski plans to focus on twelve areas, from free nurseries for all children in the Polish capital to fighting smog via better public transport and more greenery. “My program is about quality of life in Warsaw, focusing on the disabled, senior citizens, education, and sustainable growth. There is so much to be achieved,” he says.

For Trzaskowski, this represents a shift away from Gronkiewicz-Waltz’s emphasis on large infrastructure projects, toward smaller tweaks that make the city more liveable and inclusive. In 2019, Warsaw will have a budget of over 18 billion złoty (€4.2 billion), including a record 4.4 billion for education―though Trzaskowski is hoping for EU funds to help expand the city’s metro network. He also plans to appoint a representative for women’s affairs and to work with the local LGBT community.

“Islands of Freedom”

“With PiS governing Poland, there are these islands of freedom that you can develop against the prevailing trend,” he adds, referring to how urban voters have pushed back against PiS’s social conservatism and disregard for judicial independence.

As an expert on EU politics in both theory and practice, Trzaskowski is critical of how the Polish government has handled its dispute with the European Commission over its reform of the Supreme Court, which officials in Brussels warn undermines the rule of law.

“The problem with them is that they are so unprofessional. They are losing battle after battle because there is no sense of ownership. The prime minister is not the one making the final decision, it’s Kaczyński,” he explains, referring to PiS’s chairman, who is considered Poland’s real leader. “If you want to be effective in the EU, sometimes you have to build coalitions, propose things, cooperate with others. They still think in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.”

Although PiS figures, including Kaczyński, say they oppose a “Polexit,” Trzaskowski warns that the government’s behavior will marginalize Poland in the EU. “They do not understand that unless you build a community together, sooner or later you will be out of it, either formally or in reality,” he explains.

Cheer to the Opposition

As Poland gears up for parliamentary elections in late 2019, Trzaskowski’s victory has cheered up the opposition, though PiS continues to lead in country-wide polls. At a PO gathering with journalists at a restaurant in Warsaw in late November, the mood was optimistic. In 2015, winning the presidential election helped PiS win the parliamentary elections that autumn. Similarly, if PO does well in the European elections in May 2019, it could pick up the momentum needed to win the parliamentary elections that autumn, senior party figures suggested. After that, they hope that Tusk will run for president in 2020 and defeat the PiS-allied incumbent, Andrzej Duda. Tusk’s term as president of the European Council ends in late 2019, but he has so far not said whether he plans to return to Polish politics.

Ahead of its next confrontations with PiS, what has PO learned from the Warsaw mayoral elections? “Above all, that it’s very important to work a lot and mobilize,” Trzaskowski replies, referring to the high turnout in Warsaw and more generally. “You must focus on what you really want to achieve and not be distracted by the media or the Twitter bubble.”

Long branded an expert in politics rather than a politician, has Trzaskowski emerged from the Warsaw mayoral race now as the real thing? “I became a politician a long, long time ago, when I found that it is impossible to be an expert in politics,” he shrugs. “Even as an MEP, I found out that you cannot be half-pregnant. If you are a politician, you have to fully be a politician.”

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

When Matteo Salvini headed to the beach this summer for his first swim of the season, he posed for a selfie that deliberately exposed his flabby belly. He wanted to remind his political supporters that he was one of them.

It wasn’t the first time. Italy’s brash interior minister, who thrives on upending political perceptions with his devil-may-care attitude, once made the cover of a weekly magazine wearing only a tie—even though he rarely wears one with a jacket.

Salvini may not be prime minister just yet, but most Italians agree it is only a question of time. There is no doubt he is the dominant force in Italian politics. Since his rejuvenated Lega party formed a coalition government with the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) in June, his popularity has surged and his right-wing party is now the most popular in the country.  He has even flirted with running for the presidency of the European Commission.

With his anti-immigrant stance and open hostility toward the European Union, Salvini is determined to reshape the political landscape in Italy and Europe, and according to the latest polls, one-third of the country is right behind him.

“Italians come from several decades where they completely mistrusted politicians,” says Lorenzo Marsili, director of European Alternatives, a citizen’s movement based in Berlin. “They think he is less likely to cheat them because he looks like them and speaks like them.”

An Unlikely Rise

Salvini does not fit the traditional mold of an Italian politician. Born in Milan in 1973, he studied political science and history at the University of Milan but dropped out before his final exams. He was involved in left-wing politics before joining the right-wing party then known as Lega Nord (“Northern League”) in 1990. He ran its radio station, Radio Padania, for several years.

In this traditional Catholic country, he married, but then got divorced. He has a son, Federico, from his marriage, as well as a daughter, Mirta, from a subsequent relationship that ended in 2012. He is currently engaged to a popular TV host.

Driven by acute political instincts and ruthless ambition, Salvini easily secured the leadership of the Lega in 2013. He drew on his experience as a local Milan city councilor and member of the European Parliament to reposition the party and give it a nation-wide identity.But it was his ability to tap into the concerns of average Italians and his clever exploitation of social media that secured his popularity.

Drawing inspiration from the success of US President Donald Trump, Salvini has adopted the slogan “Italians First.” In his campaign for the March election, he promised to deport 500,000 illegal immigrants, take a tougher stance on crime, introduce a flat tax, abolish the EU fiscal compact, and even legalize brothels.

The Lega’s share of the vote surged from a dismal four percent to nearly 18 percent, easily surpassing the party of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. It became the dominant right-wing player—but not quite dominant enough to seize power on its own. Salvini was forced to seek a marriage of convenience with the populist Five Star Movement.

Immigration was at the top of Salvini’s agenda. No sooner was he appointed interior minister than he made global headlines by refusing to allow a private vessel carrying 629 refugees and migrants rescued off the coast of Libya to dock in Italy. “Go wherever you want, but not to Italy,” Salvini tweeted after he closed the ports to migrants.

A majority of Italians endorsed Salvini’s hard line, and the ship ended up docking in Spain. “The closing of the ports in order to trigger EU solidarity drew a surprisingly positive response despite the extremism of kidnapping people on a boat,” said Marsili, author of Citizens of Nowhere. “People like this strongarm attitude because they don’t believe that democracy is changing Europe, and unfortunately they are right.”

Media Machine

Working with France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and others from the right, Salvini is aiming to overthrow the European Union’s liberal establishment, reinforce the borders, and restore power to nation states―an agenda many see as a threat to European unity.

Miraculously, he avoided major fallout after the Lega’s founder and former leader, Umberto Bossi, was convicted for illegally using public funds for family expenses. In September, a Genoa court ruled prosecutors could begin to sequester up to €48.9 million in funds from accounts and businesses belonging to the party until the money Bossi had swindled could be recouped. Salvini has lashed back, calling it a “political trial.”

Everything Salvini does is backed by a communications machine that has revolutionized Italy’s political landscape. He has 3.2 million followers on Facebook and 900,000 on Twitter. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told Reuters news agency that US politicians could learn a lot from Salvini’s methods. “The use of social media and Facebook Live … were state of the art,” said Bannon, who has met Salvini more than once. He also invited him to join the “Movement”, an organization Bannon set up in Brussels to promote economic nationalism and right-wing populism in Europe. “I was blown away by how sophisticated he was, and how he managed to do it on a shoestring.”

Salvini’s ten-member social media team, dubbed the “Beast,” pumps out messages across YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, with tweets including xenophobic rants, promotion of his achievements, or upcoming radio and TV appearances—even photos of his favorite pesto sauce or pizza. Thus Salvini’s rate of social media engagement surpasses Trump. Now the Lega is polling as high as 34 percent and has overtaken its M5S coalition partner.

Trouble Ahead?

Well before this year’s election, Salvini had questioned the value of the euro and adopted a position that was very critical of the EU. Since then, he has stepped up his attacks. Most recently, the conflict over Rome’s 2019 budget is providing him with ammunition against Brussels. Despite a binding commitment by an earlier Italian government, Salvini’s coalition inists on increasing spending and running a 2.4 percent deficit next year.

With the stock market in decline and the bond spread rising to its highest level in five years, Salvini was asked what he thought of opposition from the EU and the Bank of Italy to the proposed budget. “This is really a demonstration that we are right,” Salvini told the Italian daily La Stampa on October 18. “The spread will fall. All the economic data is positive.”

Professor Francesco Giavazzi, a leading economist at Bocconi University in Milan, said Salvini flourished by creating an “external enemy,” whether it is the European Commission or the European Central Bank. Given the conflict over the budget and its effects on the financial markets, Giavazzi warned Italy was on the edge of an economic abyss unlike anything it had seen in the past 70 years.

“The fact that the government continues to enjoy widespread popularity is little consolation,” he said.  “Juan Peron, and more recently the Kirchners, were acclaimed by immense crowds, but this did not prevent Argentina which was one of the richest countries in the world just a century ago from becoming a place in which per capita income is now similar to that of Mexico.”

Salvini prefers to blame Brussels or Berlin when questions about the Italian budget or border controls arise. But he is not ready to walk away from the European Union just yet. In fact the Lega leader is staking his political future on the European elections in May 2019, in the hope that they will not only help him reshape the EU but reaffirm his political dominance at home as well.

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

It is a sign of the febrile state of British politics that the twin resignations in July of the foreign secretary and the Brexit secretary (within hours of each other) barely caused more than a week-long ripple in the news cycle. In the places of Boris Johnson and David Davis came two new faces, one hardly known outside the United Kingdom, and one hardly known within it—namely Jeremy Hunt as foreign secretary and Dominic Raab as the new Brexit secretary. Both men, at least superficially, come directly from Conservative party central casting: Oxford University, southern England, posh, male, white.

Macho Approach

Raab, who is 44 and far from a household name in the UK, carries a big reputation in Conservative circles as the standard bearer of the Thatcherite right. In the flesh, he has something of the good looks of the Mad Men’s Don Draper. His constituency page boasts a photo of him in army camouflage, taking part in an exercise with local army cadets. Raab also has a taste for karate and boxing.

This self-consciously macho approach also soaks into how Raab talks about himself. For his first big BBC interview on the job, he served up a diet of phrases such as “I’m focused—relentlessly and unflinchingly—on getting a deal [with the EU on Brexit]. I’ll be striving every sinew…” This sort of muscular talk plays well to the Conservative party membership, but Raab may need to adopt a slightly more three-dimensional public persona if he wants one day to become prime minister.

Andrew Gimson, biographer of Boris Johnson and contributing editor at the influential ConservativeHome.com website, concurs. “Raab is a formidable figure—never backward in advertising his powerful intellect,” he wrote, adding: “He knows his brief, but there is something a bit inhuman about his drive and persistence. His present job [Brexit secretary] will make or mar him. It’s easy to imagine him as a senior cabinet minister, but again quite difficult to see him as leader. If May cannot keep him on side, she will be in desperate trouble, and this, one supposes, gives him a certain amount of leverage.”

After Oxford and a brief legal career, Raab joined the Foreign Office, which saw him serve a spell in The Hague, and, most notably, in Ramallah with the World Bank, advising the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Vim And Vigor

Raab first really reached the headlines in 2012 with a book (co-written with four other young Tory MPs) entitled Britannia Unchained. It made the case for lower taxes, less red tape, and reduced employment rights. Raab ominously told The Guardian at the time, “The talented and hard-working have nothing to fear,” but added, “People who are coasting—it should be easier to let them go, to give the unemployed a chance. It’s a delicate balancing act, but it should be decided in favor of the latter.” While such “unpalatable” beliefs probably did him no harm among party members, Raab’s critics quickly dubbed the book “Britannia Unhinged.”

Considering Raab’s macho image, it is perhaps ironic that just two weeks after his promotion, the UK’s female Prime Minister Theresa May announced she would be taking personal control of Brexit negotiations, relegating Raab to responsibility for domestic preparations. Only two days later, Raab appeared stumbling, even at times slightly terrified, when he stepped before the Brussels press corps with EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier for the first time. His pre-planned pay-off line “Michel, we’ve got work to do!” fell resoundingly flat. In fairness, Raab had recovered his sangfroid by the time of their second meeting a month later—even if it came at the expense of rehashing again his “I bring vim and vigour” cliches.

A Tricky Post

Jeremy Hunt, the new foreign secretary, is a much better-known proposition, due to his six-year tenure as health secretary—always a tricky post for a Conservative politician, as the NHS was a post-war Labour creation, and his party is still widely distrusted on it.

Indeed, Hunt was the longest-serving health secretary in British political history—which gives some indication of his flexibility and survival instinct. Others have been less charitable, with Lewis Baston, UK politics-watcher at the Electoral Reform Society, likening Hunt’s adaptability to being a shape-shifter, although he adds that is “not necessarily a bad thing in a cabinet-level politician.”

“For example, he was quite a good ‘Remainer’ in the Cameron era, but now claims he’d vote ‘Leave’ if history was re-run. It also means he fits into the departmental ethos where he goes—and will probably do a competent, polite, and professional job at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.”

Hunt also has what Baston describes as a “low emotional temperature,” and so “some of the qualities that make him a good cabinet minister would make him a poor leader, I think.” “[Nevertheless,] he is one of not many politicians on any side to have much of a clue about east Asia,” he added. “Despite his slip the other day, he is knowledgeable and reasonable on China and Japan.”

That “slip” was his debut meeting with Chinese leaders in Beijing, where Hunt accidentally described his Chinese wife as Japanese, before swiftly correcting himself. (Speaking of slips of the tongue, one reason Hunt is well-known with UK voters is because his surname is rhyming slang for the abusive term for female genitalia, something that has tripped up even BBC presenters live on air.)

At Oxford with Cameron and Johnson

The son of a navy admiral, Hunt was educated at one of the UK’s most exclusive (that is, expensive) private schools, Charterhouse, before studying PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxford, where he was a contemporary of both David Cameron—the prime minister who called the Brexit referundum—and Boris Johnson.

His first government position, under the Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition, was in the role of Minister for the Olympics, widely considered a success; he then became culture secretary before moving on to the far more difficult job of health secretary.

There, he managed to annoy senior doctors by referring to a “Monday to Friday” culture (prompting the social media hashtag #ImatworkJeremy from consultants working weekends). Junior doctors turned against him when he imposed a new work contract extending basic hours to 10pm on weekdays and Saturdays, prompting the first strike by junior doctors in more than 40 years.

A senior consultant at a London teaching hospital who saw Hunt up close praised him for ultimately managing to obtain substantial money for the NHS before leaving for the Foreign Office. He said he was impressed with “the quality of Hunt’s ‘stagecraft,’ but in all my time working in health, there was never such an unpopular leader.”

Compulsive Desire

Gimson agrees, pointing out that Hunt has “the compulsive desire of a certain kind of Englishman always to remain on good terms with people, which makes him, from the point of view of the official classes in Brussels and Berlin as well as London, a safer type of foreign secretary than his predecessor.”

“He must harbor dreams of the leadership and might come through as a compromise ‘Stop Boris’ candidate,” said Gimson. “But Hunt is so unforthcoming that I think the Tories would be wary of fighting a general election under him—which probably rules him out.”

That slight evasiveness of Hunt was evident in his first major speech as foreign secretary, in mid-August, where he laid down the law with a stark warning that a “messy divorce” would be a “geostrategic error for Europe, at an extremely vulnerable time”—indeed, it would represent a “fissure in relations between European allies that would take a generation to heal.” However, characteristically, he delivered this thunderous threat to a friendly audience in Washington, not Brussels.

Peter Martin, president of Hunt’s South West Surrey Conservative Association, naturally disagrees, highlighting Hunt’s “knowledge of languages, superb organizational skills, his ability to get on with everyone and his amazing affability. None of us are surprised that he is now the secretary of state for foreign affairs. Indeed, few would be surprised if he one day took the top job!”

Hunt may be helped by the fact that he speaks fluent Japanese (from a spell after university teaching English in the country), and by his aforementioned Chinese wife. Raab also has a foreign wife, from Brazil. Unremarkable as these facts may be in 2018, that still makes both men something of a rarity among upper echelons of the Conservative party.

Prime Ministerial Ambitions

Whilst the off-the-record line in Brussels since the reshuffle is that “a change in personnel, not a change in policy” is all that is expected from London, personal chemistry can go a long way in politics. Both men have a brief handed down to them from Number 10 Downing Street that they have to stick to, but both Hunt’s politeness and personability and Raab’s inexperience may make life easier—if only for the EU side.

And both men’s likely aspirations to secure the top job—the prime ministership—will be shaped by the aftermath of Boris Johnson’s own resignation. While it opened up the Foreign Office post for Hunt, its immediate affect was a large boost in Johnson’s popularity among the party’s hugely euroskeptic membership.

It is these grassroots Tories, numbering only around 120,000, who will pick the next Conservative party leader, and with it, the next prime minister, at least until a general election is called.

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