© REUTERS/Lisi Niesner

Watching EU leaders shuffle uncertainly around the Mirabell gardens in Salzburg, cameras clicking and whirring from the sidelines, I thought of when the pretty park—and indeed most of the city—attracted attention in 1964. The cast and crew took up residence to film “The Sound of Music,” a Hollywood musical about a singing family, a sinister duchess, and a young post boy who—spoiler alert—joins the Hitler Youth.

If they ever make a musical out of Brexit, it’s unlikely that, in the words of one Sound of Music tune, Salzburg will count among EU leaders’ favorite things.

With Brexit looming large, leaders’ hopes were again raised by the British spin machine that London might have something to move talks beyond the departure lounge. But hopes of entering a new space, to discuss a future relationship between Britain and the European Union, were once again dashed.

British Prime Minister Theresa May had everyone’s attention at dinner on Wednesday evening. With half a year to go until a disorderly departure from the EU, would May move? And would the EU shift in return, as senior officials had signaled before the meeting? No and no.

In the words of one dinner attendee, May “effectively read out an op-ed” she had written for that morning’s Die Welt newspaper. “To come to a successful conclusion, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to do the same,” she wrote, and said.

Everyone besides Britain views the UK’s position as wanting to have its cake and eat it. But they are waiting for London to put forward proposals that would make such cake-eating politically or legally possible for the EU27. Thus, the response of Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, to May’s after-dinner address was short and blunt: “It won’t work.”

Squaring the Circle

Talks on what happens after March 29 next year are stalled because London has yet to square the circle on the border that divides the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In six months’ time this will be an outer EU border and all such borders—particularly those which are also a customs border, as Britain wants—require checks and infrastructure.

This is unacceptable to Dublin and many in Northern Ireland who thought borders belonged in the bad old days of the province. The old border infrastructure from the Troubles was dismantled, never to return, after the 1998 peace agreement. Last December Britain agreed that Brexit must reflect and respect this when the UK departs the EU and the customs union.

Brussels put forward its proposal for turning this political aspiration into legal reality: minimize controls on the island of Ireland by keeping the province inside the EU customs union. Any checks on people or goods entering and leaving could then take place between Ireland and Great Britain, with a new border effectively in the Irish Sea.

But London views this as unacceptable: it would create different legal regimes within the UK—and Belfast politicians loyal to the crown fear this would separate them from the mainland. Their reservations carry weight because May depends on their parliamentary support in Westminster.

But if the EU’s legal proposal is unacceptable, what is the UK’s alternative? Salzburg could have been the moment when the prime minister presented even an outline. But she didn’t.

For the Irish, Brexit is not a technicality but, in the words of foreign minister Simon Coveney this week, a “lose-lose-lose situation.” The best Dublin hopes for on Brexit is a damage-limitation deal. Open borders in Ireland will keep people and trade moving. But Irish trucks having to exit and re-enter the EU on their way to mainland Europe could be disastrous—in particular for fresh food exporters.

For Dublin, the so-called Brexit backstop—no border on the island of Ireland—is as non-negotiable in Brexit talks as the 1998 peace agreement, the result of years of complicated talks backed by Dublin, London, but also Brussels. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said that all EU leaders he had spoken to gave him their “absolute support in standing behind Ireland,”and that the only acceptable EU agreement on Brexit was one that worked for Ireland. “I am leaving here very reassured,” he said.

With the clock running down to “finalize and formalize” a still non-existent Brexit deal, EU leaders will come together again next month for a moment of truth meeting—and possibly for an emergency meeting in November, in case more truth is needed.

All or Nothing

Will the EU27 hold together in the weeks ahead? Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán suggested in Salzburg that a group of EU leaders were seeking to “punish” the UK.  But in their closed-door talks, EU officials said, Orbán had nothing to say, not even when officials from Poland, a close ally of the Hungarian leader, proposed greater flexibility in the mandate for EU Brexit negotiators.

After a “frank bilateral” with Tusk, the British prime minister left Salzburg. The remaining EU27 leaders stayed to discuss the political declaration on their future relationship with the UK. That is supposed to accompany the legally binding Withdrawal Agreement but is also suspended in limbo.

Again, leaders reiterated that existing British proposals could not provide the basis of such a relationship. May has proposed a free trade agreement between her country and the EU, but wants to exclude services. EU leaders, with thinning patience, insist the internal market is not a cherry-picking farm: it’s all or nothing.

For what felt like the 1000^th time since the 2016 Brexit vote, Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “We were all unified today that there can be no compromises on the internal market.” French president Emmanuel Macron describes such thinking as “unacceptable” and called on his EU colleagues to increase pressure on London in the coming weeks. Echoing growing voices in Britain, Maltese leader Joseph Muscat called for a second referendum in the UK—but other EU leaders declined to follow suit.

The EU circus left Salzburg with leaders calling for compromise with London. Even the Irish—who have the most to lose—said they were open to creative thinking on “language and detail” of any agreement. But this is difficult, they say, given the British have presented nothing to work on.

“De-Dramatizing”

The lack of progress on Brexit couldn’t hide a significant shift on the EU’s other major headache: a long-term political answer to the emotive migration question.

Tusk said there was a “sharp determination” to expand the EU’s border and coast guard Frontex. He said most EU leaders want to press on with plans to create a standing corps of 10,000 border guards—amid some concerns over national sovereignty.

After the pre-summer drama on migration, pushed by German domestic politics, EU leaders transferred their hopes of “de-dramatizing” Brexit onto the refugee question.

Since 2015, EU member states have been divided on whether they should be obliged to share the continent’s refugee burden. In a bid to end the deadlock, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker proposed a new push for “flexibility solidarity.” Describing it as “a proposal I don’t even like myself,” he suggested countries that refuse to accept asylum seekers, such as those in central Europe, should be obliged to contribute on other—chiefly financial—fronts.

President Macron warned in his post-summit press conference that countries that refuse to contribute more to Schengen or other solidarity measures will be edged out of the common travel area. “Countries that don’t want more Europe will no longer touch structural funds,” he said.

Meanwhile EU leaders have pressed on with plans to push offshore the refugee issue, returning people rescued at sea to Egypt and other non-EU countries.

With the migration issue flaring up again in Germany before state elections in the fall, Chancellor Merkel is happy not to push for big changes at the EU level. Above all the German leader knows that, after leading the moral charge on refugees three years ago, such a migration compromise now is less music to her ears than the sound of a political climb-down.

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With scorched fields, parched rivers, and sweltering temperatures, Germany hasn’t had a summer like this in living memory. And Berlin hasn’t had a Sommerloch, or silly season, quite like this one in years either, with debates emerging that have real potential to last long after Germany’s political class returns.

Perhaps the most lively debate that has emerged over this summer break is over the prospect of reinstating compulsory military service. Seven years ago, Germany consigned to history the year-long military service duty for young people, as well as the alternative—civil, or community, service. But now there’s talk of reversing that decision, at least if we’re to believe Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, general secretary of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Kramp-Karrenbauer is considered a possible successor to Merkel and has built a reputation as a straight-talker, not known for shooting off her mouth. Last weekend she told a German newspaper that reviving military and alternative civil service was one of issues she was confronted with on nearly every stop of a recent “listening tour,” where she traveled across the country speaking to CDU party members.

This being August, when news stories are as rare as rain clouds, media and political commentators happily pounced on the story. Compulsory military service was abolished in 2011 as the defense ministry overhauled Germany’s armed forces, or the Bundeswehr, into a new, slimmed-down model of volunteers and professional recruits. But numbers have plummeted more dramatically than expected: at the time of reunification, there were 585,000 soldiers in the Bundeswehr; last year, there were around 179,000, with more than 20,000 vacant posts. The situation is so serious that the ministry is considering a new recruitment drive to encourage EU nationals to join up.

Despite those recruitment challenges, even those concerned about Germany’s struggle to meet its security obligations are wary. “Focusing on military service is too short-sighted,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, CDU head of the Bundestag foreign policy committee, warning the debate was too complex “to be used to fill a silly season hole.”

Unsettled by the momentum of the debate, a federal government spokeswoman intervened to insist Berlin has no plans to bring back military service. And Kramp-Karrenbauer took to Twitter to calm the waters, insisting she was not necessarily in favor of compulsory conscription, adding that “there are many ways to serve.” Still, she is likely to be happy she’s started a debate as the CDU faces tricky negotiations over a new party program and its next election manifesto. Paul Ziemak, head of the CDU youth wing, praised the idea of a community year as an “opportunity give something back while strengthening national unity.

Merkel, currently on holiday, has yet to express an opinion, though she will be watching closely to see which way public opinion blows before making her move. A poll this month found that nearly 56 percent of Germans would welcome a return of military duty. Legal experts warn that reactivating compulsory military service would be constitutionally difficult, as politicians would have to justify the move on security grounds.

Even if national service is not likely to be restored, the debate may woo back German conservative voters from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). They view the abolition of military service as one of the great policy betrayals of the Merkel era.

Merkel’s center-left coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), and other opposition parties are skeptical of the entire debate. Many who did their year of obligatory service remember how they were exploited as free labor—most frequently in the health sector, working in hospitals and elderly homes. Reintroducing civil service could backfire, they fear, with trained staff replaced by unskilled volunteers.

The Spahn Tour and a New Movement

But that could serve one man’s political agenda nicely: Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister and another would-be Merkel successor. At the height of the summer, Spahn has been busy taking on Germany’s healthcare system. He pushed through a new law that will cap the number of patients to be cared for by home staff, in a bid to reduce the work overload for caregivers in for-profit facilities, where low pay and high stress has made the work so unattractive.

Despite Germany’s ageing population, there are too few care workers on the market. To counteract that, Spahn wants to boost salaries in a bid to attract previously badly-paid staff back into the workplace. He has also pushed through changes forcing employers to pay the same contributions for health insurance as their employees starting next year. And registered doctors will soon have to guarantee more office hours for patients on public health insurance as well. It remains to be seen whether these measures will have the desired effect, but for Germany’s ambitious health minister, who has an eye on the chancellor’s post, failing is not an option.

Meanwhile, on the other end of Germany’s political landscape, the summer season has seen the soft launch of a new left-wing movement called Aufstehen (“Arise”). Ahead of the official launch on September 4, its website went live last weekend and promptly drew in around 40,000 supporters—though it’s not at all clear to what exactly they have signed up.

What we know so far is that Arise has drawn inspiration from other political movements both inside and outside traditional party structures, from left-wing Democrat Bernie Sanders in the United States to France’s hard left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

The driving force is Sahra Wagenknecht, Bundestag co-leader of the Left Party, and her husband Oskar Lafontaine, a former leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Wagenknecht has two main priorities: to attract people turned off by mainstream politics and to reactivate a left-wing majority by satisfying public demand for solutions to the social justice issues dominating German life, like living wages, pensions above the poverty line, and affordable housing

“Our goal is naturally [to achieve] different political majorities, and a new government with a social agenda,” Wagenknecht told Der Spiegel over the weekend.

Though details are scarce, the plan is for Aufstehen to develop policies and feed them into the political debate. Wagenknecht insists her aim isn’t to splinter Germany’s already divided left, but to call out parties (read: the SPD) whom she says are more fond of left-wing lip service than real policy.

“If the pressure is great enough,” she said, “parties will, in their own interest, open their lists to our ideas and campaigners.”

With temperatures hitting 36 degrees Celsius this week in Berlin, however, it remains to be seen how much appetite there is for Wagenknecht turning up the heat still further on her fellow left-wingers.

The post A Debate about Military Service Fills Germany’s Summer Void appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Miguel Vidal

In the wake of Chancellor Merkel’s interview last Sunday, most commentators have focused on her plans for the eurozone, with the European Council meeting at the end of June to discuss the issue and French President Emmanuel Macron in need of German support for his ambitious eurozone reform proposals. The hostility of Italy’s new government toward EU spending rules has only increased debate about the future of the common currency.

Merkel acknowledged that the EU needs to do something to bring “long-lasting stability” to the euro. She insisted that Europe needs “the banking union and the capital markets union,” though she failed to discuss the concrete steps required to get there, such as European deposit insurance. She said that Europe should transform the European Stability Mechanism, the euro area’s bailout fund, into a European Monetary Fund (EMF) that could make both long-term loans conditional on structural reforms and shorter loans to member-states that “get into difficulties because of external factors.”

Control of this fund, Merkel envisions, would remain at least in part with national parliaments. It would have “instruments that could, if necessary, restore [a member-state’s] ability to carry its debts.” The main such instrument is automatic debt restructuring, whereby receiving an EMF loan would be conditional on the borrowing member-state paying its bondholders back either more slowly or only partially. For a heavily indebted member-state like Italy, the prospect of restructuring would make sovereign bonds appear less safe and thus raise borrowing costs.

She also repeated her support for a eurozone investment budget in the “low double digits of billions” (for context, eurozone GDP in 2017 was €11.2 trillion) with the aim of helping member-states that need to “catch up” in areas like artificial intelligence, to take Merkel’s example.

While these are all constructive ideas, there is a lot that Merkel didn’t mention. She said nothing about a large eurozone budget worth several points of eurozone GDP or a eurozone finance minister—both proposals Macron backs. What’s more, France would resist her plans for automatic debt restructuring. Germany’s preference for strict rules clashes with France’s desire for greater fiscal firepower.

Playing to the Home Crowd

So what will the French president think of all this? The Élysée Palace called this all a “positive step,” but an editorial in the newspaper Le Monde better captured the mood in Paris: Merkel’s “caution isn’t suitable given what’s at stake.”

Merkel’s proposals, then, are a mixed bag. But it’s important to keep her domestic political situation in mind. She only became chancellor after her initial bid to build a coalition government fell apart, and the CDU/CSU and SPD agreed to keep the grand coalition going with a reduced majority. With the right-wing populist AfD entering parliament for the first time, she has a deeply euroskeptic party heading the opposition—not to mention one with neo-Nazi tendencies.

The mainstream German debate is a minefield too. Though the SPD party leader Andrea Nahles backed Merkel’s proposals, and the Greens lamented that the chancellor had not gone further to accommodate Macron, FDP party chief Christian Lindner worried that the EMF could become “a type of overdraft facility” for struggling member-states. According to a recent survey from German public broadcaster ARD, most Germans are satisfied that Macron wants to reform the EU, but 48 percent of those polled also think his proposals for financial integration “go too far.”

The liberal weekly DER SPIEGEL, meanwhile, has responded to Italy’s turn to populism with a cover that stereotypes and an editorial that lambasts the pasta-eating “moochers from Rome.” Then there is the faction of conservatives in Merkel’s own party who tend to think first of protecting German wealth from greedy neighbors. Merkel’s pledge to the FAS that “solidarity among European partners may never lead to a debt union” was directed primarily at them.

Finally, there is the minor problem that the other member-states would have to agree to Macron’s proposals as well.  The Franco-German motor is important, but Europe also needs the rest of the car. Merkel’s pragmatism might drag some reluctant reformers along.

Merkel did in fact push for change on some significant non-eurozone issues. She came out in favor of Macron’s European Intervention Force for rapid military action outside the EU framework. She backed a system of common EU asylum standards and a proper border security agency. And she confirmed that Germany is ready to pay more into the EU budget—an area where other net payers like Austria and the Netherlands are more protective of their money.

It is true that Merkel’s EU reform proposals leave something to be desired; they certainly understate the need for a more integrated eurozone with more risk sharing.  But they are also reasonable negotiating positions restrained by domestic politics—far enough from Macron’s preferences that there will almost certainly be no agreement at the summit at the end of the month, but constructive enough that the debate can move forward.

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