© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

When Sigmar Gabriel spoke at the Berlin Foreign Policy Forum, his audience could be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu. His call for a more assertive European Union has become almost a tradition, an annual call for renewed foreign policy engagement from Germany and the EU. With the decades-old assumption that the US would play the role of protector “crumbling”, Germany’s foreign minister said the EU – and Berlin in particular – needed to adopt a more energetic role in the world.

“We have to see that either we try to shape this world ourselves, or we will be shaped by the rest of the world,” he said. I have asked a few Berlin officials why Gabriel had flagged, but not explained, what he thinks Germany’s more energetic role in the world should be. Their explanation: with Germany still waiting for a new government after September’s elections, it was no surprise that Gabriel stopped short of being more concrete.

That is this year’s excuse, I thought. What will it be next year?

Perhaps my journalist’s ear is not attuned to the fine diplomatic messages hidden in Gabriel’s speech. Or perhaps, after years of listening to similar speeches about Germany – leading from behind, from the middle, wherever – I’ve finally lost patience. Does Germany do foreign policy, I wonder, or does Germany do foreign policy policy?

In my time in Berlin, I have covered my share of German politicians calling for things to be done in the world. Challenge them on why Germany doesn’t do them, or at least contribute more, and often you get an emotional response listing what Berlin is doing. It is often far less than their own ambitious demands of others, but we clearly should be grateful Germany is doing anything at all.

Gabriel urged his Berlin audience – as in previous years – to “describe our own positions and, if necessary, make clear where the limits of our solidarity lie.” As he is the foreign minister, I expected him to do just that: show and tell where Germany’s solidarity limits lie, and why. I’m still waiting.

A Tired Fortune Teller

Instead, sounding like a tired fortune teller, Germany’s chief diplomat predicted that, after Trump, the EU’s relationship with the US would never be the same again. “Germany can no longer simply react to US policy, but must establish its own position,” he said. All that was lacking: Germany’s position.

In a barely-concealed dig at acting leader Angela Merkel, Gabriel said Berlin had to do more to “invest in its own strength and in the unity and strength of the EU.” In particular, he described as “barely tolerable” an EU narrative dominant in Berlin since the eurocrisis that highlights the EU’s cost over its benefits for Germany. “In truth, we are net winners,” he said. “Yes, we pay more taxes to Brussels than we get in subsidies, but in truth our economy only wins through the European area.”

So where, I wonder, are Gabriel and other German politicians when the Bild tabloid or populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) wheel out their by now weekly attacks on the EU? Bild and the AfD have embraced the post-eurocrisis narrative of the bloc as a plot against poor German taxpayers. This is poisoning Germany’s European debate and severely curtailing any political wriggle room in Berlin, but no politician has stepped in directly to slap down the tabloid or the populists. Why bother – Sunday sermons are just fine, aren’t they?

10-0 for France

Wrapping up, Germany’s chief diplomat heaped praise on the election of French President Emmanuel Macron, author of radical euro reform proposals, as a “stroke of luck of historical dimensions.” By comparison, Germany in the Merkel era had played a “delaying, blocking or even eccentric position” in the EU of late.

“Things stand 10-0 to France, but it shouldn’t remain that way,” he added a week later. Instead of owning up to the SPD’s contribution to this yawning gap – ruling for all but four years since 1998 – Gabriel had not even one idea in his speech to even up the score.

Perhaps we should be grateful. Like many Germany politicians, when Gabriel does present ideas for Europe he rarely explains how they could and should be implemented. For years as economic minister, for instance, Gabriel argued that the eurozone’s “Stability and Growth Pact” was lopsided, with too much focus on stability and fiscal concerns. He made an interesting call for the euro to be equipped with an added social dimension to temper the pursuit of balanced budgets with social cohesion concerns. It was an interesting idea, but lacked a concrete “how” – and, after being recycled a few times, vanished from view.

Last week it was the turn of Gabriel’s successor as Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Martin Schulz. In a speech to party delegates heavy on pathos but tellingly light on detail, Schulz called for a United States of Europe by 2025. Great, Martin: how? Announcing is not the same as presenting a road map or, heaven forbid, delivering.

Europe is waiting for a new German government to finally get to work. But with this bunch in Berlin, it will be a long time before this country gets down to the real work of spelling out what it is prepared to do – or sacrifice – to help stabilize an increasingly uncertain world.

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Germany’s mercurial Sigmar Gabriel has always been good for a surprise. But the political earthquake he triggered on Tuesday, announcing his resignation as Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader, was the best yet.

Gabriel, the burly party chairman since 2009, said he was throwing in the towel to back ex-European Parliament president Martin Schulz as his successor. This being an election year, that makes Schulz the de facto challenger to Chancellor Angela Merkel in the September federal poll.

The announcement by Gabriel, a 57-year-old political veteran and economy minister in the Merkel government, caught even close allies by surprise. They knew an announcement was coming in the next days, but Gabriel tore up his own timetable with the painfully self-critical comment that he viewed himself as more of a liability than an asset to his party.

“If I ran then I would fail and, with me, the SPD,” he said. “The party has to believe in its candidate and gather behind them.”

After mulling his future for six months, Gabriel’s last act was to commission a private poll of SPD members. The result: the 61-year-old Schulz was by far their preference to try and hinder a fourth Merkel term.

Gabriel, in comparison, has long been viewed as an unpredictable figure, as unpopular inside his party as among the wider public. Just 19 percent of voters backed him to challenge Merkel in a public television poll last month, compared to 36 percent for Schulz.

Gabriel isn’t disappearing: he wants to switch from economics to foreign affairs, succeeding Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who will become Germany’s president in the next few weeks. That raises fresh questions about German diplomacy at a delicate time – given tensions with Russia and Donald Trump’s United States – between now and September.

“Bull in a China Shop”

“He’s not a born diplomat, more a bull in a china shop,” said Daniel Friedrich Sturm, a Gabriel biographer. “He’ll push a different style but, with the rise of Trump and the right-wing populism in Europe, everything is being mixed up anyway. It’ll be interesting to see how things develop.”

A protégé of ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Gabriel failed to resolve tensions between the SPD’s leftist and centrist wings and provide resolution to the party’s lingering ambiguous relationship to the Schröder-era economic and social reforms.

An added challenge in the second grand coalition under Merkel: voters’ refusal of voters to reward him for delivering on core campaign promises such as a minimum wage. “Because the numbers didn’t go up, he decided the person most likely to win should run,” said Johannes Kahrs, a leading centrist SPD figure.

The task of reviving – and uniting – the SPD now falls to Schulz, who grew up in a mining family in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and has had several stations in his life: bookseller, alcoholic, local mayor, and, since 1994, a member of the European parliament. For the last five years, he was EU Parliament president, boosting the profile of the institution like none of his predecessors.

But apart from being a dyed-in-the-wool European, lifelong Social Democrat, and permanent German talk show guest, nobody knows much about how he will position himself in a domestic political scene in which, until now, he was always an outside observer.

“He has to position himself – on social policy, security policy, all domestic policy – on an ad hoc basis, and in just eight months,” said Volker Kronenburg, a professor for political science at the University of Bonn.

Aware that he has a lot to do in the coming months, Schulz will not, as previously speculated, join Merkel’s cabinet. Rather, he will concentrate on the campaign and the party, which is flat-lining at historic lows of around 20 percent in polls, around 13 points behind Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Back to the Roots?

In his first remarks, Schulz promised a back-to-the-roots campaign, taking on Merkel, populism, and growing social divisions with classic social democratic politics of social justice. “The SPD has a claim on this theme,” he told party MPs on Wednesday, who greeted him with a standing ovation, hopeful the new arrival can restart the party and reboot its political fortunes after years adrift.

“Many people are turning away from Merkel and are asking what the SPD has on offer,” said deputy leader Manuela Schwesig. “Martin Schulz stands for the European idea and solidarity. I think he can reach people’s hearts because he stands for a new start and has a high level of credibility.”

The biggest question thrown up by Gabriel’s departure and Schulz’s arrival is whether the surprise move makes Merkel’s life more difficult as she seeks re-election next September – and, if so, how.

After three terms, including two grand coalitions with the SPD, no one in her government relishes the thought of a return of the current setup. But there may be no other realistic option, given slumping support for the mainstream parties and the complicated arithmetic resulting from the likely arrival of two more parties in the next Bundestag – the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the returning Liberal Democrats (FDP).

Schulz is the fifth SPD leader to face Merkel in her time at the helm of the CDU and, while he is unlikely to overtake the CDU in polls, he could prove a wild card in Germany’s election campaign.

“He’s never had government power and very little domestic political experience,” said Jürgen Falter, professor for political science at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. “But he is more of a fighter with the common touch, so Angela Merkel will have to take him seriously as a campaigner.

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© REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer

Punk and social democracy have one thing in common and one big difference. The similarity: both were swallowed by neo-liberal capitalism. The difference: only punk is aware that it is dead.

It’s 40 years since Malcolm McLaren and his then wife Vivienne Westwood opened “SEX”, their London punk boutique that presented a dyed-and-pierced aesthetic with a Sex Pistols soundtrack to the “no future” younger generation in a United Kingdom that was going to the dogs. They had their fun, but what came next? Thatcherism and Spandau Ballet.

Last weekend, to mark punk’s 40^th anniversary in Britain, the late McLaren’s son, Joe Corré, lit a punk funeral pyre. Burning punk collectibles worth several million pounds was a protest, he said, at how the movement had become a “McDonald’s brand … privatized, packaged, and castrated by the establishment.”

That same fate has befallen social democracy, which, roughly a century before punk, took hold in Germany as the political face of the burgeoning union movement. Social democracy empowered the working class by popularizing what were then radical ideas of social justice and state oversight of markets, promising common social goods like universal education and healthcare. Social democracy in Europe survived fascism, and while being co-opted by communism in eastern Europe, it peaked in the 1970s under Willy Brandt in West Germany, Bruno Kreisky in Austria, and Olof Palme in Sweden.

This week their respective political heirs – Sigmar Gabriel, Christian Kern, and Stefan Lövfen – met in Vienna to reboot the social democratic ideals. And barely anyone noticed.

Instead of presenting a concrete plan, theirs was a limp attempt to reboot a failing brand. It fell on deaf ears because Europe’s social democrats have tried this every other year over the last decade. The result: instead of firing up a new generation, social democracy meanders around Europe like an ideological zombie, arms outstretched and stumbling into every hole before it.

Lack of Honesty, Lack of Conviction

The problem is twofold: a lack of honesty and a lack of conviction. If Europe’s social democrats were honest they would admit that they simply don’t have the answer to rebooting the European social democratic model for the globalized world. That is because, like punk, social democracy has been privatized, packaged, and castrated by international capital. Because social democrats, with their “Third Way” politics of the late 1990s, played a role in their own castration. And because, unlike the hard left, social democrats don’t really believe in facing down their castrators. “We are staring into the abyss,” said Kern, Austria’s chancellor of six months, suggesting their endeavor is motivated less by new, fairer politics and more by the fear of Europe’s ruling social democrats losing power – and, with it, their last hold on political relevance.

After decades of neo-liberalism and post-crisis belt-tightening, the three leaders in Vienna said Europe needed a social democratic makeover. Hurray. The EU’s four fundamental freedoms – of trade, capital, services, and labor – needed a fifth social pillar. Great idea.

How? In concrete terms, they said, this meant giving EU governments “more fiscal-political freedom” to invest in growth and jobs, infrastructure, and fighting youth unemployment. Labor laws needed to be updated for the 21^st century single market, Lövfen said, so “EU freedoms don’t come at the cost of workers.”

The problem, as always, is the implementation. These three amigos have little or no political credibility as defenders of the workers or keepers of the social democratic flame. In the mid 1990s, after drinking from the poisoned, third way chalice, German SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder swapped union support to be embraced as the “bosses’ comrade”. He introduced social reforms admirers say saved the German economy or, critics say, gave birth to today’s working poor. Some 14 years on, the SPD still cannot decide whether to disown and reverse the reforms, or own up to them and take credit for the subsequent economic boom. As they say in Ireland: shit or get off the pot.

In the last years, these three social democratic parties were all in power when the EU nodded through eurozone crisis program that socialized billions of private banks debt and hung it around taxpayers’ necks – as “rescue” rings in crisis countries and bailout payments in non-crisis countries. Under Gabriel, the SPD in Germany spends one year chastising Europe’s periphery as fiscal “sinners” and the next sulking that their peripheral neighbors show them the cold shoulder.

The World Has Moved On

As Europe’s social democrats grapple with their extended identity crisis, the world has moved on. First, hard left parties peeled away social democrats’ welfare and social justice robes and added some anti-globalization, pro-Russian patches of their own. Then center-right parties, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, moved back to the center ground. Now squeezed by both sides, the social democrats find themselves in a tug of war with far-right populist parties in Sweden, Germany, and Austria, offering vulnerable voters the promise of more welfare and fewer Muslims. Those hit hardest by globalized transformation are being tempted by an opportunistic, xenophobic social nationalism when what they really need is robust, tolerant, old school social democracy 2.0.

Yet those best placed to deliver this have failed to do so, suggesting they either can’t or won’t.

In his eleven years as SPD leader, Gabriel has announced but not delivered, in order: an EU with an enhanced social dimension; “solidarity” bonds of pooled, lower-interest sovereign debt issues; and more flexible stability pact rules to aid indebted euro members. In recent months he has promised more investment for Germany’s crumbling infrastructure while, last week, his party backed yet another balanced budget with minimal spending for the future.

Each time Gabriel has a new idea, he either drops it privately or, under howls of protest from his center-right coalition partners, rows back publicly. I may be wrong, but this week’s “social pact” bore suspicious similarities to a Franco-German pact Gabriel launched with France’s Socialists a few years ago, and later buried.

And yet the departure of French president Francois Hollande leaves Gabriel as Europe’s longest-serving, most senior Social Democrat leader. Next year’s federal election in Germany offers a chance for Gabriel to change the record in Europe. He could shaft Chancellor Merkel and activate the center-left majority that has existed in Germany since Merkel came to power in 2005 – if he has the courage of his convictions.

The only chance left to revive some form of social democracy is a three-way pact with two of three parties: the Greens, the liberal Free Democrats, and the Left Party. Such a bold move might risk Sex Pistols-style anarchy in German politics. Sticking with the safe option – another grand coalition with Merkel – would be social democracy’s final, fatal embrace of punk’s “no future” philosophy.

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© REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

Anna, a friend of mine who lives outside Cologne, has two options to get to work: She can get into her car by 7:30 AM and hope to get to her desk by 9. Or, if she’s running late, she can wait until after 11 before heading for her desk at Bayer in nearby Leverkusen.

The reason: crumbling infrastructure, which means Anna’s commute, which should take 30 minutes, takes three times that on a good day – and many times longer on a bad one.

Anna’s nemesis is the Leverkusen Bridge, a 50-year-old structure that has been closed to heavy goods traffic since engineers discovered major rips in its steel structure two years ago. Rather than repair the bridge, a crucial part of the A1 Autobahn, city leaders have reduced the car lanes from six to four.

The Leverkusen Bridge is just one of 2,500 in Germany that has slipped from needing serious repairs to being a public danger over the past decade. These crumbling bridges are just part of a wider trend in Germany, where infrastructure investment as a percentage of total economic spending dropped from around 25 percent in 1991 to below 20 percent in 2015.

Some see a worrying symmetry between the Merkel-era push for balanced budgets and the rapid decline in infrastructure spending. In the Merkel decade up to 2015, Der Spiegel calculated that investment in German motorways halved to just €1.5 billion annually.

So why have things become so bad, and who is to blame?

German economic minister Sigmar Gabriel, head of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), asked a commission to investigate the problem. Headed by economist Marcel Fratzscher of Berlin’s German Institute for Economic Research (or DIW Berlin), the report it published pointed to two problems. First, years of pressure from Berlin to balance budgets forced federal states and municipal authorities to cut all infrastructure repair work to the bone. Second, infrastructure repairs in Germany are a bureaucratic nightmare, with ownership of major motorways and bridges often divided between federal authorities in Berlin, one or more of Germany’s 16 state capitals, and local authorities.

“Federal states are overwhelmed by this task,” Prof Fratzscher, who also teaches macroeconomics and finance at Berlin’s Humboldt University, told Der Spiegel, urging the ownership of crucial infrastructure be transferred to a central authority overseen by the federal government.

And what of the financial concerns? Officials close to federal finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble bristle at criticism that their balanced budget demands have caused the infrastructure backlog.

Schäuble’s officials say their ministry made €13 billion available for infrastructure spending in 2015 – but just €2 billion was drawn, as state governments had no capacity to submit plans entitled to funding.

“Even if we wanted to invest €5-€10 billion more, there would not be any start-ready projects there,” complained Jens Spahn, deputy finance minister, to Der Spiegel earlier this month.

While Berlin blames federal states for cutting back on engineers able to draft and submit plans for overdue repair work, state capitals disagree. Berlin’s obsession with balanced budgets, they say, not only forced them to drop big ticket spending projects – but also to fire idle engineers and planners.

Nowhere is Germany’s depreciation dilemma more obvious than in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Europe’s largest urban conurbation and home to one in five Germans. There has been so little investment in infrastructure here that, according to Der Spiegel, NRW has let go of 1,500 planning officials in recent years.

As a result, the rail and road arteries that keep the Rhine-Ruhr region alive have fallen into the same decline as its heavy industry. One in three rail bridges here is more than a century old. German car lobby group ADAC estimates that traffic jams in NRW in 2015 totaled 323,000 kilometers – almost the distance from the earth to the moon.

But this isn’t just about unsexy things like bridges and roads: according to the public KfW bank, Germany’s ramshackle schools need €34 billion to fix as well.

A year ahead of Germany’s federal election, the decline in public infrastructure could become a campaign issue. Senior SPD officials around leader Gabriel are urging him to make a dramatic ideological reversal to clear Germany’s investment backlog. Historically low interest rates and Germany’s triple-A rating mean Berlin can borrow – at effectively no cost – the billions it needs for repairs.

But even borrowed billions are useless if no political compromise emerges to streamline infrastructure ownership and repair planning. And apart from hand-wringing, years of debate on this front have yielded few discernible results. Germany’s various layers of government are so effective at defending their competences while passing blame on to others that it may take a collapsed bridge to force change.

“We Germans hear about our record exports, our record employment rates and our record tax takings, yet there’s no money for our infrastructure,” says Anna, my Cologne friend. “If you want to see German infrastructure efficiency these days, go to Switzerland.”

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Germany is a long way behind the United States when it comes to political data-crunching. But a first attempt this week – computer-aided analysis of party manifestos – threw up interesting results.

The analysis by Berlin’s Idalab, a group of mathematicians and IT specialists, suggested that Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is now far more center than right. And Merkel’s grand coalition partners, the Social Democratic Party (SPD)?

The most remarkable thing about the SPD program, they said, is that there is nothing remarkable about it.  The SPD manifesto, the analysis tool said, showed “absolutely no clear statements.” Or, to use a beloved phrase from the comedy show “Little Britain”: computer says no.

The computer is not alone. German voters have been saying no to the SPD for years. It stormed to power in 1998 when Gerhard Schröder secured 40.9 percent support. But the party has been in decline ever since, losing half of its voters and now bobbing along at 20 percent in polls.

It is a truism that politics is a cruel business but, in recent years, politics has been particularly cruel to the SPD, which, since the party lost power in 2005, is licking wounds of Third Way politics that refuse to heal. The peak of SPD market-friendly social democracy came a little over a decade ago when Chancellor Schröder forced his party – and the country – to swallow some tough medicine. The social and economic reforms, dubbed Agenda 2010, were necessary to revive the ailing German patient, at that point sometimes termed the “sick man of Europe.” “Either we reform ourselves,” Schröder warned his mutinous party ahead of the Bundestag vote, “or the market will reform us.”

The medicine worked, according to economists. But the reforms cost Schröder his job and many SPD voters saw them as a betrayal of workers. A decade on, a survey out this week showed that just one third of voters believe social justice – historically the SPD’s unique selling point – is still a core party competence.

Merkel Taking Credit

The reforms were only the start of the SPD’s misery. By the time the economy turned around, Angela Merkel was chancellor, the SPD suddenly her coalition junior partner. Merkel happily took political credit for the recovery while ensuring the blame for the reform “betrayal,” and for many unintended consequences, stuck to the SPD.

On the opposition benches after the 2009 election, the tormented SPD began drifting to the political left again until party leader Sigmar Gabriel had second thoughts. Disowning the reforms by marching left, he said, would only compound the SPD’s credibility problem. The more realistic survival option was to stick to the political center and, when back in power, work to correct the most egregious effects of the reforms.

That is what it has done since 2013, in its second grand coalition with Merkel’s CDU. Last year the SPD pushed through a €8.50 statutory minimum wage – against a noisy lobbying campaign that the party’s demand would break the economy. Those dire warnings are long forgotten but so, too, is the party behind the minimum wage.

This week the SPD pushed through another core promise to voters: forcing companies to pay contract employees the same as full-time employees. Again, this was a key SPD voter promise in the last election and closed a loophole opened through Schröder-era labor market deregulation. But that may be the problem. Many SPD officials appear unable or unwilling to take full credit for their political breakthroughs because, in their heart, they see these political victories as an indirect admission of failure, a reminder of the disgrace of Agenda 2010.

Another problem for the party is their energetic leader, Sigmar Gabriel. The good news, senior party figures say, is that he has many ideas on how to turn around his party. The bad news, they groan, is that he has at least one big idea a week.

What is the SPD For?

On Monday was his latest idea, a “Values Conference” to discuss “new and old questions for Social Democracy”. But the biggest question went unanswered: what, in the year 2016, is the SPD for?

That identity question is haunting center-left parties around Europe as they grapple with a decline in traditional, class-based voter affiliation and the disappearance of the classic working class milieu. The rise of fleet-footed populist parties, all pursuing hybrid social-national agendas, has catalyzed the decline of European social democracy.

On Monday, Austria’s Social Democratic (SPÖ) chancellor Werner Faymann became the latest victim of this decline. Gabriel insists he won’t be next, but faced damaging rumors last weekend that his days as party leader are numbered.

A year before Germany enters federal election mode, Gabriel faces a thankless, hopeless task. His party is squeezed on one side by Merkel’s centrist CDU, on the other side by the hard Left Party. Peeling off voters, too, is the neo-populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The SPD’s only growth area, it seems, is voter frustration.

Sharing a stage with Gabriel at Monday’s SPD “Values Conference”, cleaning lady Susanne Neumann delivered a devastatingly frank assessment of the SPD’s labor and welfare reforms: “shitty contracts” that condemned workers to low-pay, casual work with few benefits.

“You ran us down,” she said. “Why should I vote for a party that did that to me and gives me no answers?”

Why indeed.

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© REUTERS/RIA Novosti/Kremlin

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel’s “private” trip to Moscow at the end of October has to be interpreted in the context of a slow shift in Germany’s Russia policy. The SPD leader claimed he did not understand why German-Russian relations had deteriorated over the last ten years and promised to help win legislative support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project – positions that by no means represent the prevelant view among the German political elite. But the fact that Gabriel was able to make the trip at all – undermining Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hard line on Russia without earning a reaction from the chancellery – shows the change that is underway.

When Gabriel linked the need for Russian cooperation on Syria and the so-called Islamic State (IS) with the Ukraine crisis in September, it represented a first attempt to shift German political discourse on Russia. Merkel’s reaction at the time was prompt: she immediately denied any connection between Syria and Ukraine. This time, she seemed to be too occupied with the refugee crisis to respond in public. What is even more alarming: due to the refugee crisis, the terror attacks in Paris, and the growing influence of euroskeptic populist parties in the EU, the chancellery has a growing interest in solving the Ukraine problem. That means that, from a German perspective, implementing the “Minsk 2” accords is a must – and it is increasingly possible that Germany will push for its completion before Ukraine is ready.

The German Foreign Office is currently preparing a road map for elections in the separatist regions of Donbass and Luhansk to get the Minsk 2 agreement implemented – a job that will only grow more pressing next year when Germany assumes the chairmanship of the OSCE, which is responsible for observing the elections and certifying them free and fair. This will put Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko under a great deal of pressure to implement the decentralization law and accept elections in the separatist regions, steps that could even further destabilize his position in Ukrainian politics.

Yet as long as the borders with Russia are open and there is no security and no free media – and criminal warlords are able to operate in an extra-legal space – free and fair elections are impossible. It would be impossible to send civil election observers from the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights into such a region without undermining the credibility of the OSCE.

And while several of these future variables remain uncertain, one thing is already clear: it is not Russia that is compromising in eastern Ukraine, but the EU – especially the larger member states, many of which have an interest in resolving the Donbass problem quickly and improving the relations with Moscow.

European politicians have been emphasizing that since the beginning of September the ceasefire agreement has (more or less) worked. But this merely represents the success of a traditional Russian tactic: create a problem and then “solve” the problem you have created, and make the other side believe that you have thus reached a compromise. We have accepted that Putin is willing to compromise because we lack any alternative to the Minsk process; yet the Minsk 2 agreement already conceded too much to Russia, with many areas left vague and open to re-interpretation.

All this plays into the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin. When Putin punctuated his September address at the UN General Assembly with military strikes in Syria, it became clear how much he was willing to do to force negotiation with other international leaders, particularly the US president. And Putin’s timing could hardly be better: as the West has no strategy for restoring stability in Syria and Iraq or fighting IS, it will clutch at any aid Putin offers – even if Putin himself has no plan beyond supporting Syria’s discredited ruler Bashar al-Assad.

Russia’s inclusion in the Vienna Process confirms that, following his meeting with Obama at the G20 summit in Ankara, Putin is to be a part of a diplomatic initiative to solve the Syrian disaster. Thus even if the Vienna format represents a step forward, it also presents Russian leadership an opportunity for a new round of diplomatic games – and once more, it is not Russia that is moving to compromise, but the West. Assad has become at least in the short and medium term a part of the solution in Syria. That is what Putin has always wanted – for his authoritarian ally being welcomed to the negotiating table, and his concept of a stabile rump state to be accepted by the West. How all this will work with the Syrian opposition nobody knows, but the main thing is that Russia is back – and we no longer speak of the Ukraine problem.

It is frightening how much European leaders are driven by the needs of crisis management, winning short term gains without any plan to secure long-term interests. With his support for Nord Stream 2 and trip to Moscow, Sigmar Gabriel has acted as though he is a purely domestic politician, one who is not concerned by Russian foreign policy. He knows how unpopular Merkel’s approach towards Russia is in his own party, and is exploiting her weakness. Germanys OSCE chairmanship next year, along with the idea promoted by German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier to engage with Russia in a Eurasian Economic Union-EU context, will give Russian leaders plenty of space to finish undermining the credibility of Merkel’s Russia policy.

A new Neue Ostpolitik remains unlikely as long as Russia makes no real compromises to rebuild trust with German leaders, and Nord Stream 2 will not help Vladimir Putin to reengage with Germany on a broader level. Ukraine, however, may well fall victim to these developments – it is increasingly seen as a hindrance to normalizing relations with Moscow. Yet to destabilize the government in Kiev while pressing it to fulfill Minsk 2 might create a next much bigger crisis, one which must be managed by Berlin.

It would be good for German leaders to think carefully before selling out their own values and principles. This is not a new German realpolitik which deals with the reality of Putin’s regime, but a slow return to a policy of hope rather than fact.

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