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Soriek  1yr ago (text post)   1644 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 26

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum lives in or might be interested in. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Germany

The Guardian touches on Germany’s rough economic period:

Industrial production has fallen for five straight months and is more than 7% below its pre-pandemic levels. The International Monetary Fund expects Germany to be the weakest economy in the G7 group of leading rich nations this year, and the only one to see output fall…

After shrinking this year between July and September there was a good chance, according to Brzeski, of a similarly weak performance in the final three months of 2023. Those two consecutive quarters of contraction would leave the economy in a technical recession.

Germany has managed to find alternative sources of energy to make up for the loss of Russian gas from the Ukraine war but it has been more expensive. Energy-intensive sectors such as chemicals have been particularly hard hit.

There have been other adverse shocks. Germany’s strong export performance in the years running up to the pandemic was in part due to strong demand from China, which has now moderated. Meanwhile, its motor industry is being attacked on two fronts – from cheap Chinese electric cars, and from the incentives provided by Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for low-carbon manufacturing to migrate to the US.

Also, @Southkraut has covered Die Linke’s former leader Sahra Wagenknecht leaving to form a more immigration skeptical party. She brought nine other lawmakers with her, but apparently they hadn’t formally stepped down from their seats to allow Die Linke to replace them. On Tuesday the beleaguered and divided Die Linke has announced that they see no path forward and will now dissolve their caucus. In the last election they had 4.9% of the vote (39/736 seats) and will be unlikely to win enough to gain seats in the next election. However, the party will continue to exist and work in the state governments it participates in. It’s unclear what exactly the future holds.

Following the trend of I guess everyone becoming more immigration skeptical, the governing CDU [edit: coalition of the SPD, Greens, and FDP] has announced more immigration controls, apparently against the wishes of their coalition partner the Greens:

Stricter measures to deal with a large number of migrants arriving in Germany have been agreed by the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and state leaders, as NGOs criticised Italy’s plans to create centres in Albania to accommodate asylum seekers.

After a marathon session of talks in Berlin that continued into the early hours of Tuesday, Scholz said the measures would help speed up asylum procedures, restrict social benefits for migrants, and provide more federal funding for local communities.

You mean the governing SPD, surely?

Laziness on my part - I even read a piece recently on the CDU victories in state elections describing them as the opposition party. I looked up the German government but saw they were the largest party, pattern matched that to Scholz having high profile roles in Merkel's governments, and assumed away the rest. All I can say in my defense is apparently our resident German was as surprised as I am!

Surprised by how easily I missed it! I won't have it said that I didn't know which parties formed the current government - their election and their actions were of significant impact on my life through pandemic measures and housing market, and I have spent many hours facepalming over their misdeeds.

Has their rule policy-wise just not been very different from the previous governments?

Not much, no, they were both middle-of-the road establishment governments, both with SPD involvement, only one with the conservative CDU and the other with the Greens and liberal FDP on board. So naturally the previous government was a bit slower overall, whereas the current one accelerated the timetable for various progressive doodads like trans rights and climate projects, until they suddenly found out that the FDP isn't there just for show and that little yellow party is currently telling everyone else to stop wasting taxpayer money. Fun to watch. But really, in the end nobody's rocking the boat, and the boat of Germany is big and bureaucratically overloaded and sits low in the water and is slow to turn. There's nothing revolutionary to expect.

Interesting, thanks for the expanded detail.

How did I miss that? I guess we had such a long stretch of CDU governance under Mutti Merkel, it just became second nature to assume that they're always in charge and whatever interlude is happening at present isn't a real government.

Additionally, for Germany:

Last year, the governing coalition retroactively repurposed funds amounting to 60 billion €, originally meant to compensate for damages caused by the COVID pandemic, from the 2021 budget to fund various climate measures. Yesterday, the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht, BVerG) ruled that this was an unconstitutional breach of the Debt Brake (Schuldenbremse), which was meant to strictly limit state spending to prevent the accumulation of greater debt. The court found that the government had not provided sufficient justification for in how far spending on climate would offset the negative consequences of the pandemic, such justification being required by the Debt Brake clause of the constitution.

The Left is now calling for the Debt Brake to be removed altogether because money is a spook (*), the Greens want it to become more flexible since to them the justification is good enough, the liberal FDP and conservative CDU call it Working As Intended, and to be honest I don't know what the others said so far.

(*) My words. Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

As always, the BVerG is a bit of a wild card. I haven't heard of anyone having predicted this, and the last time they were big in the news was when they rubber-stamped (or duly supported, depending on your point of view) whatever the government did in the name of pandemic measures.

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