[Guardian] After the war in Ukraine led German chancellor Olaf Scholz to pivot dramatically last week on his country’s postwar creeds of faith, attention is shifting to his predecessors, who took Germany down a strategic path towards Russia that became a dead end.
The conflict in the east has caused a seismic shift in Germany, where Scholz has made a U-turn on a restrictive stance on weapons exports, announced huge increases in military spending and vowed to wean the country off Russian gas.
Since then, all eyes have been on Gerhard Schröder, the unrepentant ex-chancellor who in his final weeks in power shook hands with Vladimir Putin to ratify the Nord Stream pipeline underneath the Baltic Sea. Just weeks later, Schröder slipped effortlessly through the revolving door to become chairman of Nord Stream. The resultant increase in Germany’s reliance on Russian energy, politicians in Berlin now concede, may have led Putin to believe Germany would be too hamstrung to support concerted economic sanctions.
As a paid-up lobbyist of energy giant Gazprom, Schröder’s motivation is transparent: on Friday, Scholz called on his party colleague and former boss to sever ties with Russian state-owned companies.
Less clear is why Schröder’s course of expanding economic ties with Russia was broadly continued by his successor, Angela Merkel, and whether she did so purely out of passivity or to her political advantage. |
