Cuddled up with Putin for too long - only a ruin remains of Merkel's Ostpolitik

Created: 02/24/2022Updated: 02/24/2022 05:39

By: Georg Anastasiadis

A comment by Georg Anastasiadis © Frederic Sierakowski/dpa/Marcus Schlaf

The traffic light government buried the Baltic Sea pipeline.

Their ruins remain the symbol of the failure of Merkel's failed Ostpolitik.

A commentary by Georg Anastasiadis.

Step by step, the traffic light government is burying the Merkel-Putin pipeline: After Chancellor Olaf Scholz suspended the approval process, Green Economics Minister Habeck said it would have been "wiser" not to build the pipeline in the first place.

Late insight is better than none at all.

Now the central energy project of the Merkel era is ending as a ruin - and as a double symbol of failure: Firstly, the geostrategic arrogance of the former chancellor has been unmasked as a historical mistake The wind blew and relied on an Ostpolitik that could not be surpassed in good faith.

Secondly, an energy policy that has precipitously abandoned the reliable nuclear energy source and instead threw itself into the arms of the unpredictable gas patron in the Kremlin has failed.

Gas customers now pay the price.

Ukraine conflict and the consequences: it would be smart to let the last German nuclear reactors continue to run

The new SPD chancellor has to be credited for taking the first opportunity to exit the pipeline project face-saving.

But as finance minister, he supported it uncritically for a long time, while the Gazprom lobbyists Gerhard Schröder and Manuela Schwesig set the tone in his SPD.

The prime minister of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania now even has it in writing from the court that she flouted international law with her policy.

The main thing is that the gas pipe comes to your federal state.

Of course, the giant statesman Söder, who just a few weeks ago called for the Baltic Sea pipeline to be commissioned because the public mood was in favor of it, is also disgraced.

Now begins, enforced by the warlord in Moscow, the time of bug fixes.

If Habeck is already talking about “cleverness”, it would be clever to let the last three German nuclear reactors that are about to be shut down continue to run until our country has enough renewables to ensure its own energy security, unperturbed by Putin’s threats.

It would definitely be cheaper than importing liquefied fracking gas from overseas.

And it would not only be clever, but also the least that politicians owe to German electricity customers, who often no longer know how to pay their bills.

George Anastasiadis