Povera Italia, Povera Europe!
It is a catastrophe with promise: According to the projections, the majority of Italians yesterday decided in favor of a right-wing government alliance led by a post-fascist party.
Two almost forgotten figures now appear on the stage again.
Silvio Berlusconi
, 85, Forza Italia boss, who as prime minister four times established tax fraud in Italian top politics, now wants to become president of the Senate and recently said on the war of aggression in Ukraine that Putin had been pressured into this "special operation".
"Russia Today" couldn't have put it better.
Matteo Salvini
, 49, leader of the Lega, former interior minister who, it should be remembered, was reported to have proposed racial segregation of immigrants and Italians in railway carriages in 2009.
At the top
Giorgia Meloni
, 45, head of the former splinter party Fratelli d'Italia, now soon prime minister.
It has repeatedly claimed that the EU is engaged in a big business-funded “population exchange” — a far-right conspiracy narrative at its finest.
Good prospects, not only for Rome, but also for Brussels, where the round of anti-agitators, especially from Hungary and Poland, now has another comrade-in-arms.
The delicate germ called unity, which recently grew significantly in our actions against Russia, could soon be destroyed again - and the
split between progressives and brakers in the European alliance
even deeper.
"Giorgia Meloni comes from a neo-fascist splinter party that had a monument erected to Italy's worst war criminal and genocide," writes my colleague Frank Hornig, SPIEGEL correspondent in Rome.
"She has a 'disgust' for Germany.
She is not looking for closeness to Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron - but to the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán.«
So does this chapter of the morning situation have to end in the apocalypse?
Not quite, because
there are also good reasons to believe that things are not going to be quite so bad.
First
, you don't know how long this squad will hold together.
In Italy, people are used to quick changes and there was a lot of crunching between the two men and the woman beforehand.
Second
, Meloni has clearly positioned himself against Putin and pro-Ukraine.
She also wants to implement the reform plans requested by the EU and work with the Commission.
This could perhaps also be related to the fact that she does not want to forego the 200 billion euros from the EU's Corona reconstruction plan.
The money might seem like putty for a while — bad enough.
Third
, Italy is a functioning democracy in which power is shared.
In addition to the government and parliament, there is a very self-confident judiciary, a lively civil society and the president, who has a great stabilizing effect in Italy.
Incumbent Sergio Matterella, a centre-left member of the Partito Democartico, was only re-elected to a second term in January.
So there is hope.
Little bit.
About 15 years ago I asked an Italian friend why so many in his country voted for Berlusconi.
His explanation was the rubbish in Naples that had been piling up in the streets for many months.
As prime minister, Berlusconi invited local politicians to special meetings, established a state secretary for the garbage emergency, declared the landfills a military zone and sent soldiers: soon the garbage was gone.
Even if the fundamental problem - the overloading of landfills - was not solved, Berlusconi's crackdown impressed people, my friend said.
That's what makes populists so successful: They have a much better sense than many other politicians (and journalists) of what really moves people.
Giorgia Meloni's election victory: what the shift to the right means for Italy
The gas-completely-unclear situation
It is understandable that politicians do not do everything right in times of crisis.
It's understandable that she sometimes gets really wrong.
And so my outrage at the
back and forth in the gas levy
has so far been limited.
It's also a complicated thing.
But now a new act has opened in the pay-as-you-go drama, the absurdity of which exceeds my tolerance limit.
Last week, Economics Minister
Robert Habeck
(Greens) was still upset about the Union's destructive "The gas surcharge-muuuuss-weeg" attitude, but he himself doubted that his invention would still be legally tenable if the money from this surcharge was fresh nationalized group like Uniper.
Finance Minister
Christian Lindner
(FDP) has brushed aside these concerns.
But then he suddenly fundamentally questioned the controversial instrument: “We have a gas levy that increases the price.
But we need a gas price brake that lowers the price,” said the finance minister in the “Bild am Sonntag” in an impressively simply formulated logic.
More and more »the question of economic meaning« arises.
In the
Chancellery
, the gas levy was maintained for a long time and reminded that it was expressly a wish of the economy.
But a sentence by the Chancellor on his trip to the Middle East indicated in his zero statement ("This is something where all factors have to be considered together") that Olaf Scholz is currently thinking hard.
If the money doesn't come from the allocation, it has to come from somewhere else, for example from the household.
But then the debt brake would be endangered in the coming year, which Lindner wants to continue to adhere to, as he emphasized again yesterday in "Anne Will".
He also revealed that he already had an idea of how it could work, but would not reveal it.
Attention cliffhangers!
And now?
The chancellor and his two ministers should quickly sit down and draft the finale of this piece before the boos from the audience can no longer be overheard.
Maybe today?
Rivalry between Habeck and Lindner: One will lose
You can find more news and background information on the war in Ukraine here:
That happened at night:
The Ukrainian President reports fierce fighting along the front line - and condemns the partial mobilization of Russia.
The mayor of Melitopol warns against forced recruitment.
Slovakia rejects the general admission of Russian conscientious objectors.
The overview.
"The mobilization will cause a lot of problems for Russia":
Vladimir Putin wants to draft 300,000 reservists.
The Russia expert Liana Fix sees the aggressor in a position of weakness and anticipates "bitter military battles".
People are leaving Russia:
The escape from the Russian partial mobilization apparently continues: The Finnish border guards report thousands of additional travelers.
Long queues form at the border crossing to Georgia.
Putin and the Peak Power Syndrome:
Russia is in demographic decline like many other countries on the globe.
Power is waning, leaders fear relegation - that makes them even more dangerous.
A column by Henrik Müller.
"Nord Stream 2" fetishism
Speaking of boos.
Yesterday in Lubmin you could get a foretaste of what might be to come.
The motto of a demo
registered by a member of the lateral thinker party »Die Basis«
was: Open Nord Stream 2!
A popular, recurring demand that a Bundestag Vice President has already expressed, but that doesn't make it any more plausible.
The Russian President also turned off the gas in Nord Stream 1 –
so whether there is no gas flowing through one or two pipelines, the result is the same
: in the end there is zero gas.
Apparently, the protesters were less concerned with the one tube and more with
hate speech against the government in general
, as my two colleagues Maik Baumgärtner and Ann-Katrin Müller from Lubmin report.
About 4,000 people gathered yesterday in the small seaside resort and listened for almost two and a half hours as it was demanded on stage that "the Reichstag had to be swept through again".
"The demonstration shows once again that it's not really about people's problems, but about forging the broadest possible anti-democratic alliance," say Baumgärtner and Müller.
Protests in Germany: The murmurs from a wide transverse front
Old acquaintance in uniform
The
Chancellor was
in the Middle East
over the weekend
, three countries in two days, it was a delicate mission.
In
Saudi Arabia
, he met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man Western intelligence services blame for the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi four years ago.
He shook his hand, ending a long diplomatic ice age.
At the same time, the Chancellor assured, he had discussed all human rights issues with the Crown Prince.
LNG and diesel contracts have been signed with the Germans in
the
United Arab Emirates .
Then Scholz traveled to
Qatar
with his large delegation for talks;
allegedly also about human rights, especially about gas.
However, no contracts were signed.
It's the well-known dilemma: How high can a country's
rogue
level be so that you can still do business with it?
At what level is the tolerance limit exceeded?
The level of the hurdle is constantly changing, influenced above all by our own needs – for example for energy.
It's, all things considered, rarely a flawless deal.
Scholz came back during the night.
In the afternoon we go to the Julius-Leber barracks, where the chancellor will take the first important step in his turning point: a new command and control unit will be set up, bundling the leadership of the armed forces in Germany.
An old acquaintance becomes the new commander: Carsten Breuer, the corona general.
From November 2021 to May 2022, Breuer was head of the federal government's pandemic crisis team in the Federal Chancellery and then coordinated the Bundeswehr's operations in forest fires.
In his new role, the major general sees the "hybrid influence on Germany's security architecture" as the greatest challenge.
So his eyes will be directed towards Moscow in the future.
Corona General Breuer: "Not quite peace anymore, not quite war yet"
Here is the current quiz of the day
The starting question today:
When did the state of war between the USA and Germany end?
Winner of the day...
… is
Eliud Kipchoge
from Kenya, who delivered a superhuman performance yesterday at the Berlin Marathon.
With 2 hours, 1 minute and 9 seconds for the 42 kilometers he undercut his best performance from last year by 30 seconds.
I need an hour and 10 to 15 minutes for my 13-kilometer lap.
I can't imagine how a person can run so fast for so long.
The latest news from the night
EU condemns Iran's violent actions:
The European Union has now sharply criticized the government of Tehran for the brutal suppression of demonstrations critical of the regime.
The 27 EU member states are also considering sanctions.
Fire in a nursing home – three dead, six seriously injured:
A fire broke out in the home in Wardenburg near Oldenburg for an unknown reason.
Rihanna is performing at the next Super Bowl:
The nine-time Grammy winner is the star of the next halftime show of the NFL finals on February 12, 2023. The TV spectacle also has a new sponsor.
The SPIEGEL + recommendations for today
Bolsonaro's friends with the gun:
Hundreds of thousands of supporters of Brazil's head of state Bolsonaro have bought a gun in recent years.
Will they throw the country into chaos if he loses the presidential election in a few days?
Somehow, somewhere, at some point:
The traffic light wants to support around every tenth school in deprived areas with money from the federal government.
Disputes among the countries threaten to crush the project.
And does the help actually end up in the right schools?
»If you sit alone in a restaurant, you feel like nobody wants to play with you«:
Being alone has a bad reputation.
The author Sarah Diehl explains where it comes from – and what we might miss if we keep adapting to other people.
The secret of a Roman roast giraffe:
In ancient Rome, there was hardly any food without the sauce garum, made from fermented fish.
Today, flavor researchers work with similar methods.
How does antiquity taste?
I wish you a good start into the day – and into the week!
Yours, Martin Knobbe
