Klingbeil wants security from Russia: The SPD admits its mistakes, Merkel does not

Created: 10/19/2022, 6:00 p.m

By: Georg Anastasiadis

"Security from Russia" is now the top priority: Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis comments on the new SPD course to the Kremlin.

© Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Klaus Haag

In the wake of the Ukraine war, the SPD is revising its attitude towards the Kremlin and clearing up old misconceptions.

The Union, however, remains entangled in Merkel's Russia course of complacency.

A commentary by Georg Anastasiadis.

SPD leader Lars Klingbeil has added a few new sentences to his party's creed, which, in their shattering clarity, are likely to deeply shake some veteran comrades.

First: The statement still contained in the 2021 election manifesto that security and stability in Europe can only exist with and not against Russia is no longer valid.

Secondly: "Russia has said goodbye to the system of common security and the common system of values." From which the SPD chairman concludes thirdly: "Today it is about organizing security before Russia."

War in Ukraine: SPD now openly admits its old mistakes in assessing Kremlin policy

Yes: One can accuse the SPD of its long tradition of Russia-political mistakes and cronies, arising from historical guilt complexes and the neurotic tendency to glorify Kremlin politics even when only the most short-sighted did not use the brutal KGB methods aimed at murder and conquest of Putin wanted to see.

But at least the party, after some hesitation, is now frankly admitting its mistakes.

The bitter truth is that as long as not only Putin, but Russia's elite as a whole, does not want to let go of their almost religious obsession with the unification of sacred Russian mother earth, the rest of Europe is left with the prospect of a new Cold War that may last for decades.

While one German people's party is honest after a rude awakening to the new reality, the other remains caught up in ever more adventurous attempts to justify its wrong policy of the past, which owes its economic (apparent) successes above all to carelessness, two aggressive ones to have handed over to dictatorships, Russia and China.

Ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel has now even gone so far as to defiantly claim that her coziness towards the Kremlin, which she continued to pursue after the annexation of Crimea, was “rational and understandable” because she gave Germany access to cheap gas.

Merkel's Germany has surrendered itself defenselessly to two aggressive dictatorships

I beg your pardon?

It is not only in the ears of Putin's victims that this bossiness must ring like derisive laughter.

It is also an unabashed excuse for a lack of geostrategic foresight: In the magic triangle of energy policy - profitability, security of supply, environmental compatibility - it has never been a good idea to make profitability, i.e. the price, absolute and ignore everything else.

Merkel's grand coalition exhausted itself in the desire to be obliging: To do this, it got out of nuclear power and coal (unfortunately without pushing ahead energetically enough with the expensive expansion of renewables), as well as national defense and the protection of borders against uncontrolled migration.

This culpable carelessness was exaggerated with the obtrusive claim of moral superiority.

And it is not only Germany that is paying a high price for all of this.

Even the Merz-Union will not be able to free itself from its entanglements if it does not finally manage to name the gas and Russia policy of its 16-year-old chancellor as clearly as what it has always been (and not only in retrospect) was: a big historical mistake.

There was never a lack of warnings, also in our newspaper, by the way.

George Anastasiadis