The German Chancellor would be looking for a “new start” in his relationship with Vladimir Putin, the opposite of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the ecologist Annalena Baerbock.
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Between Russia and the United States, there is the European Union (EU). And at the heart of this one, there is Germany. Logically, Berlin should therefore occupy a central place in the intense diplomatic sequence of this beginning of the year, where what is at stake, through the fate of Ukraine, is nothing less than the security of the continent European.
For Germany to play this role, however, it should have a clear policy vis-à-vis Russia. However, it is not the case. Since his election, December 8, 2021, the new Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, shows itself very little about the issue. According to the Daily BILD, however, this discretion would be misleading. In an article published on Monday, January 3, the Conservative tabloid affirms that Mr. Scholz is looking for a “new start” in the German-Russian relations and he intends to take the file directly in hand, relegating a role of Figuring its Minister of Foreign Affairs, the ecologist Annalena Baerbock, partisan of a firmware policy vis-à-vis the Kremlin. According to Bild, a first bilateral meeting between the new leader of the German Government and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, would be scheduled by the end of January.
If the chancery has not confirmed this information, they have not been very well commented in the German press, which questions what this call can mean to a “new start” in the Relations between Berlin and Moscow while these are not consensus within the “Tricolore fire” coalition led by Mr. Scholz.
“I have trouble seeing the form that this new start could take. For the moment, there is nothing substantial, nothing concrete. What is true for Russia is a elsewhere for Germany’s foreign policy in general, which is not very strategic, not conceptual and essentially reactive, “says Stefan Meister, head of the” International Order and Democracy “program at the DGAP, a Think Tank Berlin specialized in the study international relations. “In addition, Scholz has a very minimalist way of communicating, so it’s hard to know what he really has in mind,” he adds.
“new ostpolitik”
At Mr. Scholz, this idea of a “reset” in German-Russian relations is not new. “We need a new ostpolitik,” he already told Deutsche Welle, in August 2021, with reference to the Politics of the former Social Democrat Chancellor (SPD) Willy Brandt (1969-1974), aimed at to normalize relations with the USSR. In this interview published a month before the legislative of September 26, 2021, the SPD candidate at the Chancellery did not have much advanced on the content of this “new ostpolitik”, containing that Russia had to accept that “C is the strength of the right that applies and not the right of the strongest “. “A typical phrase of a German social democrat: when he wants to please his electorate, he talks to him about a new ostpolitik,” says Stefan Meister.
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