It’s a worrying sign – perhaps one of irreversible senile decay – when one finds oneself admiring not merely a senior politician, but one who is chancellor of Germany. Readers of Brussels Signal are possibly aware that the position has not always been held by people of the most noble and uplifting probity History whispers that there can be some terrible downstream consequences when the wrong people get the job. Bismarck, for example. Also Merkel. (Why? One word. Russia.) And there was that other chap….
It was to him that Friedrich Merz was recently referring when he addressed the reopening ceremony of the synagogue on Munich’s Reichenbachstrasse, and for a moment, genuinely wept. It was not in the least, as the expression goes, “performative”. Philipp Peyman Engel, editor-in-chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine, Germany’s foremost Jewish newspaper, reported: “It was a goosebump moment.”
That is an accolade indeed from any Jewish observer about a German chancellor. It is usually steps not bumps that most people refer to when ever talking about a goose and Germany. Moreover, one has to feel sorry for poor Merz: He has inherited a vast mess in whatever direction he looks. Upwards to the moon, from which a Chinese weapons station will probably be pointing its lasers on Berlin in ten years’ time. Eastwards towards Russia, enough said. Westward towards Brussels, the undemocratic home of a pseudo-democratic imperial union, and even further westward to Washington, which is rightly sick and tired of Europe and its arrant, arrogant refusal to behave like adults. To the South he sees Israel and its endless war-or-survival, and beyond to the Arab countries, which also are the home of millions of “new Germans”, though as to whether that is what they will genuinely become is somewhere between marginal and net zero. So, a lot of juggler’s balls in the air….
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