16 NEWS Best articles: Europe
THE WEEK 9 April 2022Some dictators
can’t afford to
face reality
Die Welt
(Hamburg)Nuclear weapons matter hugely to the dictator Kim Jong Un, says Torsten Krauel. A symbol of
national pride, they guarantee the regime’s security. So it was a major setback when, on 16 March,
North Korea’s new intercontinental ballistic missile, Hwasong-17, blew up on its test flight above
Pyongyang. A state-of-the-art, two-stage long-distance rocket, it had been Kim’s “pride and joy”.
But pride was restored when a week later, the rocket was launched on a second attempt. Or was it?
Discrepancies in the glossy video recording of the second launch indicate an older model of rocket
was used for the launch, together with shots of the new rocket. Kim’s resort to subterfuge wasn’t just
a matter of preserving his “infallibility”. The country, as he admitted in a party confer ence, faces “the
worst difficulties”, as its zero-Covid policy has cut off critical supplies. The state media is also full of
talk about the “ideological misconduct” of security officials. For Kim, trying to con his people and
world opinion with sham shows of force is the only way he knows to keep his problems at bay.The Inquisition,
an oligarch and
an EU passport
Haaretz
(Tel Aviv)He is (or at least used to be) one of Putin’s pet oligarchs; he’s an Israeli citizen; he’s the richest man in
Israel. Yet last year, Roman Abramovich somehow managed to become a Portuguese citizen too. You
can see what was in it for him: if you own properties and dock yachts across Europe, an EU passport
is a huge benefit. But why was it ever granted? That’s what the Portuguese authorities want to know.
And the answer lies in their own attempt to right a historic wrong, says Nesi Altaras. In the 15th
century, under the Spanish Inquisition, tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from the Iberian
peninsula; their descendants – known as Sephardim – initially settled in Morocco and Ottoman
Turkey. In a belated gesture of atonement, Spain and Portugal recently passed “laws of return”,
granting citizenship to anyone able to establish Sephardic ancestry. And under Portugal’s lax system,
the job of approving an applicant’s Sephardic heritage was outsourced to the Jewish communities of
Porto and Lisbon. Abramovich has no publicly known Sephardic ancestor, but Porto’s rabbi, Daniel
Litvak, somehow appears to have attested to the existence of one. Litvak was recently arrested on his
way to Israel, and the full truth has yet to emerge, but the entire rotten saga underlines how generous
but ill-thought-out gestures can so easily be subverted by unscrupulous opportunists.NORTH KOREA
PORTUGAL
“Like a deer in the headlights,”
Germany’s government has been
“caught in the trap of Russian
gas”, said Le Monde (Paris). For
two decades, Berlin has prided itself
that getting the bulk of its gas –
now some 40% – from Russia was
a win-win policy, helping both to
lower energy costs and draw Russia
closer to Europe. Only two months
ago, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was
still resisting pressure from his
European partners to abandon the
Nord Stream 2 pipeline through
which gas would flow from Russia
to Germany. Now, however, that
policy can be seen for what it is: “a
veritable economic and social time bomb”, one that could
have exploded last week when Vladimir Putin threatened that
payments for Russian energy would all have to be in sanction-
breaking Russian roubles. Luckily, Putin relented on that threat
this week: he needs the money as badly as Germany needs the
gas. But let us hope this is a wake-up call for Berlin to give up
its energy reliance on Russia. “The time for denial is over.”But how soon will it act, asked Nik Martin and Insa Wrede in
Deutsche Welle (Bonn). Right now, “Germany is effectively
funding Putin’s war machine” by spending hundreds of millions
of euros daily on Russian energy. We have to go on doing that,
insists the Federation of German Industries, or we’ll suffer
“incalculable consequences”, a line Scholz has echoed. Any
sudden embargo, he told parliament last month, would mean
“plunging our country and the whole of Europe into recession”.
Well, possibly so, yet some analysts are adamant that a short-
term halt to the supply would be “sub stan tial but manageable”:
according to scholars from the German National Academy of
Sciences Leopoldina, it would cause no more than a 0.5%-3%
fall in Germany’s GDP – small beer compared with the 4.5%
fall in the first year of the pandemic.Chancellor Scholz just doesn’t seem to get it, said Alexander
Kissler in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich). He has been deeplyunimpressive throughout this
crisis. He brooks no criticism: he
resembles more and more the
know-it-all Social Democrat
mayor he once was. By contrast,
the next most prominent member
of the federal government –
economics minister and Green
party co-leader Robert Habeck- has grown in stature. Habeck
has announced a three-stage alert
system to put the country in
readiness for energy cutbacks, the
final one involving the rationing of
gas supplies. The first stage – an
early warning of a supply
emergency – was triggered last
week. The “brash” regional politician has turned into a pan-
German leader. “Habeck can crisis; Scholz can only Scholz.”
Well, not exactly, said Jörg Münchenberg on Deutschlandfunk
(Berlin). Habeck should have acted a lot sooner to prepare
citizens and companies to use energy more sparingly: his own
Green party urged him to do so, but until this week he held
back. The bottom line, in all this, said Hans-Werner Sinn in
Project Syndicate (Prague), is that thanks to Angela Merkel’s
disastrous energy policies – shutting down the nation’s 17
nuclear plants at the same time as phasing out coal – Germany
is stuck. It simply won’t be able to import the gas it would need
were it to slash the supply from Russia. Unlike many of its
neighbours, it has no liquefied natural gas terminals that could
enable Russian deliveries to be replaced by deliveries from the
US or the Middle East. If it did suddenly cut back on Russian
gas imports, then the gas-based residential heating systems –
“on which half the German population rely” – and the
industrial processes that depend on gas imports (notably the
chemical industry and the world’s largest chemical firm, BASF),
would collapse. The chances of any government surviving the
resulting chaos would be non-existent, and “the likely scale of
domestic disruption would call into question the cohesion of
the Western response to the Ukraine war”. In short, don’t
expect Germany to wean itself off Russian gas any time soon.In hock to Moscow: Germany’s woeful energy policy
“Habeck (left) can crisis; Scholz (right) can only Scholz”