4 ★ FT Weekend 17 August/18 August 2019INTERNATIONAL
TOBIAS BUCK AND GUY CHAZAN
BERLINGerman finance minister Olaf Scholz
has signalled he is ready to run for the
leadership of theSocial Democratic
party, breathing new life into a race that
has suffered until now from a notable
absence of big-name candidates.
The SPD has been without a leader
sinceAndrea Nahles stepped down
from the job in June following a painful
defeat in the European Parliament elec-
tions. The party is set to pick a replace-
ment in December, after an extended
internal campaign and areferendumof
rank-and-file members.
The race will be closely watched in
part to see whether a new leader can
turn round the SPD’s dramatic slide in
the polls.
But it also matters because oflikely
repercussions for Angela Merkel’s gov-
ernment. The SPD agreed last year to
support the veteran chancellor and
serve once again as the junior coalition
partner to Ms Merkel’s Christian Demo-
crats. That decisionis now seen as a mis-
take by many party leaders and mem-
bers, who want the SPD to abandon the
coalition at the end of this year.
Mr Scholz is one of the most vocifer-
ous supporters of thegrand coalition,
and would likely fight hard for the SPD
to remain in government.
News of Mr Scholz’s plan to run was
first reported by Der Spiegel, the Ger-
man magazine. The Financial Times
understands he signalled his interestin
recent days but has yet to make a formal
announcement. The finance ministry
declined to comment on the report.
The finance minister’s move, if con-firmed, would mark a dramatic reversal
from previous assurances by Mr Scholz,
who said repeatedly that he had no
intention to run. He argued that his job
as finance minister left him no time to
take on the task of leading and rejuve-
nating the SPD.
But party insiders said at the time Mr
Scholz’s reluctance also reflected his
view that he was unlikely to win the sup-
port of the party base. Mr Scholz has
often done poorly in internal elections
for party office in recent years, owing to
his position on the conservative wing of
the SPD and his strong support for the
grand coalition. His somewhat robotic
public appearances have earned him
the nickname “Scholz-O-Mat”.
His supporters dismiss such criticism,
however, and instead point to Mr
Scholz’s wide-ranging experience as
finance and labour minister, and as
mayor of Hamburg, his home town. He
is also one of only a handful of top party
figures who have a record of winning
elections. With most senior SPD leaders
having ruled themselves out of the race
already, Mr Scholz may have concluded
his chances of winning are better than
initially thought.
The SPD has been mired in crisis since
the September 2017 general election,
when the party slid to just 20.5 per cent
of the vote. Scarred by infighting and
hemmed in by its commitment to the
grand coalition, the Social Democrats
have fallen even further since: some sur-
veys suggest the SPD would win just 12
per cent of the vote if a general election
was held today — a shocking number for
a party that has governed Europe’s larg-
est economy three times since the end of
the war and obtained more than 40 per
cent of the vote as recently as 1998.
Should Mr Scholz stand as a candi-
date, he would have to find a female
party colleague to join the ticket.
Opinionpage 7German politics
Berlin finance
minister Scholz
signals interest in
SPD leadership
Big name would inject new
life into party race and
fight to remain in coalition
Zimbabwe’s police beat protesters on
the streets of the capital Harare
yesterday after the government of
President Emmerson Mnangagwa
banned a demonstration against its
mismanagement of the economy.
Riot police charged into crowds and
tear-gassed Red Cross personnelhelping the injured after a court
upheld a ban on the protest. The
demonstration was called by the main
opposition Movement for Democratic
Change in response to desperate
shortages of food, fueland electricity.
Mr Mnangagwa promised to end the
worst practices of Robert Mugabe’s
rule when he replaced him in a 2017
coup. But he has increasingly used
force to suppress anger over rising
prices and currency chaos. Thirteen
people were killed in January after a
violent crackdown on protests over a
sharp increase in fuel prices.
“After a few skirmishes...
normalcy has returned to Harare,” thegovernment said yesterday:
“Security remains on high alert.”
IMF-backedausterity measures
adopted to end the money-printing
that triggered shortageshave
increased the pain for ordinary
people as prices soar. This week,
Zimbabwe’s hospital doctors’
association warned the health
system was facing collapse within
weeks because “members are
struggling to meet the costs of basic
needs” such as shelter.
More than 5.5m people in rural
areas face serious food shortages by
2020 due to this year’s drought.
Joseph CotterillZimbabwe
Police suppress
street protests
Aaron Ufumeli/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockILAN BEN ZION— JERUSALEM
MATTHEW ROCCO— NEW YORKRashida Tlaib said yesterday she would
not travel to Israel, despite a govern-
ment reprieve allowing her a “humani-
tarian visit” to the West Bank, a day
after the US congresswoman had been
barredover her support for a group
promoting anti-Israel boycotts.Israel had taken the unprecedented step
of denying entry to Ms Tlaib and fellow
Democratic congresswoman Ilhan
Omar on Thursday because of their pro-
motion of the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions movement, which supports
boycotts of Israeli products and compa-
nies until the country ends the occupa-
tion of the West Bank.
A2017 Israeli law allows the country
to ban visitors, including Jews, who sup-
port the boycotts. President Donald
Trump had urged Israel to block the two
Muslim lawmakers — with whom he has
frequently sparred — saying it would
“show great weakness” by allowing
them to make the trip.
The move was roundly condemned by
Democratic lawmakers, including some
of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Con-
gress. Even Aipac, the powerful pro-
Israel lobby in Washington, said it
believed every US lawmaker should be
allowed to “visit and experience our
democratic ally Israel first-hand”.
Israel subsequently relented, allowing
Ms Tlaib — the daughter of Palestinian
immigrants — permission to visit her
grandmother, who still lives in the West
Bank.
But Ms Tlaib said in a series oftweets
yesterdayshe had “decided that visiting
my grandmother under these oppres-
sive conditions stands against every-
thing I believe in — fighting against rac-
ism, oppression & injustice. Silencing
me & treating me like a criminal is not
what she wants for me. It would kill a
piece of me.”
Ms Tlaib and Ms Omar, both fresh-
man congresswomen, had planned a
trip to the West Bank and East Jerusa-
lem next week and were not planning to
meet any Israeli officials.Israel
US lawmaker
drops plan
to visit West
Bank after
ban reversed
TOBIAS BUCK— OLDERSHAUSENPhilip von Oldershausen picks his way
past tree stumps and dead wood, a lush
forest of spruce trees turned into a land-
scape of devastation.
In his family’s forest, near the Harz
mountains in Lower Saxony,entire hill-
sides have beendestroyed, part of a
national environmental crisis and a
blow to Germans brought up on the fair-
ytale woodlands of the Brothers Grimm.
The tree trunks willbe removed and
sold at a steep discount as so-called
calamity timber. The real calamity,
however, is here to stay: climate change.
“Over the past year we have had long
periods without rain as well as periods
of tremendous heat. Water deposits are
exhausted, and all those factors
together have weakened the trees,” said
Mr von Oldershausen, an aristocrat
whose family has owned forests in the
region for more than 800 years. “The
trees can no longer defend themselves.”
At least 110,000 hectares of German
woodland have been destroyed this year
alone by heat and lack of water, which
leave the weakened trees at the mercy of
storms and parasites such as the bark
beetle. Some forest owners say they
stand to lose more than half their hold-
ings. Even without further losses this
year, the cost of replanting the trees
destroyed so far runs to €660m.
For the German public, the sight ofrazed woodlands and dead trees has
brought homein unusually stark fash-
ion the impact of climate change. “This
is a wake-up call,” said Nicola Uhde, a
forest expert at Bund, the environmen-
tal group. “For most Germans climate
change is something that felt distant.
We thought of polar bears and flooding
in Bangladesh. But now the forests are
dying, and it is happening right outside
our doorstep.”
Green campaigners have dubbed the
phenomenon Waldsterben 2.0, in apointed reference to the so-called Wald-
sterben, or forest dying, that gripped
the imagination of the German public in
the early 1980s. The principal cause of
the woodland demise then was acid rain
caused by pollutants in the air — a prob-
lem that would ultimately be solved
through tougher environmental stand-
ards for cars and factories.
The 1980s forest fightback was one of
the first environmental campaigns in
Germany to garner widespread political
support. This time, too, dramatic
images of dead and dying trees seem to
have spurred political action: agricul-
ture minister Julia Klöckner this week
vowed to spend at least €1.5bn in public
funds to help repair the damage. Next
month, the German government is
expected to answer the growing political
clamour for climate action with a wide-
ranging “climate package”aimed at
reducing carbon emissions.
Germans have long prided them-
selves on their special attachment to the
forest, which forms an elementary part
of national culture, from the tales of the
Brothers Grimm to the poems of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe.“The forest has a special meaning for
Germans. It is the place they yearn to be
in, and it has been like this for centu-
ries,” said Hans-Georg von der Marwitz,
the president of the German association
of forest owners.
Today, however, the forest is also a
place of ideological battle. Environmen-
tal groups say forest owners are at least
partly to blame for the current malaise
— and point to the widespread planting
of profitable but vulnerable conifer
trees in recent decades. Such trees,
including the ubiquitous spruce, have
suffered far more from the recent heat-
wave than beech and oak.
“The forest owners say this is all down
to the climate crisis and has nothing to
do with our forest management. We say:
Yes, this is a consequence of the climate
crisis but it also has to do with what you
did, and in particular the fact that in
many areas we now have a spruce
monoculture,” said Ms Uhde.
According to official data, conifer
treessuch as spruce and pine, which
grow relatively fast and are sought after
by the construction industry, account
for almost 50 per cent of Germany’s
11.4m hectares of woodland. Beech and
oak trees make up just 25 per cent.
Forest owners such as Mr von Older-
shausen agree that vulnerable tree
types such as spruce and pine will prob-
ably play a much smaller role in German
forests in the years ahead. But they also
warn that a full-scale return to the beech
and oak forests that dominated Ger-
many centuries ago — as suggested by
the environmental movement — would
be no less misguided. “There is no tree
type that is not showing signs of prob-
lems,” said Mr von Oldershausen.
In economic terms, the collapse of so
much forest has been a disaster. Timber
prices have dropped sharply in response
to the sudden surge in logging this year.
The impact on the environment has
been no less calamitous. In Germany,
forests absorb 62m tonnes of carbon
dioxide every year, equivalent to 7 per
cent of all emissions. When trees rot or
burn, however, carbon dioxide is
released back into the atmosphere.
Fornow, forest owners say there is lit-
tle they can do. Only one thing is clear,
as Mr von der Marwitz admitted: “The
forest of the future will look different.”Environment.Dying trees
Grim future for forests sparks German alarm
Devoted attachment to
fairytale woodland fuels
concerns over climate change
Philip von Oldershausen’s woodland has been devastated— Jan ZappnerHENRY FOY— MOSCOWDays after a nuclear-powered rocket
exploded, killing five people and injur-
ing others, authorities told residents in
Nyonoksa, a village in Russia’s north-
west adjacent to a secretive military
testing site, to leave their homes.The evacuation order followed news of a
16-fold radiation spike in a nearby city
and reports of pharmacies running out
of iodine. A ban on civilian boats in the
waters around the site added to the
panic. And then the authorities changed
their minds: residents could stay. The
village was safe, officials stressed. But
the mystery behind the explosion
remained.
The chaotic response to last week’s
incidentat the Nyonoksa facility on the
White Sea, one of Russia’s main military
testing sites, and a lack of clear informa-
tion from authoritieshas sparked a
surge of conspiracy theories as analysts
try to piece together what happened and
how it relates to the secretive nuclear
project dubbed Skyfall.
“It is simply unthinkable to hide
information about radioactive con-
tamination from people,” said Rashid
Alimov, a nuclear expert at the Rus-
sian branch of Greenpeace. It has
accused authorities of leaking “in-
complete information about radioac-
tive contamination... to the media”.
Fear of a nuclear radiation outbreak
and Moscow’s determination to keep
the incident under wraps has also
invited inevitable comparisons with
the 1986 Chernobyl tragedy, which the
Soviet Union sought to keep secret even
as deadly radiation spread through pop-
ulated areas.
The size of the explosion appears tiny
compared with the nuclear plant melt-
down in then Soviet Ukraine. But while
Russia’s defence ministry said no harm-
ful chemicals had been released and
that radiation levels in the vicinity were
unaffected, data from Rosgidromet,
Russia’s weather agency,said radiation
levels in Severodvinsk, a city 30km
from Nyonoksa, reached 1.78 microsiev-
erts an hour — far from dangerous but
16 times higher than normal.
The incident has also heightened
interest inRussia’s nascent next-genera-tion nuclear weapons programme, as
arms control treaties signed with the US
in recent decades are torn up or head for
expiry.
Much of the speculation has focused
around the development of anuclear-
powered cruise missile known as
Burevestnik in Russia and SSC-X-9 Sky-
fall by Nato, amid suggestionsthe explo-
sion was the result of a botched test of
this system.
State nuclear corporation Rosatom
has saidthe explosion involved an “iso-
tope power source for a liquid-fuelled
rocket engine”, prompting speculation
it involved technologyrelated to
the Skyfall weapon. Such theories
appeared to be confirmed by US
president Donald Trump, who tweeted:“The Russian ‘Skyfall’ explosion has
people worried about the air around the
facility, and far beyond. Not good!”
While Russia’s defence ministry has
confirmedthe Skyfall missile is under
development, Moscow has declined to
confirmit was involved in the accident.
“Accidents, unfortunately, happen.
They are tragedies. But in this particular
case, it is important for us to remember
those heroes who lost their lives in this
accident,” Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s
spokesman, said on Tuesday in the
Kremlin’scomments on the incident.
Russia remained “considerably far
ahead of the level other countries have
managed to achieve” in terms of such
advanced missile technologies, Mr
Peskov added.
“Accidents happen, yes, but nuclear-
powered cruise missile programs don’t
just happen,” said Ankit Panda, an
international security analyst at the
Federation of American Scientists.
Little is known about Skyfall, or how
nuclear technology could be used to
power it. Russian president Vladimir
Putin announced the missilelast year
with a graphic video showingit dodging
enemy radarbefore flying to its target.Fatal accident
Nuclear blast puts Russia’s
Skyfall missile in spotlight
‘Accidents happen, yes,
but nuclear-powered
cruise missile programsdon’t just happen’
Contracts & Tenders
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