The Economist July 17th 2021 Europe 47
most successful doctrines of the postwar
years, Wandel durch Handel (change
through trade), the mantra of the past two
decades, is a distortion of Ostpolitik,argues
Hans Kundnani of Chatham House, a Brit
ish thinktank. Ostpolitik at least had re
unification as a strategic objective: the idea
of political change through trade is often
little more than an excuse for closer com
mercial ties with autocratic regimes. It is
one of the reasons that other euleaders re
cently scuppered Mrs Merkel’s push for the
first eu summit with Vladimir Putin since
the Russian president annexed Crimea.
Until a couple of years ago Germany’s
China policy was guided mainly by Wandel
durch Handel, promoted in particular by
the big carmakers that are Germany’s most
important industry. Over the past ten years
China has become Germany’s biggest trad
ing partner, with goods exchanges growing
to $243bn last year. And Volkswagen, Eu
rope’s biggest carmaker, now sells more
than 40% of its passenger cars in China
(see charts).
But German enthusiasm for doing busi
ness with China has abated. At the start of
2019 the bdi, the main German industry as
sociation, published a paper calling China
a “systemic competitor” and outlining its
concerns about high barriers to entry, state
subsidies to local firms and other distor
tions in the Chinese market. Siegfried
Russwurm, the bdi’s boss, recently said
that Germany needs “an honest discussion
about how we deal with autocratic trading
partners”. Human rights are not an inter
nal affair, insisted Mr Russwurm, describ
ing as “unacceptable” China’s treatment of
the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority.
Policies are changing too. A new law re
quires German firms with more than 3,000
employees to prove by 2023 that their sup
ply chains are free of humanrights abuses
(from 2024 it will apply to those with more
than 1,000). Penalties for infractions can
be 2% of a company’s annual revenue.
Even so, Mrs Merkel is sticking to her
policy of treating China with kid gloves.
She was loth to ban Huawei, a Chinese
firm, from bidding for contracts to build
Germany’s fifthgeneration telecoms net
works, as America wanted. In the last days
of Germany’s rotating presidency of the eu
last December, she pushed through a treaty
that is meant to grant European firms bet
ter access to the Chinese market. This irri
tated the incoming Biden administration,
and has been blocked by the eu parlia
ment. And in June Mrs Merkel made fellow
g7leaders water down their summit’s final
communiqué to avoid upsetting China.
Will Mrs Merkel’s successor chart a dif
ferent course? Of the three people vying to
replace her after an election in September,
two give the impression they are not aware
of the extent of the challenge posed by Rus
sian and Chinese aggression, says Con
stanzeStelzenmülleroftheBrookingsIn
stitution,a thinktank.ArminLaschet,the
ChristianDemocratic(cdu) candidate,and
OlafScholzoftheSocialDemocratsmake
feebleargumentsaboutAmericawantinga
“newcoldwar”andtryingtoforceEuro
peansto“decouple”fromChina.
In contrast Annalena Baerbock, the
Greens’candidate,wantsto standupto
RussiaandChina.Butherchancesarere
ceding, with the latest polls giving the
Greenslessthan20%ofthevotewhilethe
cduanditsallieshoveraround30%.Asa
potentialjuniorpartnershewouldcarry
someweightonChinaandRussiapolicy,
butit ishardtosayhowmuch;herpriority
wouldbeclimatechange.ThatiswhyMr
Biden will listen to Mrs Merkel, even
thoughsheisonherwayout.Hersucces
sorislikelytofollowherfaithfully.n
Moldova
An anti-corruption
party triumphs
S
heisslight, politeandgetswhatshe
wants. On July 11th the party founded by
Maia Sandu, Moldova’s president, won
parliamentary elections by a landslide. Ov
er the past two years Ms Sandu (pictured),
briefly prime minister in 2019, has seen off
a local oligarch and has now dispatched
the men from Moscow, too.
Moldova is one of Europe’s poorest
countries. Weak institutions have made it
even poorer. From 2012 to 2014 almost
$1bn, or 12% of the country’s gdp, was sto
len from the country through its banking
system. Most of those believed to be re
sponsible are still at large. From 2013 to
2019 Moldova was controlled by an oli
garch, Vlad Plahotniuc, prompting the
Council of Europe, which promotes hu
man rights and democracy, to label it a
“captive state”. Mr Plahotniuc used to
claim he was proWestern and that Moldo
vans should vote for him to stop their
country falling into the hands of proRus
sian parties.
Ms Sandu founded a reformist party in
2016. Though harassed and bullied, it grew.
In 2019 she struck a deal with Igor Dodon,
the president at the time, and became
prime minister, prompting Mr Plahotniuc
to flee the country. But Mr Dodon, close to
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, later
turned on Ms Sandu and engineered her re
moval as prime minister. Undeterred, she
beat him in presidential elections last year.
Now her victory is complete.
Unlike Moldova’s proEuropean politi
cians in the past, she appealed not only to
Romanianspeakers (the majority) but also
to Russianspeakers, who often get their
news from Moscow’s propagandists. Cor
ruption hurts everyone, she says, except
the bribetakers. A recent unstudy esti
mates that illicit financial flows, from tax
evasion to organised crime, cost Moldova
$1bn a year. If a tenth of that could be reco
vered, it would pay the salaries of 20,000
teachers. Such brazen looting has hastened
an exodus of Moldovans that has been
swift even by eastern European standards.
In 1989 Moldova had 4.3m people; now it
has fewer than 3m.
With her hands on all the levers of pow
er, Ms Sandu now has a unique opportuni
ty. Her government must now clean up the
judiciary, she says. Vadim Pistrinciuc, a re
formist former mp, agrees but adds that if
the government moves too slowly, a histor
ic chance to break the link between the
judges, the oligarchs and the media they
control will be lost. They will regroup fast,
he says. “Unless their power is smashed
within six months, they will never leave.”
To the south, Bulgarians also voted on
July 11th, with less happy results. They had
already done so in April but neither the
then incumbent prime minister, Boyko Bo
risov, nor the opposition was able to form a
government. It is unclear if the situation is
much different now. A stream of allega
tions of corruption and gangsterism, al
ways denied, has eroded support for Mr
Borisov. But there is no love lost between
his many enemies.
Mr Borisov’s party was pushed into sec
ond place by that of Slavi Trifonov, a former
tv showman. Then Mr Trifonov shocked
the other antiBorisov parties by declaring
“coalition” to be a “dirty word”. He present
ed a takeitorleaveit proposal that he
should lead a minority government.The
other parties seem to have leftit. n
Moldova has a chance to clean up.
Bulgaria, not so much
The Vlad impaler