Hamstrung & Unpopular in Paris & Berlin

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‘A leadership void’

Over in Germany, Olaf Scholz is less popular than any chancellor since his country’s reunification in 1990. In a recent poll, 77 percent of Germans characterized Scholz as a “weak leader.” Even members of his own Social Democratic Party are calling on him to step down before next year’s general elections. His coalition partners, the left-wing Greens and the center-right Free Democrats, are sniping at one another publicly—while Scholz and his finance minister have been arguing in the media about who’s to blame for the government’s inability to put a budget together for next year.

Meanwhile, Bulgaria is about to hold its sixth general election in three years, after one government after another there has fallen.

Political news out of Europe has understandably focused a lot this year on the rise of the nationalist right on the continent—but there’s been another trend running through European current affairs: a growing tendency toward fractious, ineffective governments. Why?

Matthias Matthijs is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Dean Acheson associate professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Matthijs says Europe’s emerging political crises are symptoms of serious, long-term issues: aging populations, a rising cost of living, controversies over immigration, economic adaptations to climate change, and Russia’s tensions with its former Soviet satellite states—that’s exploded in the war in Ukraine.

Europeans increasingly see the traditional parties of the center-right and center-left as failing to solve any of these problems, so voters are increasingly turning to upstart parties—all along the political spectrum, many on the far right and far left. This political fragmentation, as Matthijs puts it, is making it harder to form governments—and making governments that are formed more mismatched and unproductive. That, in turn, is encouraging perceptions that the governments are simply inept—which is only further stoking the popular dissatisfaction behind the rising power of the nationalist right …

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• “None of Europe’s national governments can solve these problems they’re facing on its own. They need the EU to deal with them. They don’t really have long-term strategies, either, because they’re constantly voted in and out of office, and each new one undoes what the previous one did. So they’re muddling through—which is making things gradually worse. It’s all driving voter frustration—and voter frustration is driving political fragmentation.”
• “Ursula von der Leyen just won a second term as president of the European Commission. She had a successful first term responding to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But now it looks like two or three member countries will always veto, water down, or just opt out of initiatives in every major policy area—immigration, climate change, foreign policy, and defense. The EU is a club of countries without coherence. And it’s a club of countries with a leadership void.”
• “In France and Germany, you’re hearing more voices saying, Maybe we need an Italian or Dutch scenario, where we let the far right govern—maybe that wouldn’t be the end of the world. If they’re in a coalition, maybe their worst instincts will be tamed. And it’s important to understand, there are huge differences between the way the nationalist right rules in Italy and the way it rules in, say, Hungary. Both use harsh rhetoric about immigrants, but the Italian government isn’t trying to pack the courts with people loyal to the party or silence independent media.”

So everything The Signal does starts with good questions, and every answer leads us to more of them.

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Foreign Agents

As a news item, “corrupt politician” might seem unremarkable, but Adams is only the most recent, glaring case. The former Democratic senator from New Jersey Bob Menendez chaired the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee until last year, when he was indicted for having conveyed sensitive information to the Egyptian government in exchange for envelopes stuffed with cash.

The incompetency of these recent operations is striking: Adams’s people kept theirs going even when they knew they were being watched. When his Turkish contact instructed him to delete their text messages, he promised he would. Perhaps he had a lot on his mind. After Egyptian officials presented Menendez with several bars of gold, he look up their value on Google—repeatedly.

What may be more striking, though, is where the money is coming from: Turkey and Egypt are both countries dominated by single parties, commanded by long-ruling strongmen, who extract and use their countries’ wealth with impunity—not least to develop influence abroad. What’s the extent of that problem?

Much of the answer, it seems, has little to do with self-exposure to criminal prosecution, Adams- or Menendez-style. As Casey Michel shows in his new book Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, there’s a whole legion of lobbyists in Washington working to influence American politics on behalf of kleptocratic states. There’s also no obvious limit of erstwhile congressmen and generals willing to take enormous sums from them, after their time in the government or military, to broker relationships. And that, for the most part, is perfectly legal.

—Gustav Jönsson

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