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Merkel steps up

September 03, 2020
Balance of Power
Bloomberg

There's no love lost between Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin: She an East German pastor's daughter and he a former KGB officer, they know each other too well.

But during almost 15 years in office, Merkel has acted as Putin's bridge to the west, consistently encouraging dialogue with Russia over its isolation.

Alexey Navalny's poisoning by the chemical agent Novichok has changed that dynamic. Long criticized for leading from behind, Merkel has moved out in front over the Kremlin critic, taking Navalny in for treatment at a Berlin hospital, demanding an explanation from Russia and now pressing for a joint response by the European Union and NATO.

It's a watershed moment for German-Russian relations. But it's not the only shift on display.

Also yesterday, Merkel's cabinet agreed on its first-ever strategy for the Indo-Pacific region, a plan to work together with countries like Australia and India to "shape the international order" in what amounts to a clear challenge to China in its own backyard.

Merkel knows that Germany alone cannot change the world. Her mission is to work through the EU to deliver real heft. Still, previous sanctions from the bloc have failed to deter Putin, making it unclear how much impact that can have.

Too big for Europe, too small for the world, was Henry Kissinger's assessment of Berlin's fate. Approaching the final year of her chancellorship, Merkel is finally pushing Germany to overcome its postwar reticence and play a bigger role on the international stage.

— Alan Crawford

Merkel prepares to make a statement on Sept. 2.

Photographer: Markus Schreiber/AFP

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Global Headlines

Poll snapshot | Joe Biden retains his lead over President Donald Trump in national polls two months before the U.S. election, with neither candidate seeing a bounce after party conventions last month. The Democratic nominee led Trump by 10 percentage points in a Quinnipiac University survey of likely voters released yesterday and by 8 percentage points in a CNN poll of registered voters.

Campaign 2020

There are 61 days until the election. Here's the latest on the race for control of the White House and Congress.

Biden will meet today with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot seven times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump has launched an attack ad in the once reliably Democratic state of Minnesota that paints Biden as "taking a knee" when protests in Minneapolis turned violent.

Other developments:

Sign up to receive daily election updates as a direct mobile notification on Twitter. Simply click on this link and like the tweet.

Tight timeline | The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has told states to prepare for a Covid-19 vaccine to be ready by Nov. 1 and asked them to remove obstacles that would prevent distribution sites from opening. The aggressive goal comes as cases spike in rural areas. The virus has killed more than 185,000 Americans.

  • Click here for more on how Trump and his top aides have ditched face masks at public events after a short-lived effort to encourage Americans to wear them.

Chip overdrive | The U.S. ban on Huawei and dozens of other Chinese tech companies buying American parts is prompting Beijing to plan an ambitious drive to develop its domestic semiconductor industry. President Xi Jinping has pledged an estimated $1.4 trillion through 2025 for technologies ranging from wireless networks to artificial intelligence as China confers the same kind of priority on the effort it put on building its atomic capability.

Horror show | Since Micheal Martin took the post of Irish prime minister, his dream job has turned into a nightmare. Since June, he's lost one minister to a drunk-driving scandal and another quit along with Ireland's EU Commissioner after breaching Covid-19 restrictions. Most damaging for Martin, as Dara Doyle and Peter Flanagan explain, is the pandemic is out of control, with new cases this week hitting the highest level since May.

Divisive trip | A visit to Taipei by the head of the Czech Senate has widened a rift between China and what was once one of its biggest cheerleaders in the EU. Speaker Milos Vystrcil is under fire both from Beijing and politicians at home for traveling to Taiwan, which China sees as a renegade province. As Lenka Ponikelska and Andrea Dudik report, it was that kind of politically induced stress that Vystrcil's predecessor, who had originally planned the trip, endured before he died of a heart attack in January.

Vystrcil gives a thumbs up to an image of late Czech Senate Speaker Jaroslav Kubera after he delivered a speech at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei on Sept. 1.

Photographer: Chiang Ying-ying/AP

What to Watch

  • France unveiled the long-awaited 100 billion-euro stimulus plan that President Emmanuel Macron is betting on to transform the economy and his political fortunes with less than two years until elections.
  • Dozens of people were detained and hurt in Bulgaria overnight as protesters against Prime Minister Boyko Borissov's government clashed with police forces.
  • As Trump's first term draws to a close, a meeting today in Washington may be Serbia's best chance to secure an advantage in resolving its dispute with Kosovo as their leaders sit down at the White House.

  • Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness is favored to win a second term in general elections today despite the deepest economic slump in decades, as the pandemic torpedoes an emerging market success story.

And finally ... Some African nations' responses to the pandemic are being undermined by an age-old problem: corruption. Allegations of graft have rocked countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Monique Vanek and Mike Cohen report that as governments relaxed tender and procurement rules in the rush to prepare their health systems for the crisis, it became easier for funds to be misappropriated.

 
 

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