HAS THE ATLANTIC BECOME A WALL?

After responding as honestly as I can to recent headlines, I will voice a simple wish later in this column. 

Set for Friday the 24th, Germany’s national elections will interest people everywhere. One reason is that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, as well as J. D. Vance, the US vice president, both strongly connected to President Trump, want 46-year-old Alice Weidel of the Alternative Fur Germany (AfG) Party to become Germany’s next Chancellor. 

Pollsters think this is improbable. Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is said to be best placed to head the next German government, with the likely support of the Social Democrats (whose Olaf Scholz is the incumbent Chancellor) and/or of the Green Party. All three parties – CDU, Social Democrat Party (SDP), and the Greens -- regard AfG as a “far-right” outfit, a label that Weidel rejects. If on Friday AfG significantly improves its numbers, the impact could extend well beyond Germany’s borders. It is worth recalling that in September of last year AfD won a regional election in Germany’s eastern province of Thuringia. 

SOFTENING A REJECTION? 

For long, AfG has been demanding a change in Germans’ attitudes towards their country’s past. In this demand some can imagine a wish to soften the total rejection of Hitler and his Nazi ideology that has marked Germany’s politics ever since the end of World War II. On her part, Weidel claims that her hero or role model is Margaret Thatcher. 

“And yet,” says the BBC, Weidel “has backed the mass deportation of migrants, embracing the highly controversial term ‘remigration’ - which she defines as deporting criminals and ‘illegal’ migrants.” According to the BBC, Weidel “also wants to end sanctions on Russia, repairing the destroyed Nord Stream gas pipelines; and she wants to tear down wind turbines, which she calls ‘windmills of shame’, even though they now provide a quarter of Germany's electricity.”

If tough immigration control and better economic relations with Russia are prominent parts of AfG’s manifesto, so is a tough response to violent attacks on crowds or individuals in German towns, attacks in which immigrants with Muslim names have been implicated. Let us recognize that in the minds of some people in today’s Germany and in other parts of Europe, Muslims seem to have replaced the Jews of the Nazi era; they are seen as people -- in fact as a people or a community -- that should be suspected, excluded, and expelled. 

The BBC tells us that front-runner Merz is “a plain-talking, pro-business, social conservative who has spent years waiting in the wings. Eclipsed in the CDU by Angela Merkel in 2002, he eventually left politics, served on the boards of investment banks and took up flying as an amateur pilot.” He may now get a chance to pilot Germany. 

WHERE IS THE PARTNERSHIP? 

It wasn’t normal for prominent Americans to intervene bluntly and physically in European elections, but we may concede that no one promised normality during a Trump presidency. Some Europeans and Americans, however, have started to ask, “Where today is the partnership across the Atlantic between the US and Europe which stabilized the democratic world during all the post-war decades?” France’s Macron and Britain’s Starmer are not the only leaders publicly raising this blunt question. 

Who thought that not Europe and the US, but Saudi Arabia and the US would initiate top-level, and possibly summit-level, talks with Russia about the war in Ukraine? If an honorable peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine is indeed found in the talks evidently scheduled in Saudi Arabia – even though there is no firm word that Ukraine will be present at the table -- the world would be relieved. However, the “if” above is not of small size, and “honorable” there is not a mere word. 

So much will obviously be at stake in these contemplated negotiations, but shouldn’t we also ask, especially with Musk talking in Germany about the need there for “free speech”, about free speech within Russia as well? 

SHREDDING A PLEDGE 

And while in some ways it may be impressive that within a few short weeks of entering the White House, Trump has kick-started talks about the war in Ukraine, we must also ask, loudly and firmly, what is to happen to the people of Gaza and of all of Palestine? Are the Trumps, Musks, Vances, Macrons, Starmers, Merzs, and Weidels of our world, along with the Bidens, Obamas, and Harrises of our world, and with our Ishibas, Modis, and Erdogans, as also our Putins and Xis, and the rulers of Saudi Arabia, neighboring Emirates and Egypt, content to let an ancient nation be erased? Content to see a whole people pushed out of their homeland? Content, even smilingly content, to shred solemn pledges about an independent Palestinian state? These eminent people seeking to organize the immediate future of portions of our world should know that all of humankind is watching, from Africa, from Asia, from South America, from reserves in North America and spaces for the indigenous in Europe and Australia and New Zealand, to see what the strong and the “advanced” do in this our 21st century with the natives of Palestine. 

THE WISH 

Most of us find it hard to understand our constantly altering world. Or to know how or where we can be of help. Sometimes it can be hard even to know just what we should be rooting for. Or rooting against. The challenges or threats we face are multiple. Each of us makes a personal response. Moreover, we may have a particular practice to which we regularly turn, or a belief to which we return in our minds. 

The wish to which I alluded at the start of this column is of a different kind. I wish for a panel of frank, sharp, impartial, and constructive observers who would clarify our complex world for us. And who would even present a road map for addressing, and perhaps gradually resolving, crises like the ones we face in, for example, the Middle East, or between Russia and Ukraine, or within Russia and within Ukraine. Or the unquestionable challenges posed by the pressure, and often the necessity, to migrate, whether from Latin America to North America, or from Africa to Europe. 

That, I suppose, is what think tanks and universities are for, and perhaps wise and practical solutions already exist somewhere. I just wish that this little website finds a link to the kind of panel I have spoken of. 

There is a connected, and perhaps simpler, wish. This website should be enabled to offer comprehensible summaries of the principal challenges in our different countries.