This Palestinian immigrant could become Berlin's next mayor

Can a foreign-born rising star turn the tide for Germany’s declining Social Democrats?

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost, May 2014)

BERLIN, Germany — Sitting in a diner in the working-class suburb of Spandau, Raed Saleh smiles and nods to acquaintances as he reels off plans for transforming this city.

Getting them right would require finding a balance between tackling social issues and creating wealth, says the 36-year-old Palestinian-born politician. He hopes to be the first immigrant to become mayor of a major German city.

“Social democracy is the art of keeping the gap as small as possible between rich and poor, top and bottom, men and women, healthy and sick,” he says.

That leftist message may not sound like part of a winning strategy for Saleh’s once venerable Social Democratic Party (SPD), which has seen its position in German politics decline in the last decade.

Although the party still controls nine of 16 German state governments, its fortunes have steadily declined under the country’s leadership by the very popular Chancellor Angela Merkel and her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Now with Berlin’s current mayor, the SPD’s Klaus Wowereit, slipping in the polls almost daily, the Social Democrats risk losing even in their stronghold Berlin.

But Saleh, a slim, handsome man with a quick, crooked smile, isn't your typical immigrant — or your average Social Democrat.

Known for singing German folk songs and a tough love strategy for the city's welfare moms, he’s becoming the SPD’s newest hope.


One of nine siblings, Saleh moved here with his family at age 5 and flipped burgers at Burger King before rising to become manager then entering politics.

His street cred may help the SPD, which was once virtually unassailable in Berlin, but is now fighting a rearguard action against the CDU across the country.

Merkel's party extended its lead to 42 percent of the popular vote during last year’s national election compared with 34 percent in 2009, while the SPD flatlined.

“It used to be the party of the urban voters,” says Peter Matuschek, head of political research at the Forsa Polling Institute. “But in general, the SPD is far from the strength it had two or three decades ago.”

Voters believe the party is preoccupied with internecine battles and divorced from community issues, according to a recent Forsa poll conducted for the daily Berliner Zeitung.

In Berlin, no less than two-thirds of respondents say Wowereit has to go.

That has as much to do with the party’s performance as his own mistakes, Matuschek says.

“So far the voters don't see that they're focusing on the everyday issues like education, infrastructure and all the problems the city has,” he says.

An openly gay politician once considered chancellor material, Wowereit presided over Berlin's economic comeback since becoming mayor in 2001. But his fortunes have flagged amid accusations he’s something of a champagne socialist and his tarring by a tax evasion scandal involving his culture secretary, who resigned in February.

However, he’s been hurt the most by his showcase public works project, the building of a new Berlin airport, which is hopelessly behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

That doesn’t mean the going will be easy for Saleh. Polls show him trailing two other SPD candidates in the race to replace “Wowie.”

But Saleh — arguably the city’s most charismatic Social Democrat who’s been the party's parliamentary leader since December 2011 — is only just now hitting the headlines. The state elections that will determine the next mayor are scheduled for 2016, more than a year away. And in an increasingly immigrant-oriented city, the candidate promises more than a clean slate.

An old-school grassroots candidate, he's focusing on bread-and-butter issues and community activities polls suggest voters are keen on.

He has already spearheaded a move to buy back the city water infrastructure after a partial privatization in 1999 saw prices skyrocket.

And he's pushing a similar move for the electricity grid.

However, with Merkel's conservatives in ascendance, his biggest appeal, in an unexpected way, could be the color of his skin.

Along with conventional but popular initiatives such as a midnight soccer program that keeps youngsters off the streets and a huge boost in funding for special schools for children from immigrant backgrounds, Saleh's street cred has freed him to push the SPD toward pragmatic policies that sound, well, conservative.

He started a program called “Strong Without Violence” that sends immigrant teenagers on ride-alongs with policemen and trips to Auschwitz in order to make them see themselves as part of Germany's past as well as its future.

After a meeting with Rotterdam's Morocco-born mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb last year, he's also leveraged his immigrant status to push for “tough love” for the city's welfare recipients.

He wants to require families to send their children to nursery school in exchange for receiving benefits, and institute language-proficiency tests for parents like the ones given children.

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The party has already agreed on a $3,500 fine for parents whose children fail to take the test.

That’s a radical change for a party that’s always preached integration but never made much headway achieving it. But such policies work in Rotterdam, says Saleh, who believes they would do just as well here.

“Too often, if you ask a teenager in Berlin where he’s from, he’ll say, 'I'm Serbian' or 'I'm Turkish,' or 'I'm from Nigeria,'” he says. “But if you ask people in Rotterdam, whether they’re children or adults, they’ll tell you they’re Rotterdamers.”

“That's what I want for Berlin.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140513/berlin-germany-mayor-raeh-saleh-palestinian-immigrant

This may be the world's most ironic block party

Berlin has tamed its notorious May Day bash. Does the once-radical holiday still have any political bite?

By Jason Overdorf

May 1, 2014 (GlobalPost)


BERLIN, Germany — “BBQ and rioting (optional).” The sardonic web advertisement for an expat group's May Day party says it all.

Long troubled by violence on the traditional workers’ holiday, Berlin's bohemian Kreuzberg district has managed to turn a rally for left-wing radicals into what may be the world's most ironic block party.

Although diehards may worry that poseur radicals and commercialization threaten to rob the annual proletarian protest of its political bite, Ipek Ipekcioglu, a Turkish-German DJ active in the transformation, says she’s not worried.

“I still consider it a political action, even if it is getting commercialized,” she said. “We shouldn’t forget what May First is about.”

Known for her layered, multicultural tracks, the dark-haired Kreuzburger runs one of 19 stages set up for MyFest, a music festival that’s helped turn the focus of May Day away from time-honored traditions like smashing shop windows.

May Day, or International Workers' Day, was founded to coincide with the traditional pagan celebration of spring and commemorate a tumultuous Chicago strike demanding the institution of the eight-hour workday in 1886. It ended in an anarchist bombing and rioting in Haymarket Square.

The date has long been an important one for left-wing demonstrations around the world, including Berlin, where radicals in 1987 completely took over Kreuzberg — then still in the shadow of the Berlin Wall — forcing police to evacuate for several hours during a battle over squatters' rights.

Across Berlin, activists from left-wing groups such as Antifa still regularly clash with neo-Nazis and occasionally firebomb luxury cars to protest gentrification throughout the year.

As recently as 2009, left-wing radicals from a group known as Autonomous threw stones, bottles and firebombs during a May Day altercation with police that involved as many as 5,000 protesters.

Although police have since succeeded in keeping the peace with a dual strategy of engagement and targeted action, the authorities are hesitant to declare victory even today.

Still, the character of May Day in Kreuzberg seems to be changing as fast as the neighborhood, where yuppies have replaced radicals as landlords are renovating buildings and rents are skyrocketing.


Old-school Kreuzbergers fed up with violence started the change in typical Kreuzberg style, Ipekcioglu says. Tired of being trapped inside their homes, residents “squatted” in the streets, organizing barbecues and street stalls that radicals couldn't attack because they would have appeared to be targeting their own.

As the effort evolved, resident-run initiatives banned stalls from selling glass bottles and organized a crew of local young people to collect empties from the street.

But even if local restaurants and shops are partly taking over, turning the residents' block party into a commercial bonanza, they haven't abandoned politics altogether.

Security for MyFest — the music festival that emerged from the effort — is handled by a leftist-friendly Kreuzberg-based company and a Turkish-owned firm that employs local teens. One of the event's stages is reserved for Antifa (a group dedicated to fighting neo-Nazis), and the music program reflects a neighborhood that’s long been synonymous with the city’s changing ethnic character. One of the acts is a Kurdish queer band.

The city government has offered logistical support and funding.

This year, some 6,000 police officers — including around 2,500 on loan from other cities — will preserve order in the streets.


Not all of them will be in riot gear. Since a study of the 2009 riots suggested that rumors that the police were cracking down on protesters may have actually prompted the conflict, the department has increased the number of uniformed negotiators whose job is to defuse potentially violent altercations.

“We will talk as long as it is possible,” says police spokesman Stefan Redlich, “and we'll talk with anybody who is willing to talk with us.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140430/berlin-kreuzberg-may-day

Who's afraid of Big Brother? This guy

Germany's largest publisher lobbies against Google.

By Jason Overdorf
April 29, 2014 (GlobalPost)

BERLIN, Germany — You wake up one morning and your smartphone tells you, “On your way to work you will run into your ex-girlfriend, Vanessa. Be sure to act surprised when she tells you she's getting married. She hasn't told anyone yet.”

That's the future in a world where Google knows more about you than George Orwell's Big Brother ever dreamed possible, argues the chief executive of Germany's largest publisher in a recent “open letter to Eric Schmidt” — his counterpart at the $50-billion company now synonymous with internet search.

Alarmist? Perhaps. Axel Springer head Mathias Doepfner borrowed the scene from futurist author Patrick Tucker's book “The Naked Future,” not any undisclosed Google strategy documents.

But Doepfner says his fear of Google is serious, and comes despite what Schmidt has called a “path-breaking advertising deal” between the two companies.

Now Doepfner and other European media players are looking to the German government and the European Union for help to counter Google’s expansion by filing an antitrust suit while mounting an unprecedented bid to force the US giant to share its search-engine revenues with the media companies that arguably supply most of the information people are actually searching for.

“We are afraid of Google,” Doepfner writes. “I must state this very clearly and frankly because few of my colleagues dare do so publicly.”

Comparisons with “1984” notwithstanding, that fear is chiefly economic, as Axel Springer's efforts to fight Google show.

In the ongoing EU antitrust action, Axel Springer and other companies argue that Google has “fixed” its search algorithms so that its own service offerings come out ahead of competitors.

Since Google accounts for as much as 90 percent of European internet searches, it's effectively the only game in town. When the search company tweaked one of its algorithms, for instance, an Axel Springer subsidiary lost a whopping 70 percent of the traffic to its website.


“Many [Google] competitors are more or less invisible for the consumer,” says Robert Maier, who heads an Axel Springer-owned e-commerce company called Ladenzeile.

In February, Google offered to settle the dispute by promising to allot space at the top of its search results for its competitors to advertise their products — a solution Axel Springer condemned as extortion because it essentially asks Google's competitors to pay for equal footing.

“It’s a question of applying existing rules and laws,” Maier says. “The EC has the relevant toolbox to take the required actions, it just has to make use of it.”

At the same time, German media companies have been pushing for an unprecedented tax that would compel Google to share a portion of its search-engine revenues with them over and above the fees generated by the advertisements hosted on their home sites. They argue Google is reaping huge benefits from people searching the internet while the companies that create the information for which they are actually looking are being driven out of business.

They may be making some headway.

Last year, the German parliament passed a copyright law that extended publishers' rights to sue websites that earn money by repackaging their content. But while the original bill would have covered the headlines and snippets that appear in a Google or Yahoo! News search, the amended version that eventually passed stopped short of that, following arguments that it would violate protections on the freedom of speech and potentially prevent media outlets and commentators from citing other articles.

Many agree, saying the media firms' demand for such a deal is like a theater demanding a cut from the taxi drivers who bring moviegoers to their door.

But there's already a precedent for such revenue-sharing in Germany, where a so-called “private copying levy” forces sellers of blank CDs and DVDs and other recordable media to give a cut from every sale to music and movie companies.

Moreover, Google’s critics say a cursory analysis of the web-based media business quickly exposes flaws in the taxi analogy.

So-called “referrals” from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter already account for the bulk of traffic to news sites.

But sites such as Google News and Yahoo! News are also emerging as indirect competitors of media outlets, the German firms argue.

Google disagrees.

“Much ink has targeted Google News and how it allegedly 'kills' journalism,” Google's Schmidt wrote in his own open letter to German executives. “[But] there is no advertising on Google News [and] each month Google sends more than 10 billion visits to publishers around the world.”

Others say it's hard to tell if Google has created $30 billion in new revenue for its “publisher partners,” as Schmidt suggests, or taken away more.

In the early days of the internet, users might have made the New York Times or Das Bild — Axel Springer’s conservative tabloid — the default page that popped up when they opened their browsers.

But with access to the latest headlines from every news provider and algorithms that push popular stories to the top, the news provider-search engine combination sites are steadily eating away at that market. Since headlines and first paragraphs of news stories are often written to communicate all the essential information, only a small number readers click through to the page that actually generates revenue for the news agency.

As Axel Springer might put it: It's as if taxi drivers are showing movie scenes every one wants to see at the cab stand.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140428/germany-google-axel-springer-mathias-doepfner

Germany has a serious wolf problem and no one knows what to do about it

“Five years from now we’ll have them in nearly every district.”

By Jason Overdorf
April 28, 2014 (GlobalPost)

SPREMBERG, Germany — Surrounded by a flock of 250-odd black-faced sheep near this northeastern town, Frank Neumann jams his green Trilby hat on his head before a gust of wind sends it flying, then chuckles as his 120-lb sheepdog leaps up to lick his face.

The bearlike Pyrenean mountain dog is people-friendly, but it's no pet. Before the stocky farmer obtained six of them to protect his flock, he arrived one morning to find 27 of his cherished sheep eviscerated, their guts strewn across the pasture. It was a tough way to learn that the wolf had returned to Germany.

“Officially, there weren't supposed to be any here,” Neumann says. “I was pretty angry because no one had warned us.”

New sightings confirm that wolves are making a rapid comeback across Europe. But the most surprising success story — together with possible related problems — is here in Germany, which lacks the infrastructure for wildlife protection despite its strong tradition of environmentalism.

“Germany as a whole is becoming affected by wolves,” says World Wildlife Fund wolf expert Janosch Arnold. “Five years from now we’ll have them in nearly every district.”

Since the year 2000, when an infrared camera produced the first evidence of their return close to the Polish border, the number of wolf packs in Germany has mushroomed from two to more than 30.

Their comeback was initially attributed to the emptying of rural areas in what was formerly East Germany.

But with wolf packs settling amid wind-energy projects, along well-trodden nature trails and even on Berlin’s doorstep, it's now clear that the European Union's tough protection laws are responsible.


Frank Neumann and dog. (Jason Overdorf/GlobalPost)


In a troubling development for some farmers, wolves are proving no more prone to remaining isolated in the wilderness than America's coyotes.

Wolves have killed some 350 farm animals across Germany during the past five years. Some farmers claim fear is stopping their sheep from breeding.

In recent weeks, wolves were indirectly blamed for a bloodbath on the Autobahn after a herd of frightened horses broke from their paddock and bolted onto the highway.

As in US states where wolves have made comebacks, such incidents have prompted calls from farmers and hunters for relaxing a ban on hunting the wild canines.

That's exposing a rift between the rural residents who must live with wolves and urban environmentalists who love them.

Conservationists are concerned that a serious lack of skills and funding would make the reinstatement of controlled hunting problematic.

Even in countries where wolves have always thrived, such as Finland and Norway, hunting licenses are often allotted with little understanding of population dynamics, critics say.

Germany has no agency that compares with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which has a budget of nearly $3 billion a year to implement laws like the Endangered Species Act.

Instead, the country's 16 states are left to conduct their own conservation policies. Research and monitoring is left mostly to poorly trained volunteers, says Ilka Reinhardt, one of Germany's rare wildlife biologists who helps run the wolf management bureau in Saxony, which has the Germany's largest population of wolves.

“In that regard, we’re like a developing country,” she says.

However, the real problem may be not the wolves themselves, but economics.

States compensate livestock owners for losses from attacks with various financial packages and incentives.

But farmers say compensation for slaughtered animals is always slow to arrive. And the funds cover only concrete items such as electric fences or sheepdogs, not the additional labor required for installation or training.

Compounding the problem, many sheep farmers make ends meet with the aid of European Union subsidies for the preservation of grassland ecosystems. They're essentially paid to graze their sheep, which means they must continually move from one pasture to another. The new threat of wolves requires them to also move their fences.

That's what bothers farmer Neumann, who despite the slaughter of his sheep remembers his lone sighting of a wolf as having filled him with exhilaration.

He's solved the problem of wolf attacks with his dogs and electric fences. But feeding his six huge flock-watchers costs him around $8,000 a year, a big chunk of the profits generated by 750 sheep.

“Many of us farmers here in Saxony are prepared to live with wolves,” he says. “But it's a huge financial burden.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140425/germany-wolf-population-returns

What 'Berlin's favela' says about this uneasy and divided city

In the German capital, anti-gentrification activists are allying with immigrants and refugees.

By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost, April 23, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — In a thicket of shanties improvised from scrap lumber and plastic tarps, 27-year-old Lukas runs a bicycle's rubber inner tube through a bucket of water, searching for a puncture that eluded him on the first go.

Next to him, a discarded lampshade — lightless, as there's no electricity or running water here — is speared on a post beside a stolen shopping cart that has been repurposed as a sieve for the camp's garbage. Farther on, a cracked aquarium now used as a planter for unidentifiable seedlings stands amid yet more detritus — a filthy sofa, a wheel-less office chair, rusted bedsprings.

Welcome to the Cuvrybrache, newly christened “Berlin's favela.”

The infamous squatters who once occupied vacant lots and abandoned buildings across Berlin have all but disappeared. But as the city's renaissance drives up rents and wealthy migrants from southern Germany displace leftists, artists and slackers, a new alliance of anti-gentrification activists, immigrants and refugees is emerging in pockets of resistance like this one.

Home to 40-odd permanent residents and a constant flow of temporary campers, the Cuvrybrache or “Cuvry street fallow,” originated during a protest against a multimillion-dollar project to redevelop the banks of the Spree River, which flows through the city center.

But as the presence of African refugees, a family of Roma and economic migrants fromPoland suggests, it's now on the verge of becoming something more, says Lukas, a tall, thin hippie from Hamburg with blond dreadlocks and a sprinkling of sun freckles across his nose.

“The big time of squatting in Berlin is over, but it's not done yet, as you can see,” he says.

In many ways, the history of squatting reflects the city’s story.




Home squat home: Squatters were evicted in February 2011 from this building after occupying it since the early '90s.

The squatting movement arose in what was then West Berlin from the anti-parliamentarian student movement in the 1970s and expanded as a housing crisis deepened throughout that decade, the result of post-World War II policies that discouraged low-income rental projects.

When the Berlin Wall came down, a new burst of squatting erupted to occupy the sudden appearance of abandoned buildings in the former East, says University of Nottingham historian Alex Vasudevan.

Over the past few years, however, construction has failed to keep pace with demand. The excess housing that long kept prices low — and allowing Berlin to remain a haven for artists and dropouts — has disappeared. Rents are rising faster than wages, turning immigrants and hipsters into allies.

“Now squatters and other housing activists are collaborating with migrant communities and refugee groups in a wider activist politics, which hasn't happened in Germany since the early '70s,” Vasudevan says.

Over the past five years, high-profile evictions have demonstrated Berlin's new commitment to protecting owners' property rights, while some of the oldest squatter communities have been forced to go legit — and turn capitalist — to survive.

In 2010, police faced down hundreds of protesters to evict residents of a five-story central Berlin apartment house that was then called “the last rent-free squat in Berlin.”

Meanwhile, residents of Rauchhaus, a squat first occupied in 1971, now offer classes in yoga, silkscreen painting and welding and operate a proletarian, albeit capitalist, bar to foot the tax bill since having gained legal title to the building.

But the battle for the city's soul is hardly over.

Less than a year after the supposedly last rent-free building was emptied, 2,500 police had to be deployed to evict residents from yet another squat in the neighborhood of Friedrichshain in the former East.

Even as housing prices rise, threatening the laidback lifestyle that prompted Mayor Klaus Wowerheit to tag Berlin with the nickname “poor but sexy” a decade ago, a steady influx of asylum seekers and immigrants from poorer European Union countries is revitalizing the struggle, says 26-year-old housing activist Helena Mueller of the group “Wir Bleiben Alle” (We're All Staying).

Using flash mob-style squatting as a public relations tool, Wir Bleiben Alle warned police in advance before occupying an abandoned building late last year, and helped Bulgarian immigrants squatting in an ice cream factory in the central part of city to resist eviction just before Christmas.

“Their problem is our problem,” says Mueller, who used a pseudonym because of the illegal nature of her group's activities. “That's why we're working with them.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140418/berlin-german-squatters-immigration

The zero-emission engine is getting ready for prime time

As the global market for electric and hybrid cars expands, Germany is also betting on another alternative power source.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost, April 16, 2014

STUTTGART, Germany — At the Mercedes-Benz headquarters here, a showroom display illustrates the rapid evolution of the iconic luxury brand’s hydrogen-fueled cars.

In a 1992 prototype, the fuel cell takes up the entire cargo area of a delivery van. Across the room, today's model — now merely the size of an average television set — is displayed in front of a neon-lit outline of a compact passenger car.

This “zero emission” engine, it appears, is ready for prime time.

With the aid of government spending and joint efforts by Ford and Nissan, Daimler — Mercedes’s parent corporation — aims to start selling hydrogen-fueled cars to the public as early as 2017.

If they take off, the biggest impact may be felt not in the car industry but in wind energy. Experts say a large commercial market could enable green energy producers to use their excess power to make clean hydrogen instead of storing it in costly batteries.

To meet Europe's aggressive targets for emissions reductions, Daimler is developing hybrids and electric cars, too. But although hydrogen-powered cars have been slower to hit the market, their potential benefit to the wind-power industry means they may become even bigger in Germany, says Christian Mohrdieck, director of Daimler's fuel cell program.

“We’re very sure we can achieve a product cost level which is competitive [with today's hybrid cars]," he says. “But to get there, we still need to work very intensively on the business side.”

The selling points for consumers are strong.

Unlike hybrids, hydrogen-fueled cars are truly “zero emission” vehicles, powered by a chemical reaction with water as its only by-product. And unlike plug-in electrics, hydrogen-powered cars have the same range as those running on gasoline or diesel — and can be refueled just as quickly.


That doesn’t mean the going will be easy.

Expensive platinum components hydrogen cars require mean it will be challenging to bring their cost below $100,000.

Moreover, while drivers of hybrids can refuel at ordinary gas stations and battery-powered car owners can plug them in at home, hydrogen cars will require a network of special fueling stations.

Prominent critics such as Elon Musk, founder of the burgeoning electric car manufacturer Tesla, joke that hydrogen is the fuel of the future — and always will be.

“The fuel cell is so bulls**t,” he told employees at the launch of a new service center for his plug-in sports cars in Germany last year.

“It's suitable for the after-stage of rockets, but not for cars.”

Skepticism like this hasn’t discouraged investment, however.

In 2012, Germany's Transportation Ministry, Daimler and several other companies agreed to finance a network of 50 refueling stations across the country by 2015.

In September, Air Liquide, Daimler, Linde, OMV, Shell and Total unveiled plans to expand that network to some 400 stations by 2023, with the first 100 in place in time for Daimler's commercial launch.

Klaus Bonhoff, who heads Germany's National Organization for Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology, says that would be enough to pass the industry’s first major test.

“In order to sell the first vehicles that will show up in the showrooms, you have to give the customer a certain gut feeling that he is able to refuel the vehicle he's about to buy,” he said in a telephone interview.

There’s another important factor at play.

In Germany, where an aggressive shift to green energy production known as “Energiewende,” or “energy transition,” has created a booming wind-energy industry, the impact could reach far beyond the automotive business.

Unlike conventional power plants, the output of wind and solar energy plants fluctuates dramatically — so much so that Germany's many wind-power companies sometimes produce as much as four times the amount of energy being consumed, which destabilizes the grid.

To offload and store that excess power, wind producers currently use costly batteries or pump water uphill, from where it can be allowed to flow down again to produce hydroelectric power. Neither solution is very efficient.

The commercialization of hydrogen-fueled cars would allow them instead to use excess wind energy for producing hydrogen — which is made by splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen — and tap a lucrative new market.

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That's where hydrogen's infrastructure hurdle may turn out to be a surprise advantage.

It’s still unclear how businesses can make a profit from plug-in car charging stations, which take six hours to charge a car. Hydrogen stations, in contrast, would operate on much the same model as existing conventional pumps, making the wind-to-hydrogen business not so different from today's petroleum-to-gasoline supply chain.

That, Bonhoff says, would enable the industry to “get to those viable business cases" much faster.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140411/germany-hydrogen-cars-wind-energy-renewables

The remarkable economic boom that began in Poland in 1990 has now become a remarkable economic divide

Born from a union protest, here's how democratic Poland lost the spirit of Solidarity.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost, April 8, 2014

GDANSK, Poland — Towering green loading cranes stretch along a wide canal leading to the shipyard where Poland's Solidarity movement began three decades ago.

For some, they are monuments to a golden age for the shipbuilders who fought for the right to form an independent labor union and eventually helped spearhead the communist collapse in 1989.

Among them, 54-year-old Zbigniew Stefanski stood on the barricades during the first strikes led by union leader Lech Walesa against the communist authorities a decade earlier. “I was arrested more times than I can remember,” he says. “Once I was beaten so badly my own mother couldn't recognize me.”

But the sacrifice was worth it. “There was a big victory,” says the gaunt, weather-beaten worker with a deeply lined forehead and a graying goatee. “There were great hopes.”

However, the painter at the former Lenin Shipyard — which was partially privatized before filing for bankruptcy in 1997 — quickly becomes wistful.

“Now it's all gone,” he says.

Poland has experienced a remarkable economic boom since it started on the path to democracy in 1990.

But it’s also seen a growing divide between those who managed to prosper and others like Stefanski who feel they’ve been left behind. He says he lost his home as well as his wife because of troubles with the law and low wages.

The division is clear right here in the shipyard, part of which has been taken over by Sunreef Yachts, which builds luxury boats. For young Poles of the post-communist generation such as 28-year-old Lukacz Lorkowski, whose father once worked in the state shipyards, the rusting cranes are symbols of a broken past.


After earning a degree in ocean engineering, he found a job at Sunreef and swiftly climbed the ladder from craftsman to supervisor. He owns a car and a motorcycle and is building a new house.

“I have a lot of things my father didn't have,” he says.

Inside a brick building the size of an airplane hangar, a dozen craftsmen in jeans and flannel shirts string wires and secure plywood boards in the cockpit of a new 70-foot yacht. The air is thick with the smell of fiberglass and the whirring sound of machines.

Business is booming.

Last year, Poland's 900-odd privately owned boat builders did more than a billion dollars of business, delivering around 15,000 luxury yachts to buyers in the US and Europe.

The rapidly growing industry helps explains why the export-oriented economy is expected to grow another 2.5 percent next year.

Still, among maritime workers, Sunreef's Lorkowski is among lucky few. At 13,000 workers, the country’s entire yacht-building industry employs only three-quarters of the number that once swarmed over ships in the Lenin Shipyard alone.

It's the same story in industries across Poland, whose 10 percent to 13 percent unemployment rate matches the European Union average.

A full quarter of the country's young remains jobless despite the exodus of some 2 million Poles for jobs elsewhere in Europe.

That wasn’t the promise in 1989.

During the first democratic elections that year, all seats in parliament went to Solidarity members except for one. That went to a businessman who had been thrown out of the Communist Party for corruption — a feat that took considerable doing. He won by promising workers he would give the one in ten with real talent a chance to rise to the top.

“That should have been a warning signal,” says Konstanty Gebert, a journalist who was part of the union movement.

The government lifted price controls and opened trade to foreign competition, forcing businesses to adapt or die. While that later enabled companies such as Sunreef to thrive, it also put millions out of work and gutted a labor movement that had inspired the world.

“Nothing was sexier than a trade union in 1980,” says Gebert, who remembers a TV news announcer applauding rising unemployment — an indicator of a “normal” economy. “But by 1990, it had gone the way of bad toilet paper and shiny suits.”

Last September, a glimmer of the old labor movement surfaced in what some called an “autumn of discontent.” Over four days, Solidarity and two other trade unions protested austerity measures that included the abolishing of the eight-hour workday, a decrease in the minimum wage and an increase in the retirement age.

But when the peaceful demonstration culminated in a march on Warsaw by as many as 100,000 protesters, Prime Minister Donald Tusk called it “an attempt at overthrowing the government.”

A year before, Lech Walesa himself had called on Tusk to send out police with truncheons when unions picketed against an increase in the retirement age.

How did Solidarity become shunned even by the man who was once its leader?

Many of its leaders left Poland or made new careers after the communist collapse, while the idealism of those left behind broke amid the privatization of state assets.

Jeremi Mordasewicz, a construction entrepreneur and former member of the government's labor commission, says the unions that had fought on behalf of Poland's workers later doomed companies in industries like shipbuilding and mining to shut down because they resisted reforms.

“In my enterprises, we had to cut half of the employees, and even then our production was higher than it had been before,” said Mordasewicz, who is now a mediator in union negotiations.

Similar problems continue to drag on the economy, he says.

Borrowing capital costs more than in Germany, while the productivity of Polish workers is far lower. That’s bad for investment, which is sorely needed to create jobs for a workforce that’s still bloated.

More from GlobalPost: As Kyiv looks West, Ukraine’s east watches in dismay

Some say the social inequities partly stem from a deeper problem.

Thanks to the backlash against communism in the 1990s, people naively believed competition could solve every problem and scorned investing in education and social programs, says Andrzej Celinski, a former leader of the independence movement who broke from Solidarity in 1999.

“It's one of the country’s biggest shames,” he says.

Back at the former Lenin Shipyard, row upon row of bracings for building container ships stand empty. A single, orange-colored gas transport ship floats in the canal.

“In the '80s, we used to build 13 or 14 ships a year,” painter Stefanski says.

“You could walk across the decks from one to another,” he adds, gazing off across a scrubby field where now pallet after pallet of steel lies rusting.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/poland/140404/poland-gdansk-shipyard-unions-solidarity

Hungary: Exit polls show Orban in clear victory

Preliminary results indicate controversial PM may repeat two-thirds majority.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost, April 6, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's center right Fidesz party won a decisive election victory on Sunday and likely earned enough votes to retain a dominant two-thirds majority in the parliament, exit polls showed.

A clear mandate, the result will allow Orban to claim public support for various policies that have been controversial abroad and criticized by the opposition, including amendments to the constitution and a so-called “freedom fight” against the European Union, said Bulcsú Hunyadi, an analyst with Budapest-based think tank Political Capital.

“With this result, Fidesz will say that the vast majority of Hungarians back the government and all the reforms the government has made in the past four years,” Hunyadi said.

Fidesz earned 48 percent of the vote, while the opposition Unity Alliance led by the Socialists earned 27 percent, and the far right Jobbik party earned 18 percent, according to exit polls conducted by Nézőpont Institute, an independent think tank based in Budapest.

Those numbers, if confirmed by the final tally late Sunday night, should allow Fidesz to win 133 seats, slightly more than two-thirds of the 199 seat parliament.

Depending on the final breakdown of the votes, the election could result in a new struggle for the leadership of the opposition alliance, prompting factionalism that could further strengthen Orban's dominance, Hunyadi said.

Going into the polls, Orban's Fidesz was widely expected to win, due in part to controversial changes to the election system the government pushed through in the previous term.

In addition to changing the way votes are counted and reducing the size of the parliament from from 386 to 199 members, Fidesz allegedly redrew the borders of voting districts to dilute support for the opposition.

As a result of those changes, experts had predicted that Orban could attain another two-thirds majority with as little as 40 percent of the popular vote.


Outside experts have predicted that another two-thirds majority for the prime minister power could be bad for Hungary.

In January, the European Parliament slammed Orban for using his near-absolute authority to circumvent or eliminate democratic checks and balances. Among other actions, he curbed judicial authority and wrote a law into the constitution enabling security forces to jail homeless people after the measure was struck down by the courts.

Orban also drew flack for his recent unilateral decision to award a $14 billion tender for the expansion of the country’s only nuclear plant to Russia's Rosatom nuclear agency — in a deal under which Moscow will lend Budapest most of the money. Along with Orban's reluctance to back sanctions against Russia for its actions in Crimea, the deal prompted accusations that he's pushing Hungary away from European democracy toward Russian-style oligarchy.

In the leadup to the polls, various economists told the Wall Street Journal that Orban's autocratic style and statist economic policy had eroded business confidence and discouraged foreign investment.

Meanwhile, critics at home and abroad have claimed that Orban ran Hungary like a party machine, allegedly turning cronies like Lorinc Meszaros, an old friend who is now the mayor of Orban's hometown, into millionaires.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140406/hungary-exit-polls-viktor-orban-victory

Roma in Hungary fear they’ll be a pawn for the ruling party

As Hungarians prepare for elections, new minority voting rights may boost Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost, April 3, 2014

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Tourists and well-heeled locals sip espresso at a cafe near this city’s majestic 19th-century Nyugati train station as a dark-complexioned elderly man in a shabby suit shuffles past, apparently faking a limp while trying to bum a cigarette. Near the station entrance, a woman with a basket hawks cooking spices.

That's the stereotypical image of the Roma, an ethnic minority also known by the more pejorative term “Gypsy.”

Although many Hungarians celebrated the end of communism in 1989, the transition to democracy hasn’t been good to the minority group.

Closures of overstaffed communist factories left as many as nine out of ten Roma unemployed in some regions. Despite making up a tenth of the population, the community has never played a significant role in politics except in the racist rhetoric of the far right.

Now its members are warily awaiting new changes in their political status as the country prepares to vote in parliamentary elections on Sunday.

As part of controversial changes to the electoral system, the Roma and other ethnic minorities will be allowed to vote as a special category whose creation the government has trumpeted as a victory in the fight for equal rights.

But Roma are worried the policy is just as likely to isolate the persecuted community even more.

Among them is Bela Racz, an ethnic Roma activist who works for George Soros’s Open Society Institute in Budapest.

“The change forces us into a choice,” he says. “Do you want to be Hungarian or do you want to be Roma?”


Under the new rules pushed through parliament by the center-right Fidesz Party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, each of the country’s 13 formally acknowledged ethnic minorities will be able to elect a member of parliament with only a quarter of the votes required for mainstream candidates.

Although registering as a minority voter is optional, it may be the only way for other minorities less numerous than the Roma to get a voice in parliament.

But critics argue the policy will reinforce a sense that Roma aren’t normal Hungarian citizens while discouraging the general Hungarian electorate from supporting the new independentHungarian Gypsy Party.

That would impede Roma integration, Racz says.

“It's saying that Roma who are living in Hungary aren’t part of this society,” he says, adding that his opinions don’t necessarily reflect his employer's. “That they should have different rights, different decisions, different systems.”

The stakes are high for Roma.

During the past five years, Hungary has seen a growth of anti-Roma vigilante groups, as well as hate crimes and racist public statements by state officials and members of mainstream political parties.

Although Hungary has adopted European Union laws against discrimination, the far-right Jobbik Party is becoming more influential at a time that violence is becoming an everyday reality, Rasz says.

In his office around the corner from Budapest's breathtaking St. Istvan's cathedral, the tall, articulate activist dressed in a khaki shirt and grey pants looks more like a marketing executive than a street fighter. But he blithely recalls youthful battles with skinheads and organizing villagers blocking far-right vigilantes from entering his hometown.

Still, there are some signs that the authorities are responding.

The government's spokesman points out that the Fidesz Party stopped uniformed vigilantes from a far-right group called the Hungarian Guard from patrolling villages for what they called “gypsy crime.” That followed years of hand-wringing from the rival Socialist Party.

In August, a Hungarian court sentenced three right-wing extremists to life in prison for the serial murders of six Roma.

Still, despite evidence that the killers belonged to neo-Nazi networks and their admission they were searching for a “solution to the Gypsy problem,” the crimes were categorized as simple murder — belying what human rights groups describe as accelerating patterns of anti-Roma violence.

More from GlobalPost: Hungary: How to steal a constitution

Critics of the new voting regulations say rather than the result of high-minded principles, the privileges they give to minorities look suspiciously like an attempt to stack the deck for Fidesz — because the minority candidate must first be selected by another elected body, the national minority self-government, whose current leadership is allied with Fidesz.

Although only around 22,000 Roma voters have registered to vote in the minority category, those votes won't go to the new Hungarian Gypsy Party and will probably be enough to elect a fully empowered MP who's allied with Orban.

What appears to be official bungling hasn’t helped calm nerves.

The authorities described the new voting rules by distributing a confusing letter that left many Roma believing registering for the minority vote is mandatory, partly because they weren’t described as optional until the second page.

Although minority voters can change their minds after registering, they must do so at least two days before the election.

Whatever happens on Sunday, even if the new regulations do nothing to isolate the Roma, few believe they’ll do anything to change society’s image of them anytime soon.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140402/hungary-roma-elections-Fidesz-Orban

Hungary: How to steal a constitution

As Hungarians prepare to vote in parliamentary elections on Sunday, critics say gerrymandering has stacked the deck for the right-wing prime minister.
By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost, April 1, 2014

KECSKEMET, Hungary — Gordon Bajnai was once Hungary’s most powerful man. Now he’s fighting a losing battle for a seat in parliament as the country prepares for elections on Sunday.

At a campaign rally in this provincial city 50 miles from Budapest, voters gather in the packed town hall to greet the former prime minister with shouts and applause.

They clap rhythmically as Bajnai takes to the stage and quips, “We're just getting started.”

But experts say he's already finished: Polls favor the party of sitting Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Critics say that’s less a reflection of public opinion than the result of new election rules the controversial PM used to gerrymander districts in order to make the vote a slam-dunk for his center-right Fidesz party, which heads a two-thirds majority in the parliament.

Worse than that, they say, more rule changes could enable him to turn just 40 percent of the popular vote — or the support of as little as 15 percent of the population — into another two-thirds majority.

A former investment banker and CEO who guided Hungary through the worst years of the euro crisis, Bajnai helped cobble together a coalition of half a dozen left-leaning parties into an anti-Orban alliance in January — just in time for the campaign. But he has no illusions going into Sunday's polls.

“When Senator McCain was visiting Budapest, he asked me is it going to be a free and fair election,” Bajnai said in an interview using his flawless, American-style English. “I told him I think it's going to be free but it's not going to be fair.”

That’s worrying not only Hungarian civil society but also the European Union.


In January, the European Parliament slammed Orban for using his near-absolute authority to circumvent or eliminate democratic checks and balances. Among other actions, he curbed judicial authority and wrote a law into the constitution enabling security forces to jail homeless people after the measure was struck down by the courts.

Orban’s policy toward Russia is also raising concerns.

Although he defeated the rival Socialists by disparaging their historical links to Russia, he has dragged his feet on joining EU sanctions to punish Moscow for annexing the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea last month.

He also recently made a unilateral decision to award a $14 billion tender for the expansion of the country’s only nuclear plant to Russia's Rosatom nuclear agency — in a deal under which Moscow will lend Budapest most of the money.

Those actions have prompted accusations that he's nudging Hungary away from European democracy toward a Russian-style oligarchy, says the Socialist Party's Viktor Szigetvari.

“The tendencies and the structures are quite similar,” he said.

More neutral critics from civil society organizations ranging from the nonprofit sector to trade unions also say Orban has run the government like a dictatorship, eschewing consultations in favor of sudden edicts.

The prime minister spent many months ignoring the tripartite National Reconciliation Council, which was designed to resolve conflicts among the government, corporations and union workers, says Peter Fiedler, a spokesman for the Liga confederation of trade unions.

Then he disbanded the negotiating body altogether, pushed through sweeping reforms to labor laws that allowed managers at state-owned firms to fire workers without cause and effectively banned strikes — prompting union members to block roads to force the government back to the table.

“The prime minister said he's been elected by employers, he's been elected by employees, and he himself is the government, so why should he consult with anyone?” Fiedler says.

The Orban government also reorganized the education system to place it under the control of a central body without consulting stakeholders and summarily dissolved the National Development Agency responsible for distributing EU funds, says Veronika Mora, who works at a nonprofit that distributes grants to environmental groups.

“I don't say that the National Development Agency was working well,” said Mora. “But now the complete governance of distributing the structural funds is under the prime minister's office.”

Despite the criticism, Orban remains unquestionably more popular than his rivals: Opinion polls show Fidesz leading the opposition alliance by 30 percent to 40 percent compared to the left’s roughly 20 percent.

Most controversial is the belief that his relatively narrow advantage will almost certainly translate into an “overwhelming majority” in the parliament, as leading research institutes predict.

That’s because Orban used the two-thirds majority he won with 53 percent of the vote in 2010 to rewrite the election rules to guarantee the same outcome this time around with a fraction of that support, says Peter Kreko, director of Budapest-based Political Capital, an independent think tank the government accuses of supporting the opposition.

The government dismisses the concerns. Although they drew criticism from the EU, none of Orban's changes violate the principles laid down by the Venice Commission's code of practice for elections, according to Ferenc Kumin, a spokesman for the PM's office. And the new system integrated 16 out of 23 changes recommended by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) after the 2010 polls, he adds.

“Why didn't Fidesz invite the smaller parties in the parliament in the drafting period?” he said about criticism that the Socialists and others dropped out of the process. “The answer is they were invited many, many times.”

“The problem was that they didn't want to be part of something they knew could be a success story for the government because it wouldn't serve their political goals.”

The electoral system in Hungary, like a number of other European countries, requires people vote for specific candidates from their constituencies and again for political parties. The parties are awarded seats for candidates selected from party lists based on the amount of the popular vote they receive under a system of proportional representation.

Acting on a universal call to shrink the size of the parliament and redraw borders to reflect population changes that have occurred since 1990, Orban's government reduced the number of parliamentarians from 386 to 199.

But in addition to placing otherwise desirable limits on campaign financing and restricting television advertisements in a way that's made it harder for the opposition to get its message out, Orban restructured the scheme to boost the party that wins a plurality, even if it gets only a fraction of the total.

The new rules also lower the bar for the entrance of new parties, making Fidesz pluralities even more likely by fracturing the opposition.

But the simplest measure was good old-fashioned gerrymandering — or redrawing districts to divide left-leaning constituencies and strengthen right-wing ones — Kreko says.

His supporters point out that Orban corrected anomalies that made some districts as much as three times more populous than others and that the new constituency map doesn't feature any suspicious shapes that would suggest gerrymandering.

Moreover, they argue, the previous borders unfairly favored the left. In any case, since Hungarian voters don't register as members of one party or another, true gerrymandering is virtually impossible, says Agoston Mraz, who heads Nezopont Intezet, another Budapest-based think tank.

“No one knows exactly whether gerrymandering has been done or it’s just political rhetoric,” he says.

More from GlobalPost: Ukraine’s next headache

Nevertheless, Political Capital's comparison of the previous district map with the present one suggests there was a definite strategy behind the new borders, Kreko says.

“The differences in size between the constituencies are smaller than before, but the left-wing voters are located in bigger electoral districts,” he says. “What does it mean? A left-wing vote matters a bit less than a right-wing vote.”

That's grim news for voters such as 61-year-old Szena Tibor, a gray-haired small-business owner seated in the back of the Kecskemet youth center during Bajnai's opposition rally.

“I'm a democrat, and Orban is not,” she says. “Everything he's done, from rewriting the constitution to making rules in reverse based on the outcome he wants to achieve so there's no competition in the economy, has been anti-democratic.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140328/hungary-elections-orban-fidesz

Poland wrestles with the legacy of a secret CIA torture site

The crisis in Ukraine may help convince Poles to close their eyes to alleged US wrongdoing.

Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - March 18, 2014

STARE KIEJKUTY, Poland — From a hilltop overlooking a military base in this picturesque village 100 miles due north of Warsaw, a charming country house is just visible across a shimmering blue lake.

Surrounded by a dual row of high chain-link fencing topped with razor wire, it's the only sign of life at the base, which serves as a training center for the Polish intelligence agency somewhere within.

This is where America's Central Intelligence Agency allegedly tortured suspected terrorists during its hunt for Osama bin Laden between 2002 and 2005. According to information leaked by CIA officers to the Washington Post, the CIA purportedly paid Poland's intelligence service $15 million for the use of the villa — or another one like it hidden in the woods behind the fence — as a secret “black site.”

Despite allegations of torture and disappearances that recall the worst crimes of Poland's recently troubled history, human rights workers say the government is stonewalling investigations.

That’s not unpopular with some in Stare Kiejkuty. Locals say terrorism must be fought by any means necessary — especially after Washington’s decision to send a dozen F-16 fighters and 300 soldiers to Poland's border with Russia this week because of the crisis in neighboring Ukraine.

At Stare Kiejkuty's only shop, a tiny general store opposite the military base, the proprietor is more disgusted with reporters than foreign spies. A dowdy, middle-aged woman with rusty gray hair and a prominent mole on her cheek, she says villagers are fed up with being portrayed as ignorant bumpkins.

“I don't believe anything was going on here,” she says, declining to give her name. “But if so, there are such bases all over the world. Something has to be done to stop the terrorists.”

Dawid, a teenager on a stroll with his girlfriend, agrees. “As long as the terrorists couldn't get off that base to hurt women and children in our town,” he says, “I don't care what happened to them there.” He, too, asked not to be identified by his full name.

Lawyers for two men granted victim status in Poland's internal investigation into the torture allegations say the CIA looked to this idyllic forested retreat when a similar black site inThailand proved to be infested with snakes. They allege the US secretly flew terror suspects to a closed nearby airport and spirited them to the military base under the cover of darkness.


Saudi-born Abu Zubaydah, Saudi national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and possibly many others were allegedly hooded and paraded naked in front of their interrogators and forced into painful “stress positions” that dislocated the shoulders of one detainee, according to a casefiled with the European Court of Human Rights.

Interrogators carried out mock executions and repeatedly waterboarded suspects to encourage them to confess to terrorism. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, is said to have been subjected to the torture 183 times, the Washington Post reported.

Back then, no one in Stare Kiejkuty could hear them scream. Now, allegedly under pressure from its American co-conspirators, Poland is working to keep the case shrouded in silence, says Amrit Singh, the lawyer representing al-Nashiri, who has been held without trial in Guantanamo Bay since 2003.

“Prosecutors have been changed three different times, [once after] there were reports that charges had been brought,” said Singh, who took the case to the European court in an attempt to break Polish stonewalling. “All indications really are that there is political influence in [Poland's] investigation.”

The implications range far wider than whether or not Polish intelligence broke the law.

Human rights workers and political analysts here say the case marks a seminal moment for a country caught between the influences of the European Union, the US and Russia, and is still struggling to develop democratic institutions.

“For the majority of Polish politicians and Polish society, the devotion to our relationship with America is constant,” says political analyst Jacek Zakowski. “But the question is what kind of America. Is it the America of Guantanamo? Or is it the America of freedom of religion?”

Keen to secure American and NATO protection back in 2005, Poland was quick to accept former US President George W. Bush's “you're with us or against us” formulation that scorned France and Germany for their criticism of his invasion of Iraq.

But some questioned the Polish support for the war, especially after President Barack Obama altered Bush’s plans to build missile defense installations here.

Despite government delays and interference, the investigation into Stare Kiejkuty trundles on, even as other countries accused of hosting black sites, such as Lithuania and Romania, have killed off any such efforts, says Julia Hall, Amnesty International's expert on counterterrorism and human rights.

But now events in Ukraine may ensure that American support for Polish security will outweigh concerns about the legality or morality of US actions.

More from GlobalPost: This is how these 12 countries will punish you for insulting their heads of state

What's at stake is not only the fate of the alleged victims but also the future of the rule of law, Hall says.

A torture verdict may allow Zubaydah and al-Nashiri to avoid the death penalty, she says, which would send a clear message to the US that it can’t simply “play the heavy” and expect Poland to do its bidding, then help cover up its crimes.

Unlike the lawyers for the two suspects who brought the case to the European Court of Human Rights, Hall believes Poland's internal case may shed more light into what took place at Stare Kiejkuty.

Although Amnesty blasted the Polish government for obstruction last June, she believes Poland's prosecutor remains independent despite continued US pressure to let the matter die. The recent addition of a third alleged victim to the case provided grounds for more optimism.

For getting to the truth behind what took place in the CIA’s black sites, she says, “Poland is the last man standing.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/poland/140312/poland-wrestles-the-legacy-secret-cia-torture-site

Take that, Putin: US and EU enact sanctions against Russia

Western countries target officials with travel bans and asset freezes over Crimea and warn of tougher measures to come.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - March 17, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — The European Union and United States have enacted visa bans and asset freezes against a number of Russian and Ukrainian officials after Crimea applied to join Russia on Monday.

Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula on Sunday held a referendum in which local officials say almost 97 percent of voters supported seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia.

The US and EU say the referendum as well as Russia’s military invasion of Crimea are illegal.

US President Barack Obama imposed sanctions against 11 Russians and Ukrainians said to have played key roles in the referendum, including two leading aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That came shortly after EU foreign ministers enacted similar measures against 21 Russians and Ukrainians whose names are expected to become public on Tuesday. The list may be expanded later in the week at a meeting of European Union leaders on Thursday and Friday, Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek told reporters.

The sanctions don’t target Putin or his closest allies in the Kremlin.

However, EU leaders are expected to define the terms of wider economic sanctions at a summit on Thursday, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said.

They may be directed against people close to Putin, Reuters reported.

Judy Dempsey of the Carnegie Europe think-tank says European leaders have “no choice” but to target people in the Russian president’s inner circle.


“No one's quite clear who gave the orders [to send troops to Crimea],” she said in a telephone interview. “But since Putin is the president of Russia and responsible for the armed forces, the EU has no choice but to go very, very close to the top. They may target the assets of the oligarchs as well.”

EU leaders are weighing whether those measures will be tough enough to provide Putin with an incentive to negotiate, but not so draconian to result in a “further escalation that could lead to the division of Europe,” said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

The stakes are particularly high for Germany, Europe’s political and economic leader.

Russia supplies 40 percent of the country’s natural gas and accounts for some $80 billion in foreign trade. Putin's spurning of diplomatic overtures has forced Chancellor Angela Merkel to effectively reverse decades of German foreign policy focused on engaging rather than isolating Moscow.

Dempsey suggests Putin's outright refusal to negotiate backing down over Crimea has tied Merkel's hands.

“There must be a sense of betrayal, but also disbelief” in Berlin, she says. “They were Russia's most important trading partner and used to be Russia's most important ally within the EU.”

The American list of targeted officials includes Vladislav Surkov, seen as the Kremlin’s former longtime ideologue, and Sergei Glazyev, an economist who advises Putin on Ukraine. It also includes acting Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov, Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin and Valentina Matviyenko, who heads Russia’s upper house of the parliament.

Obama told Putin on Sunday that the Crimean referendum “violates the Ukrainian constitution and occurred under duress of Russian military intervention.” Speaking by telephone, he told the Russian leader that the vote “would never be recognized by the United States and the international community.”

However, both Obama and European leaders say a diplomatic path for resolving the crisis remains open.

Dempsey says enacting meaningful sanctions against Russia will be no easy task. “If they do put [real economic] sanctions on Russia, this is a huge step for Europe,” she says. “A huge step emotionally, historically, strategically, politically, economically. It's just huge.”

Fears are growing that Moscow wants to also annex parts of Ukraine’s largely Russian-speaking east, where Russia has been accused of fomenting separatism and pro-Russian demonstrators have stormed government buildings and killed and injured Ukrainians during clashes with pro-Ukrainian protesters. Moscow has also massed troops on its border with Ukraine.

More from GlobalPost: Why the crisis in Ukraine may be just beginning

Pro-Russian forces have been in control of Crimea since late February, shortly after Ukraine's pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted following months of street protests prompted by his rejection of a planned deal with the EU in favor of closer ties with Moscow.

US Vice President Joseph Biden is expected to travel to Eastern Europe on Monday to meet the leaders of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, which feel most nervous about Russian assertiveness.

Obama is set to travel to Europe next week on a previously planned trip.

Regardless of the Kremlin’s decisions in the coming days and weeks, Dempsey believes there’s little Western leaders will be able to do to influence events inside Ukraine.

“The future of Ukraine lies with the huge swell of civil society and the pro-democracy movements,” she says. “There's a momentum in Ukraine now that has to be seized, and the civil society is seizing it. They don't want this revolution to get out of their hands.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140317/us-eu-sanctions-russia-ukraine-crimea-referendum

Merkel’s tough stance toward Russia threatens trade war

Reversing a longtime policy of caution toward Russia, Germany enters new territory with unknown consequences.
Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost - March 13, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — Chancellor Angela Merkel has issued an ultimatum to Russia over what she called its annexation of Crimea: Back down or face strong measures from the European Union.

Accusing Moscow of acting by the “law of the jungle” in an address to parliament on Thursday, Merkel said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions are a clear breach of international law and threatened full-fledged economic sanctions.

“If Russia continues on its course of the past weeks, it will not only be a catastrophe for Ukraine, but also we, the neighboring states, would understand this as a threat to us,” she said in her strongest-ever words toward Russia. “It would not only change the European Union's relationship with Russia, but… would also cause massive damage to Russia, economically and politically.”

Although Merkel continued to call for a diplomatic resolution to the Crimea crisis and emphasized that the standoff can’t be solved militarily, her tough talk is the clearest evidence so far of what appears to be a reversal in German policy away from arguing for engaging rather than challenging Russia that pre-dates the end of the Cold War.

The new stance from the EU’s political and economic leader comes despite deep concerns about Germany’s heavy dependence on Russian natural gas as well as dogged resistance from business leaders, and indicates the chancellor may make good on promises made at the beginning of her first term in 2005 to end her country’s reluctance to take a leadership role in foreign affairs.

Calling Putin’s actions “annexation” clearly evokes Adolph Hitler's 1938 “Anschluss” of Austria, says Nina Schick of Open Europe, an EU-focused think tank.

“The stance in Berlin has definitely hardened over the past few days,” she says.

Merkel reiterated a threat she made at a meeting with Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Wednesday that Putin has until Monday to enter into substantial negotiations in order to avert European Union visa bans and asset freezes for Russians deemed responsible for the country’s actions in Crimea. She also made first mention of a potential “third round” of sanctions.

Few believe Putin will back down over a Crimean referendum planned for Sunday about joining Russia. US and European officials argue that the poll’s suddenness and presence of Russian troops on the Black Sea peninsula make the exercise a farce.


Moscow has threatened to respond in kind to EU sanctions.

Claudia Kemfert, an energy policy expert at the German Institute for Economic Research, says Merkel doesn't plan on being first to blink, despite being “very dependent on Russia's energy imports.”

The German leader may be gambling that Russia will balk at retaliating by cutting off gas supplies to Germany because it needs the EU’s money as badly as the European bloc needs the fuel.

However, the depth of Merkel's change of heart and just how far other EU members are willing to venture remains to be seen.

The EU has so far suspended talks with Russia on a wide-ranging economic pact and granting Russian citizens visa-free travel within the EU. Shick believes a tougher, second round of targeted measures promised for next week will stop short of “meaningful” economic sanctions, and be highly unlikely that to freeze Putin's personal assets.

“It's still largely symbolic,” she says. “If they wanted to hit Russia hard, they would take broader economic sanctions.”

In her speech on Thursday, Merkel also made first mention of a potential “third round” of sanctions.

However, business lobbies that have heavily influenced German policy toward Russia in the past have tried to steer Merkel away from any meaningful sanctions.

On Wednesday, the trade group BGA warned that economic sanctions against Russia would hurt German businesses more than companies from other European countries. It pointed to the 6,200 German firms with investments in Russia and Germany's $100 billion in bilateral trade with Moscow.

Public opinion polls suggest sanctions would also be unpopular among the population, which fears a rise in what are already Europe's highest electricity charges. A survey conducted last week by the polling firm infratest dimap found that Germans oppose economic sanctions by a ratio of 57 percent to 38 percent.

In the lead-up to Merkel’s speech on Thursday, politicians and spin-doctors in Germany and the US have endeavored to chip away at such opposition. Advocates of fracking — the extraction of gas by fracturing rock — suggest shale gas supplies around the world can make up for a potential loss of Russian supplies.

American officials have promised to speed up exports of liquified natural gas from America. And Merkel's Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, among others, has downplayed the impact sanctions against Russia would have on the German economy, pointing out that they would be far more devastating to Russia — and therefore likely to work.

“We believe the fallout for the economy and for financial policy is — and will remain — manageable, for both Germany and Europe as a whole," he said on Wednesday.

Manageable perhaps, but certainly not pleasant, energy experts say.

Germany currently relies on Russia for around 40 percent of its gas.

However, US production of its own gas through fracking had created a glut in international markets that may enable Germany to replace that supply with imports from Norway, the Netherlands, Algeria or Qatar, Kemfert says.

More from GlobalPost: In Kyiv, fear of war mixes with frustration over lack of action

The stakes are far higher for other countries in Central and Eastern Europe that depend on Russia for up to 100 percent of their gas supplies and have recently asked Washington to make it easier for them to import American gas.

Analysts say it’s wrong to believe that supply can be replaced without a significant increase in prices, or that US gas producers can wave a magic wand to make the problem go away.

“It would take a decade for gas supplies from the US to have any impact on the European situation,” says Andrew McKillop, former in-house policy analyst at the European Commission's energy directorate.

A decision by Moscow to cut off gas to Europe may prompt panic in the energy sector and power rationing in some countries, he adds.

Even Germany lacks the infrastructure needed to replace piped Russian gas with liquified natural gas from the US — which means that despite Merkel’s new resolve to confront Putin, the consequences of an EU trade war with Russia can’t be predicted.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/140313/merkel-russia-ukraine-eu-sanctions-trade-war

China looks to Germany to beat up Japan

By Jason Overdorf

Newsweek Japan (March 2014)

For decades, a single adage was the key to good diplomatic relations in Europe: Don't talk about the war. But unfortunately for Germany and Japan, it looks like Beijing never got the memo.

That's right: On his March visit to Berlin, Chinese president Xi Jinping plans to talk about the war every chance he gets.

Xi wants the trip to have a strong focus on World War II. His team even pushed for a press event at Berlin's Holocaust Memorial – which Berlin rejected.

The idea is not to criticize Germany for the crimes of the Nazis. Rather, Xi hopes to praise Germany to the heavens for its 30-odd years of soul searching – by contrast extending China's dogged criticism of Japan for failing to apologize as often or as abjectly as Beijing thinks it should.

But there's more behind the scheme than an attempt to get Tokyo to build a memorial to Nanjing – and the plan is bound to rub Germany the wrong way, says professor James Davis, director of the political science department at Switzerland's University of St. Gallen.

“Germany has nothing to gain from being drawn into China's bid for regional influence and certainly does not want to be put in a position of having to choose between the Chinese and Japanese positions,” Davis said.

For China, it's not the first time. Chinese leaders have stepped up their references to World War II in recent years, not only criticizing Japan for war crimes committed in Nanjing. On a 2012 visit to Poland, for example, then-premier Wen Jiabao evoked an oft-repeated truism with an eye toward Japan, saying “Only those who remember history can build a good future.”

Similarly, in January of this year China built a museum in Harbin to Ahn Jung-geun, the Korean assassin who gunned down the Japanese governor of Korea in 1909, in a bid to use Japan's imperial past to drive a wedge between today's Tokyo and Seoul.

China-watchers say the battle over history has a broader importance. By focussing attention on wartime atrocities, Beijing hopes to squash any ambitions Tokyo may have toward re-building Japan's military or embracing a leadership role in regional foreign policy – even as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bumbles toward closing the books on the war with moves such as his controversial visit to the Yasukini shrine in December. And every sentence devoted to Japan's past crimes both justifies and draws attention away from China's own massive military expansion and ambitions toward regional hegemony.

“China pushed the anti-Japan line in foreign policy to make Japan defensive in the region, but China’s leaders also see limitations in over-playing the historical card as democrats, Tibetans and Uighurs may raise similar issues against the Chinese leadership later,” Srikanth Kondapalli, professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi said. “China is not reluctant to support German candidature for the UNSC, but vehemently opposes Japan. In China’s assessments a ‘normative’ Germany is better than a ‘normal’ Japan.”

That said, there's more behind Germany's refusal to fete him at the Holocaust Memorial than a reluctance to get in the middle of China's spat with Japan. And Xi's timing may favor Tokyo.

Leading recent negotiations in Ukraine and offering to send troops to the Central African Republic, Germany itself is finally moving to put the paralyzing memory of World War II behind it.

Along with the foreign ministers of France and Poland, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was instrumental in brokering a deal between the opposition and ousted Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych last week.

German President Joachim Gauck has repeatedly called for Germany to abandon its post-war reticence and lead from the front in recent speeches.

Popular films like “Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter” and the rise of the so-called “finish line movement” suggest that Germans themselves are fed up with taking the blame for the crimes of their grandfathers – or great grandfathers.

And by taking a tough stance against Israeli settlements in the West Bank during her trip to Israel this week, Chancellor Angela Merkel showed that there are no holy cows – which could well bode ill for Xi's propaganda initiative.

“Chancellor Merkel has never shied away from reminding the Chinese of their human rights obligations and has not shied away from meeting the Dalai Lama, despite strong protests from Beijing,” said Davis.

“If the Chinese want to discuss the Nazis' imperialist foreign policy or racist domestic policy, Merkel can turn the sword around and address the meanings of those lessons for China.”

Ukraine crisis confirms Poland's rising role in Europe

Europe's eastern troubles are giving Warsaw a seat at the big table.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - March 6, 2014)

WARSAW, Poland — After hours of tense overnight negotiations last month in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv between then-President Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition leaders demanding his ouster, one of the European officials mediating the talks briefly stole the spotlight.

“If you don't support this [deal] you'll have martial law, the army. You will all be dead,” he told the opposition about an agreement to hold elections in December. Caught on camera by Britain's ITV News, the tough talk was heard around the world.

That exhortation didn’t come from a foreign minister from the traditional European powers Germany or France, who were taking part, but their Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski.

Yanukovych soon fled to Russia before Moscow prompted a new crisis by invading the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea, and the implications of the deal are still being debated.

But one matter is certain: Sikorski’s role was important not only for Ukraine, but his own country, which is emerging as an increasingly powerful player in European affairs.

“This could not only strengthen the image of Poland as actively involved in the EU's eastern policy but also contribute to Poland taking a more active role in foreign policy in general,” says Ryszarda Formuszewicz of the Polish Institute of International Affairs.

When European Union leaders met on Thursday to discuss imposing sanctions against Russia, Poland — which neighbors Ukraine — was among the mostly Eastern European countries pushing for harder measures, as well as warnings to prevent Russia from making similar moves in Georgia and Moldova.

The EU decided to suspend talks with Russia on visa and investment liberalization and called for Russia to withdraw its troops from Crimea and open negotiations with Kyiv. The leaders said they would impose more sanctions unless negotiations produced results in the next few days.

That was stronger than many expected. Polish President Donald Tusk called the measures “significant.”

Experts say Poland’s increasing political role reflects its rapidly growing economic ties with Germany — Europe’s largest political and economic power — as well as Tusk's relatively deft handling of the global financial crisis, when his country avoided recession.

With some 80 billion euros in bilateral trade last year, Poland eclipsed Russia to become Germany's tenth largest trading partner. Their political partnership has deepened in tandem.

Some believe German Chancellor’s Angela Merkel's calls for dialogue during the ongoing Ukraine crisis together with Tusk's Cold War-style request for assurances of protection from the United States and an emergency NATO meeting this week can be seen as a “good cop, bad cop” dynamic.

The Polish Defense Ministry said Thursday that Washington will send 12 F-16 fighter jets and 300 military personnel to Poland next week for a training exercise that was expanded in response to the crisis in Ukraine.

Whatever decisions are made in the coming days over Crimea, Cornelius Ochmann, director of the Warsaw-based Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation, the Polish influence will remain key for pushing for tougher measures.

“Today,” he says, “we are really important partners for creating the new eastern European policy.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/poland/140306/ukraine-crisis-poland-rising-role-europe

Central Europe braces for escalation in Ukraine

Leaders criticize Russia, seek to reassure population as markets plunge.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - March 3, 2014

BERLIN, Germany — Political leaders across Central Europe slammed Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Monday and sought to reassure their own people amid mounting fears that the crisis may escalate into war.

“Europe undoubtedly faces its sharpest crisis since the Berlin Wall came down,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at a special meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.

“The danger of a new division of Europe is real,” he added. “The situation in Ukraine intensifies daily.”

Steinmeier's comments followed a strained weekend telephone conversation between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Merkel told Putin in no uncertain terms that the invasion violates international law and called the military intervention “unacceptable,” according to a spokesman for the chancellor's office.

Apart from stern words, however, Germany has pledged little in the way of action, having proposed only the formation of a contact group and sending a "fact finding mission" of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Sunday that the United States and its European partners must stop the Ukrainian crisis from expanding into a wider regional conflict.

If anything, Tusk — whose country shares a border with Ukraine — showed stronger resolve than his German allies.

"History shows — although I don't want to use too many historical comparisons — that those who appease all the time in order to preserve peace usually only buy a little bit of time," Tusk told reporters in a thinly veiled reference to the Allied capitulation to Adolph Hitler's annexing of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in 1938.

Meanwhile, internet users speculated that troop movements underway in Poland were intended to beef up defenses on the border with Ukraine, although an army spokesman said the shift has “absolutely no connection with the events in Ukraine.”

Reactions were more muted elsewhere in Central Europe.

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka on Monday looked to control the damage after his defense minister over the weekend effectively threatened that the Russian invasion could prompt the Czech Republic to select a bid from US-based Westinghouse over a consortium led by Russia's Atomstroyexport for the planned $10 billion expansion of a Czech nuclear power plant.

"It is impossible to imagine that we will burn all bridges and because of this crisis will cancel all trade relations with Russia," Sobotka said.

Hungarian President Viktor Orban, fighting an election and banking heavily on Russian financial support, opted out of the fray altogether.

“Hungary is not part of the conflict,” he said on state-owned media.

He also sought to reassure Hungarians that they are safe from any spillover of violence and emphasized that his government is working to ensure that remains the case.

Investors weren’t convinced. Germany's DAX closed down 3.44 percent, while key stocks on the Warsaw Stock Exchange dropped more than 5 percent.

Ukrainian companies listed on the Polish bourse plummeted a whopping 16 percent.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140303/central-europe-ukraine-russia-germany-czech-republic-poland