Germany and Iraq: The tune changes – a bit

Date: 22/02/03

The government shifts, but the opposition is divided

AT LAST Gerhard Schröder has signed up, with the European Union, to the use of force against Iraq as a last resort. Welcome and long overdue, said the conservative opposition - but what a U-turn from a policy that had caused such damage to Germany's reputation and its relations with its American and European partners alike. Edmund Stoiber, Mr Schröder's challenger for the chancellorship last September, likened Mr Schröder's diplomatic bungling to that of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor who led Germany into the first world war.

Mr Schröder denied he had made a U-turn. His rejection of German participation in any war, and his refusal to sign up to any UN resolution permitting one, remain as firm as ever, he says. And, for all the government's abysmal showing in the opinion polls, some 70% of Germans support him on Iraq. On February 15th, 500,000 anti-war demonstrators marched through Berlin. Only 15% of Germans - and only 17% even of conservative voters - feel Germany should join in an Iraq conflict.

So the opposition has a problem: how to demonstrate loyalty to Germany's most important ally, without offending its own voters. The result, so far, has been a mess.

During last summer's election campaign, Mr Stoiber accused Mr Schröder of putting Germany's ties with the United States at risk. Yet he too declared that he did not want Germany to take part in any military “adventures” (his word at the time, not just Mr Schröder's). Now he says Germany must “stand by the side with the United States, even in a military conflict”.

Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, the big sister of Mr Stoiber's Bavarian-based Christian Social Union, recently also hardened her party's wishy-washy stance. Until now, she had always argued that Germany should stick to the line of its partners in the EU and the United Nations, without spelling out what that line was (forgiveably: there wasn't one). But at a conference in Munich this month, for the first time she backed both military intervention, if peaceful attempts to disarm Iraq failed, and German participation “in accordance with our means”. Had her party been in office, she said, Germany would have joined the eight European countries that put out a declaration supporting American policy.

So far, so plain? No. When Mr Schröder suggested in a parliamentary debate on Iraq last week that the conservatives had now evidently joined President Bush's “coalition of the willing” for a war, the opposition backbenches erupted in outrage, and a red-faced Mrs Merkel angrily accused him of seeking to vilify them as war-mongers. The trouble is that the conservatives themselves are deeply divided. Both parties lay great store by the “Christian” in their names - and the leaders of both the Catholic and the Protestant churches in Germany, like the pope, have come out firmly against any war. Last week, 17 conservative backbenchers in the Bundestag, Germany's lower chamber of parliament, refused to vote for their parties' motions condemning official policy on Iraq. And even among America's most loyal supporters, many have been shocked by the contempt with which people such as Donald Rumsfeld, America's defence secretary, have been treating their country, dismissing it as “old Europe” and lumping it together with the unsavoury regimes of Cuba and Libya.

Till now, Germans have probably been the most pro-American people in Europe. There is still a deep admiration of American values, and immense gratitude for America's role in liberating Germany from the Nazis, building it up after the war, and supporting it over its reunification. Nearly 90% of Germans, say pollsters, believe that the United States will continue to be an important partner. Yet there is growing disquiet, on the right as on the left, about the Bush administration's perceived tendency to divide the world into “them and us”, and to claim that it alone has right on its side. New polls show 74% of Germans consider the United States has “too much power”; over half think it a greater threat to world peace than Iraq or North Korea.

This week, Atlantik Brucke (Atlantic Bridge), a cross-party organisation for the promotion of transatlantic relations, took a full-page advertisement in American and German newspapers, signed by more than 500 political, business and union leaders, including many opponents of a war with Iraq, to voice their concern over the growing tensions. But Mr Schröder is unlikely to change course. Germany is beginning to look less isolated. While millions demonstrate worldwide against a war, he may be starting to think that the German and French insistence on a peaceful alternative to war may at last be vindicated.

For the moment, his own party is firmly behind him. But he knows it is still a gamble. If the UN Security Council does eventually sanction a war, Germany could be left alone on the sidelines with its international reputation in ruins. Mr Schröder's own future would then be at stake.

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