Germany has one last chance to reform deeply [interview].

One of my champions, Udo di Fabio, nearly 20 years ago - this was the early days of the Merkel government - wrote a book called The Culture of Freedom. It was met with a great response in conservative circles - they wrote that this is exactly what we need today. It seemed that since the CDU won at the time, we would return to the thinking that dominated for a while during the economic miracle. Ludwig Erhard defined the role of the citizen and entrepreneur in such a way that risk is inherent in it, including the possibility of failure - but also that taking risks, embarking on ambitious ventures, is the essence of economic culture. It's just that Germans have lived with a strong aversion to risk for a very long time.

They cherish to perfection what they can already do well, but prefer not to venture into technologies that are not proven and mastered? .

That's in the economy, but this problem runs even deeper in politics. Angela Merkel dismantled nuclear power in Germany, using the argument of earthquakes, among other things. Her speech shortly after the Fukushima disaster dealt with fears that were most irrational, but stemmed from a deeper tendency: not to take risks. Merkel had a saying that one should conduct Politik auf Sicht, i.e. drive carefully, on a proven road, look around carefully, pay attention to the circumstances....

That is, without farsighted visions, but also actions that can bring incalculable consequences. .

And according to familiar mechanisms and rules. This was seen with the eurozone crisis - saving what is there, i.e. the common currency, keeping Greece in the monetary union, while enforcing its known rules, however inadequate. Schäuble, who is often accused of economic dogmatism, was of the opinion that the Greeks should be excluded from the eurozone for a while, which would be better for everyone. And the eurozone would be healthier, and the Greek economy would be in a very different place.

But for Merkel, that would be a leap into the unknown .

Yes, she preferred to keep Greece in the middle, completely ignoring the fact that all the economic parameters in the eurozone are arranged under the German model, and not the one from Erhard's time, but under the stereotypical German bookkeeper. The Maastricht macroeconomic criteria, those maximum 3 percent deficit and 60 percent public debt - this is taken from the ceiling. To make matters worse, not only did these rules not suit, for example, the countries of the South, but clinging to them in Germany itself led to a fetishization of the so-called debt brake.

Budget balance - the so-called black zero - is sacred? .

Yes, and it ends with Christian Lindner in the finance ministry and the dogma that we can't take on more debt, whatever happens. I understand the argument that debt should not be increased to finance new social spending, but when we know that 60 billion euros are needed to renew and prepare for the future of the Deutsche Bahn, and that's a no-brainer - that's absurd. Likewise, when we don't want to put money into completing the Energiewende, now that we've made up our minds about it.

Lindner flew out of the coalition and led to the collapse of the government, but his views don't seem to have changed. Is it possible for the Free Democrats to be part of a future coalition with the CDU-CSU? Provided, of course, they enter the Bundestag..

The FDP has conspicuously disappeared from the statements of Christian Democratic politicians that have been the order of the day for years - Merkel before the 2009 elections basically did an advertisement for the party as a potential coalition partner. Now I have the impression that the fixation on the constitutional "debt brake" makes them a very uncomfortable partner, because any government then loses room for maneuver. Today the atmosphere is different, there are ideas in the debate that the states should be able to take on debt - in order to relieve the investment burden on the federal government.

This would probably be a tectonic shift?.

In my opinion, Merz understands such a historical necessity, and that the "debt brake" was introduced when it was really the "wisdom of the stage." But this is not the 10 commandments, we must adapt to the requirements of reality. Let's compare the state of public finances in Germany with that in France. There, after all, we have 120 percent of GDP in debt, while Germany has 60 percent. Serious economists say that as long as it is no more than 85 percent, everything is fine, meanwhile, some experts and politicians closet the argument about "the future of children." - that by incurring debt, one lives at the expense of future generations. Except that those generations and those children will have nothing to drive on, nothing to ride on and nowhere to work if we don't invest that money now.

Don't fetishize debt, just invest public money - this is basically a leftist demand. Just right for social democrats.

Only that the new "grand coalition" won't make any great reforms, it will only prolong all of Germany's persistence in its being. Because it's not just about spending money, it's about creating conditions in which it pays for business to take risks and look for new solutions, instead of counting on cheap fuel from Russia, the huge Chinese market and still free trade with the US to sustain competitive advantages. Of course, I realize that taking responsibility for the state in this way could make the coalition parties lose the next election. But Merkel's successive elections were won, she would probably have won her fifth election if she had run - history will judge her badly, however.

You've already mentioned several trends that put the German economic and political model in question: the likely end of free trade with China, the loss of cheap gas and oil from Russia, turbulence in relations with the US, from customs policy to demands for more spending on armaments and taking responsibility for security in Europe. A lot of it at once..

None of this fell from the sky, the ship's captains were fully aware of the storm ahead of them - because if they weren't, it only speaks worse of them. But as I read Angela Merkel's memoirs, I simply don't believe that she counted on the fact that joint trade would stop Putin from aggression. She must have known that there would eventually be a war with Ukraine, and it has been more so since 2014.

So what - she was just buying time? That in itself is not necessarily irrational. The British, at the dawn of World War II, sacrificed Czechoslovakia and pushed us under the German bus, but nevertheless, from Munich onward, they began to rapidly produce fighter planes. The prime minister proclaimed that he had secured peace for Europe, but the industry was getting ready for war. .

But here even these contract aircraft were not produced. LNG ports were built on the catch-cap, but only after a full-scale invasion. What has changed so much in the German economy after 2014? Has the Energiewende accelerated? No. Did those north-south energy highways start to emerge? No, because they were blocked by Söder in Bavaria - and without large transmission grids, it's impossible to fine-tune the energy mix, since windmills stand in the north, where the wind blows, and electricity is most scarce in the south. Further, could it have been predicted that a president would eventually come to the White House who would not be the beloved child of the New York and Washington establishment? After Obama, any sane person should have been able to predict this. Besides, economic protectionism has always been alive in the United States.

Republican Reagan pressured the Japanese to limit car exports to the US, Biden introduced subsidies for the production of electric cars domestically....

It really wasn't a surprise and there was time to prepare. Merkel, especially in her third term, when she chafed against an independent majority, could do whatever she wanted. Meanwhile, Germany was accumulating funds in the budget for no one knows what, and the Chancellor was beaming with calm, composure and confidence.

You mentioned an independent majority, which will definitely not be there after this election. The FDP is blocking spending, the SPD is expected to be ultraconservative, the Greens remain as a coalition partner - desirable. But the CDU, and especially Söder, have been quite consistent in proclaiming that there will be no coalition with the Greens..

The Greens govern with the Christian Democrats in three German states, including two very large ones, Rhineland-Westphalia and Baden-Wittenbegi, on top of that in the small Schleswig-Holstein, moreover, in the latter case the Greens, headed by Winfried Kretschmann, are the larger coalition partner. These coalitions really work, and to make things funnier, the Rhineland Greens are dominated by the left wing of the party. Schleswig's prime minister, Daniel Günther, opted for a Black-Green coalition as recently as last fall, because he cares about a coalition for modernization. That's why I wouldn't rule out any option after the elections, especially since Söder and the Bavarians made no such volts: the head of the CSU was a green prime minister, an innovative prime minister, a prime minister open to refugees, closed to refugees, in favor of anti-pandemic restrictions, against restrictions....

Back to what Germany actually needs to do. One thing is to catch up with digital backwardness - in the Münchau book you cited, among other things, we find an anecdote about how someone wanted to test whether photos to be printed over a distance of 10 kilometers were better sent over the Internet or given a flash drive by horse courier. The horse reportedly won. The state of the Bundeswehr can be equally anecdotal. A substitute for Russian gas has to be found from somewhere that is not expensive, emission-free and from a safe source. Well, and some idea for automobiles, because now Germany is in danger not of losing the Chinese market, but of flooding the German market with Chinese electric vehicles - the Chinese, unfortunately, have learned how to make them and are no longer afraid to get into them, and they are cheap. Do you think the CDU, in partnership with the Greens, have any practical ideas on this? .

The sine qua non is to give up the fetish of budget balance at all costs.

That is, Christian Lindner out - but what next?.

And this is where the stairs begin, because due to a number of laggards, one would have to think about finding some big, new idea for oneself when it comes to production. Imagine, for example, that Germany becomes the great armory of Europe.

This is where you can make out that their industrial traditions are the envy of the whole world. Fans of history know these brands very well..

If one were to assume, however, that it is a Germany deeply embedded in the European Union, whose economic success is linked to the fact that we are all safe - then trying to shift the German economy to a model in which the arms sector is much more important than it is today could be a good idea. Especially if Germany learns what the Israelis and Americans have been doing for a long time, which is "dual-use," in other words, commercialization and civilianization of military technology.

Disarmament, however, comes at a certain cost.

Subsidizing Volkswagen also costs money, and the Americans won't lift tariffs on cars, after all, because theirs will then be unprofitable. As for the auto industry, I don't have a good idea. I don't believe that in 10 years we'll all be driving electric cars, and I'm generally in favor of collective transportation. But these are all, of course, questions on a European scale, not just a German one: a lot depends on whether the European Commission will allow state aid for new industries, but also on whether Europe has really understood that the ceasefire in Ukraine does not mean that Russia ceases to be an enemy and that it becomes "part of Europe" again. I assume, however, that economic elites not only in Germany, but in other countries as well, know that, as bad as it may sound, war is profitable.

Particularly for those who have tank factories rather than buying them from abroad. .

Of course, such a rearrangement of vectors in the European economy would put the problem of north-south relations back on the table, although this time with Italy taken out, because it has an extensive arms industry. If we don't want the south, including the Balkans, to buy weapons from Russia or China, they will have to be permanently subsidized.

The German and Dutch voter, as is well known, loves transfers to the south.

It is known that he doesn't love it, but this is how you actually subsidize your own production. People imagine, when they hear about these loans and U.S. money for Ukraine, that there are planes flying there or trains going from Przemysl with dollars to Kyiv - yet these funds go from one U.S. account to another U.S. account, because U.S. products are bought with them, in recent years mainly weapons. On top of that, these armaments will also be needed by Germany for its own use - they have only recently realized, for example, that the Russians are sailing them near wind farms in the Baltic.

What if Germany fails in this transformation of its economy, for whatever reasons? .

A bad economy means a problematic Germany: more likely AfD participation in government and radicalization of the political community. Because to be clear, I don't believe that their participation in government would somehow civilize this formation, and I certainly don't want us to have to push it. I for one hear echoes in their message that are very distant and also very dangerous. These are ideas ranging from the denial of the existence of concentration camps and the Wehrmacht's perpetration of genocide, to ideas of "repatriation" of German citizens - I emphasize: citizens - of migrant background, even in the second and third generations; to restrictions on the civil rights of the disabled. When I hear something like this, it's not a knife but a lightsaber that opens in my pocket.

Do you think that it is the economy and the state of industry that will determine the AfD's successes or lack thereof?

Yes, because, for example, part of the unemployment statistics do not include people permanently excluded from the labor market, on top of that, this market itself is very different - a job of a skilled laborer, unionized, in a large corporation producing for export, and a job in services, on some mini-job, is heaven and earth.

So the key, however, is the economy? And not, for example, immigration issues?.

Otherwise: the economic situation and vision of development is the key to the political story of Germans about themselves, to how the community tells itself. Neither Merkel nor Scholz were able to tell it - who we are today, what problems we have and who we can be in the future. With them it always ended with "today." You have to find a politician who will tell you about tomorrow, but not in a teacherly way, as the Greens sometimes do, that we will tell you what you are supposed to be like. That's why I keep coming back to this "culture of freedom," to the story of risks that can be taken, but also worth taking, because freedom is simply an opportunity. With such a modernizing, developmental, reformist narrative, it will be difficult to block something for ideological reasons, just as those ill-fated energy connections have been blocked so far.

Let's say that Germany would be willing to do some significant shifting of the reins, that it would start arming Europe, but also at least complete the Energiewende, since a return to the atom is unlikely; that it would start overhauling its infrastructure, fix its railroads and - sorry for the mischief - install Wi-Fi instead of a fax machine in every office. That no Lindner will lie down Rejtan in the name of sacred budget balance and no Söder will block the construction of those power lines from Lower Saxony over the Isar. How does such a great re-branding apply to us?.

Fostering such a change and creating the conditions for it is also an opportunity for Poland's creative participation in shaping European policy. This would require changing the macroeconomic criteria in the eurozone, moving away from this Maastricht-derived bookkeeping - but after all, if Poland were to support something like this, if only to exclude investments from budget deficit accounting, Macron would be clapping his ears, we would have the South on our side, and I don't think the Benelux or Northern countries would stand up against it either.

And you are convinced that, under favorable conditions, the government headed by Merz is able to accomplish all these things?.

This ship is bound to turn slowly, because Germany is a dream state for lawyers - nothing to do but sit around and interpret interlocking competency laws. This is not just a matter of bureaucratic tradition, but also of federal structure; the government in Berlin simply does not have the right to forbid or order various things to the states, as is well demonstrated by such a seemingly simple matter as the teaching of the Polish language in German schools. What's more, there will be mutinies on this ship, to stick with the metaphor; it will rock.

And surely it will sail .

It will arrive if the captain sensibly tells the crew where they are sailing to and why. And if pirates in the form of the AfD get on board, we will have a problem - I repeat - not so much with the German economy, but with the German political community. Because Russia is just waiting for that, and it's no coincidence that it conducts most of its operations in Germany.

Do I understand correctly, assuming the AfD can be contained - that it does not enter any government and does not influence policy at the federal level - we can assume that Germany is not returning to the status quo ante with Russia? .

I would say yes, albeit on one more condition - and this is probably the condition for the success of a major breakthrough in Germany in general - that Merz does what no German government has yet done, which is to include East Germans in the German political community.

What does that mean? Reunification, after all, took place more than 34 years ago.

Only that the prevailing story in Germany about the East is a Western story about adopted children, such poor relatives with whom there was nothing to do, so they had to be taken under the roof. If this can be changed, they will also change their attitude towards us, because Poles, Balts, to the smallest extent perhaps Czechs, we all sit more or less at the same table as this uncle and aunt from the east.

And such a change, this inclusion of the former GDR in the German political community on an equal footing, could happen as a positive side effect of all these reforms you are advocating? .

This cannot be done in one move. It can't immediately change the fact that a citizen from the East gets a much lower pension than in the West, and a civil servant in Potsdam gets a lower salary for the same position as a civil servant in Bonn. But if they felt that the economy has taken off and that their story is finally a story of opportunity, not just a story of missed opportunities....

Only I understand that then these windmills, train factories and munitions factories would have to....

Be erected largely in the East. What's more, they would have to be managed by people from the East, because today - Dirk Oschmann wrote brilliantly about this in his book How the German West Invented Its East - they are marginal among the directors, deans, rectors of universities in Germany, not to mention such a trifle as the fact that no judge from the East has so far ruled in the Federal Constitutional Court. And this is the same tribunal that indirectly decides the law for much of Europe.

Ossi had its chancellor for 16 years, more than half the time after reunification, until 2021, when she finished ruling. They also had a president from the East.

Only with Merkel from an East-West perspective were there two problems. First, this great inclusion of easterners requires a politician-narrator, that someone who will tell the community who she can be. Someone like that was, of course, Helmut Kohl: he could tell the story of those "blossoming landscapes" after reunification and the German mark that would change everything. And East Germans wanted to listen, because they had a deep sense of being uprooted from Europe, much more so than the People's Republic to the east of them. Only Kohl couldn't prove this promise, and acquiesced to everything that happened in the East afterwards, only to have that East stolen and still whacked over the head with a moralistic cudgel.

As far as Merkel is concerned, once she is not fit to be a narrator, she could read bedtime stories to children so that they fall asleep in a minute. Admittedly, she likes to emphasize how much this easternness was reproached to her in the CDU, how she was treated condescendingly. But as Anna Kwiatkowska, head of OSW's German department, recently noted, in reading her memoirs it is striking how well she understands these easterners and how she did absolutely nothing for them.

There was also Joachim Gauck. From Rostock, where you also come from.

I had high hopes for him, precisely as such a great narrator. A penetrating and independent one, as evidenced today by the fact that he opposes the ideas of delegation of the AfD. Unlike the establishment, which would like to deal with this issue in the simplest, seeming way, he understands two things. First, that it's almost impossible to do, and will only discredit the establishment, because the last parties to be successfully outlawed in West Germany were the now-forgotten Sozialistische Reichspartei, successor to the NSDAP, and the Communist Party of Germany - both in 1952. It's just that the criteria are so exorbitant and the procedure complicated. And secondly, even if by some miracle it were to happen, what - the voters will be cut out of the system too?

What to do with them? Since you yourself emphasize that they are dangerous?.

The political community must, in the words of the great pre-war German jurist Rudolf Smend, of itself, from within itself, constantly renew and integrate itself. So, too, the German political community must find the strength and the thought to get rid of this canker in the form of the AfD, but for that it must get a narrative from the people who lead the community. I am willing to believe that more than 80 percent of AfD voters are not at all people who want to hear all those echoes from the distant past. They are simply frustrated by the underrepresentation in the public sphere of their problems, missed opportunities, crises. Faced with this, they choose people who give them the simplest prescriptions and the simplest stories. Really, few people read into the AfD's vulgarly libertarian electoral program, which would, after all, be disastrous for the East.

Merkel of the CDU did not succeed, neither did Gauck of the SPD. Merz will succeed .

I believe that with the Greens in coalition it is possible. I know that the Greens don't sell very well in the East, because the problems of the East after reunification were completely different from what they are talking about. But they are nevertheless a forward-looking partner, and probably the least - since they joined the political establishment late - tainted by typical paternalistic German thinking about the East. One exemplified recently by President Steinmeier and other SPD politicians, the brakes on aid to Ukraine. These ones are still as if they were taken alive from Julian Klaczko's old book about Bismarck and Prince Alexander Gorchakov The Two Chancellors, as if 150 years of history had simply passed them by.

The last days and weeks of the German election campaign have become very tumultuous. Does the dispute over the appropriate response to the knifeman attacks, followed by the rapid shifts in international politics - Trump's phone calls to Putin and talks in Saudi Arabia about Ukraine - bring any new quality to the German political situation? .

Two things have happened that put Germany now perhaps at a crucial moment for its future and, in a way, for Europe. First, unfortunately, there have been further terrorist attacks, which are undoubtedly the result of the powerlessness of the German state, but let's agree, no one in their right mind can rule out the hybrid actions of Russia.

Second, we have happened upon President Trump in the form of the worst predictions. I, of course, understand what he and his establishment are playing for - to detach Russia from China and bring it closer to the States, at the price of any peace in Ukraine. Only at the end of the day Trump will be Putin's puppet, and the US will lose its credibility for years. With that, Iraq will be nothing. We should wish for Germany to have a chancellor who not only looks forward to the end of this war, but one who, together with his partners, will have an idea for security in Europe and put his own country back on its feet.

I would also like us to take this time to get the Germans in order for the last review of our relations for the next, let's say 4 years, and agree on a few key projects and negotiating space on others. And then they stuck to that agenda like a drunken fence, because as a very wise equalizer used to say: it doesn't matter if it's smart or stupid, as long as it's consistent. The worst thing about our relationship is the lack of consistency. We keep reinventing the world of our relationships. How much can one do?

**

Tomasz F. Krawczyk - philosopher of law and politics. Born in Rostock and raised on both sides of the Oder River in a Polish-German family, he learned Europe from great Europeans and European women - such as Richard von Weizsäcker, Prof. Lech Kaczynski and Ewa Ośniecka-Tamecka, former advisor to the Prime Minister for European Affairs. Now in business, he builds relationships with German-speaking countries as head of DSBJ Group's DACH Desk.

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