Germany is Preparing for the Post-Merkel Era

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton NB] Times & Transcript

In October 2018, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she would step down as the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) though she has remained in office until the forthcoming Sept. 26 election.

The CDU and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) has headed the federal government with various coalition partners since 2005 under Merkel’s leadership. Since 2013 it has led a “grand coalition” with the country’s second largest party, the Social Democrats (SPD). But can the CDU hang on to power after she leaves?

Under Germany’s mixed member-proportional electoral system, coalition governments are the norm. Germans cast two votes: one for a candidate in their individual constituency and one for a political party.

The constituency election is a simple first-past-the-post. There are 299 constituencies in Germany, so direct votes make up half of the 598 seats in the Bundestag. Every candidate who wins one is guaranteed a seat.

The second vote is for a political party list. These results determine which candidates make it off the lists to the remaining 299 seats in parliament. There is a threshold: Parties need to receive at least five percent of the overall list votes to qualify for list seats.

Voters are able to split their vote amongst parties, perhaps voting for their local CDU candidate in the first vote but casting their ballot for the free-market liberal Free Democrats (FDP) in the second vote, enabling the smaller party to gain list seats.

Currently, there are six parties represented in the Bundestag: the centre-right CDU/CSU with 245 seats; the centre-right FDP with 80; the centre-left SPD with 152; the Left Party with 69; the Alliance 90/the Greens with 67; and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), with 88.

No party will emerge with an absolute majority in September’s general election. So tortuous negotiations will then begin to cobble together a coalition government.

Here are some of the most common options, though the AfD is regarded as outside the realm of possibility by the others. The colours refer to the parties’ own self-identification:

A “Grand” Black-Red coalition: This refers to the alliance of Germany’s two biggest parties and is the one that Merkel has headed at the federal level for three of her four tenures as chancellor.

A Black-Yellow coalition: Germany’s centre-right CDU/FDP partnership has governed Germany at a federal level for the bulk of its post-war history. The last time was under Merkel from 2009 to 2013, but before then, CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl led no fewer than five black-yellow cabinets from 1982 to 1998.

The CDU/CSU candidate for chancellor, Armin Laschet, has been heading a coalition government with the FDP in Germany's most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia since 2017, and has stressed the advantages of this combination.

A Red-Green coalition: This is the standard for a centre-left government in Germany, and was successfully led by SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroder with the Greens as partner from 1998 to 2005.

A Red-Red-Green coalition: Until now, this SPD/Left/Green option has not been considered at a national level, because of the lingering connection of the Left Party with the East German Communist dictatorship and its occasional rhetoric about leaving NATO.

A so-called “Traffic Light” Red-Yellow-Green coalition: While the SPD and the Greens are usually willing to accommodate the FDP as a junior partner who could put them in power, the FDP generally rules this one out on the grounds that their platforms were too different.

Then there are the two “flag” possibilities. A “Jamaica” Black-Yellow-Green coalition: Of Germany’s major leftist parties, the Greens are the most likely to appeal to the country’s CDU/FDP conservative centre. This version almost came about on the federal level in 2017, before the FDP dropped out, its leader Christian Lindner declaring that “It's better not to govern than to govern wrongly.”

Though it has never made up a national government, “Jamaica” coalitions have succeeded on the state level in the Saarland from 2009 to 2012 and currently in Schleswig-Holstein.

A “Kenya” Red-Black-Green coalition: Such an SPD-CDU-Green government would definitely manage to get an absolute majority, but is highly unlikely and would only be considered in response to a significant rise of the far-right AfD.

 

On the Matter of Settler Colonial States

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

During the recent Hamas-Israel conflict, many critics of Israel referred to it as a “settler colonial state.”

By their own definition, the label “settler” doesn’t just refer to Jews born elsewhere, including Middle Eastern countries like Egypt and Iraq, but to all those in the state who have dispossessed the indigenous inhabitants and oppressed and marginalized them.

As for “colonial,” that indicates the type of state they created, one that privileges one group. This remains the case even though Israel is today independent and no longer the possession of the former imperial power, Great Britain.

Fine. As we know, Canada, which was created by white British and French imperialists through the conquest, murder, and even genocide, of its native inhabitants, is also such a country. Our own governments tell us so, especially with the recent horrific discoveries of unmarked graves of children who died at the notorious residential schools.

So too are Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, among many others, including the Latin American republics created by the Spanish settlers who extinguished the Aztec, Inca and many other indigenous political entities. They all have their own centuries-old “nakbas.”

Tara Sutton, a Communications and Engagement Specialist at the University of Waterloo, whose work in conflict zones has received many awards, has compared Canada’s actions to those of other genocides.

“Violence and torture on this scale reminds me of reporting on life in Cambodia under Pol Pot. It has all the elements of the worst things I’ve seen anywhere -- hunger, displacement, kidnapping, rape, disappearance, unmarked graves, genocide, she writes in “Canada has Lost its Halo: We Must Confront Our Indigenous Genocide,” a June 29 article published in the Guardian of London.

As former Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke contended in the Globe and Mail July 10, “the project to cast Canada as ‘a white man’s country’ has mandated genocidal policies against Indigenous peoples.”

The original peoples in this country were forcibly removed, stripped of all rights, including even the vote, and relocated on reserves – a system Israel’s enemies would, I think, no doubt label as apartheid. Indeed, the actual South African apartheid state used this system as a model for its own “bantustan” policy.

And unlike those Jews who founded Israel, the non-indigenous settlers in Canada can’t even claim that, long ago, their ancestors lived here but were evicted, or that they were promised the land by their biblical God.

These “anti-Zionists” want Arab Christian and Muslim Palestinians to regain their land. But I hope they also would wish to see the native people in Canada reclaim their unceded territories as well.

Should perhaps they, I, and all other non-native Canadians return to wherever it is we all originated? In many cases, though, that would prove difficult, dangerous, or even impossible. So maybe we should dismantle the current Canadian state and live under the regained sovereignty of the people who once owned this part of the world? After all, if it holds for Israel, then surely it does, perhaps more so, for Canada.

As for the question of who the original inhabitants of today’s Israel were, that of course depends on how far back in history you go.

But whereas no trace can be found in Canada of Europeans prior to the arrival of the Vikings some one thousand years ago, when it was the home of numerous First Nations, ancient Palestine has archeological, historical and theological references to Jews and Judaism and its offshoot, Christianity for many centuries before it was conquered in 636-637 by the Arabs under Caliph Umar.

After all, the al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock are situated where they are because Jerusalem was already a sacred city to Jews and Christians, and the site from where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. And Jesus is mentioned many times in the Qur’an – and he wasn’t a Latvian or a Swede.

The eminent Palestinian-American scholar and intellectual Edward Said has demonstrated how the settler colonial paradigm falls short in understanding Zionism.

In “The One-State Solution,” New York Times, Jan. 10, 1999, Said called Palestinians “victims of the victims.”  The trauma of the Palestinians was closely and causally related to the prior traumas of the Jews. 

It is not possible to detach the actions of Zionists toward Palestinians from the toxic mix of forces -- modern antisemitism and the rise of fascism and Nazism -- that befell Jews in Europe and prompted some to leave for Palestine under the aegis of Zionism.

 

Gibraltar Navigates a Post-Brexit World

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton NB] Times & Transcript

Gibraltar is a small peninsula, barely seven square kilometres in area and populated by a little more than 33,000 inhabitants. Despite its size, this territory has been of great interest to the international community throughout history. It remains so, especially in light of the new challenge it faces in the post-Brexit age.

Very few territories have undergone the historical, political, economic and legal transformation that Gibraltar has. It has been the subject of territorial disputes between great powers and remains so today. This rocky and arid territory has faced and overcome multiple obstacles to become one of the places with the highest living standards in the world.

The strategic “rock” at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea was captured by Anglo-Dutch forces in 1704, a move aided also by Catalan volunteers as part of the War of the Spanish Succession and was incorporated into the British Empire.

Despite ceding Gibraltar to Britain in 1713, Spain has long sought to reclaim this southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula. To this day, Spain remains committed to its recovery.

Spain has often been accused of deliberately holding up traffic by slowing down checks at the frontier to generate long delays, especially at times of tension between the two sides.

Gibraltar’s 2006 Constitution introduced a new term, the “non-colonial,” to describe Gibraltar’s relationship with Britain. But Gibraltar remains on the United Nations’ Special Committee on Decolonisation list, with formal decolonisation as the only permissible end-game, irrespective of the wishes of the people of Gibraltar, who are not Spanish and don’t wish to become so.

As a British territory, Gibraltar was forced to leave the European Union following the United Kingdom’s 2016 membership referendum, won by the leave side -- despite Gibraltarians voting 96 per cent to remain. But with Britain now having left the EU, the post-Brexit era will require a new framework for relations between Gibraltar and Spain.

Gibraltar needs to reinforce its role and its relationship with Spain, particularly now that its EU linkage needs to be rebuilt. Whereas right-wing parties in Madrid seek confrontation and polarisation for electoral gain and have put forward various proposals for co-sovereignty, the left wing has adopted a more conciliatory approach in which it strives to negotiate and encourage cross-border channels of dialogue.

In April 2017, British Prime Minister Theresa May reiterated that Britain would seek the best possible deal for Gibraltar, and “there would be no negotiation on the sovereignty of Gibraltar without the consent of its people.”

Madrid and London need to set out how the shared border will be transformed now that it as a boundary between the EU and the rest of the world. Gibraltar’s chief minister, Fabian Picardo, has explained that these talks have focused on preserving free movement for the 15,000 workers who daily cross the border that divides Spain and Gibraltar, while steering clear of the centuries-old sovereignty dispute between London and Madrid.

Picardo has advocated that this fluidity could be protected by Gibraltar joining the Schengen Area – a move that would see Gibraltar establish closer ties to the EU. It would see Gibraltar join the 26 European countries that currently allow free movement of people through the Schengen treaty and turn the airport and seaport of the territory into the EU’s newest external border.

On Dec. 31, Spain and Britain reached an agreement in principle under which Gibraltar would join the Schengen Area. The deal would subject British nationals that arrive in Gibraltar to passport control while Spaniards would be able to cross freely into the territory. It would be policed by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex).

In the last round of talks Picardo lavished praise on former Spanish Foreign Affairs Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya over her negotiating spirit. Her successor, Jose Manuel Albares, is familiar with the detail of the political agreement. Picardo wants to finalise this as a treaty soon but added: “It’s not easy.”

What of Gibraltar’s eventual long-term status? One option might be for Gibraltar to become a Free Associated State of the United Kingdom, in the form of a British realm within the Commonwealth. Useful precedents would be the Cook Islands and Niue, two such entities associated with New Zealand.

 

Nigeria is a Tinderbox of Political Unrest

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton NB] Times & Transcript 

In Nigeria, Africa’s largest country by population, power-sharing is enforced by strict formal rules and political elites rely on patron-client networks to maintain support, while inter-elite relations in both countries are strongly adversarial.  

As a result, Nigeria has so far been able to avert a resurgence of the Biafra war of secession which ended in 1970.   

But the country remains instable. Government crackdowns on increasingly violent protests and a blanket Twitter ban suggest weakness at the top, while citizens face rising terrorism and kidnappings. 

The electoral success of President Muhammadu Buhari was built on the promise of ending violence and improving public administration. But the deterioration of the conditions in the southeastern and northeastern regions is very concerning.  

In the southeast, Biafra secessionist have increased attacks on government forces. Nnamdi Kanu, who founded the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) movement has been returned to Nigeria after fleeing an earlier trial. 

In the northeast, Boko Haram Islamists remain a major threat. In the first half of 2021, Boko Haram escalated its mass kidnapping campaign; since December more than 800 students have been abducted.  

Nigeria’s 211 million people make it one of the most diverse in the world, with around 250 distinct ethnic groups. The three largest groups are the Yoruba, which originate from the southwest, the Igbo originating from the southeast, and the Hausa-Fulani who inhabit the north.  

The latter group encompasses the original Hausa inhabitants of the region as well as the Fulani conquerors of the nineteenth century who have adapted to local Hausa customs.  

Sharp cleavages exist between these ethnic groups as well as among them and other minority groups. Nigeria is also religiously divided with around one half of the population adhering to Islam, concentrated in the north, and the other half to Christianity, concentrated in the south. 

Nigeria became independent from Britain in 1960 with a Westminster majoritarian parliamentary system and a federal structure built around three regions: the North, East, and West. This structure caused ethnic and regional tensions from the onset. 

These regions were only joined together as one state by Britain, the colonial ruler, in 1914. The south had been developed economically and socially under colonial rule, while the north had been ruled indirectly through the Hausa-Fulani emirs who resisted modernisation.  

At independence in 1960, southerners feared they would be marginalised by the north’s demographic majority, while northerners feared domination by the South’s educational and economic advancement. Meanwhile, minorities feared domination by the majority groups in each of the three federal regions. 

In 1966, two military coups brought an end to Nigeria’s First Republic. Violence broke out against Igbo migrants in the north and southwest. This led to their return to their home region and a declaration of independence of the southeast as the state of Biafra. The subsequent secession war lasted from 1967 to 1970. 

In 1979, a presidential system was installed with a strong executive president that needed to be elected by a majority of the votes and at least a quarter of the votes in two-thirds of the states, rather than a simple majority.  

Political parties were prohibited from having a sectional character or relying on cultural symbols. Furthermore, the principle of “federal character” was enshrined in the new constitution These constitutional mechanisms have survived into the Fourth Republic, in place since 1999. 

Minority groups continued to clamour for their own state, in which they could have their own majority, and the number of states has increased to the current 36. 

Constitutional prescriptions and majoritarian voting ensure that political success in Nigeria relies on a party’s ability to unite divergent groupings. The largest parties today, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC), can be described as grand coalitions bridging ethnic and regional lines.  

The PDP emerged as the dominant party during the first 15 years after Nigeria’s 1999 transition to democracy. Opposition parties were regionally based until 2013, when the APC was created.  

Political parties have also devised informal power-sharing rules. The most well-known agreement is that a president and vice-president cannot both be from the North/South or Muslim/Christian. Yet all this has not prevented the instability which continues to plague the country.

“Forever War” in Afghanistan Ends With Western Defeat

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton NB] Times & Transcript 

Almost two decades since the United States invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Islamist Taliban regime, Washington is set to exit the country.

U.S. President Joe Biden, in a meeting at the White House with Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani June 25, declared that Afghans “are going to have to decide their future.”

Biden promised continued support for the country, even though American troops are set to finish their withdrawal on Sept. 11, if not sooner. “Our troops may be leaving, but support for Afghanistan is not ending,” he said. Everyone knows this is nonsense.

The military withdrawal will not depend on the situation on the ground, despite the major gains made by the Taliban, whose fighters captured more than 100 districts from Afghan forces in a recent offensive.

It leaves Afghanistan’s government at their mercy. A U.S. intelligence report suggests that it would “struggle” to stand its ground against the “confident” Taliban.

The cost of this 20-year military engagement has been astronomically high. Over 2,300 U.S. servicemen and women have been killed and more than 20,000 injured, along with hundreds more from other nationalities. The estimated financial cost to the U.S. taxpayer is close to a staggering US$1 trillion.

Was it all worth it? Of course not. “Nation-building” doesn’t work when there’s no “nation” to build. Forcing “democracy” on people when all that was attained was a succession of corrupt regimes in Kabul headed by presidents who won fixed elections was no model that impressed ordinary Afghans.

Obviously nothing was learned from the Vietnam debacle. The U.S. should, after the 9/11 attacks, have removed the al-Qaeda terror apparatus in Afghanistan and, after a few months, left the country to its own devices. That may sound cynical, but is this 20-year disaster any better?

The Taliban view themselves not as a rebel group, but as a government-in-waiting. They refer to themselves as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” the name they used when they were in power from 1996 until being overthrown in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The Taliban, or “students” in the Pashto language, emerged in the early 1990s following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. By 1998, the Taliban were in control of almost 90 per cent of the country.

Led by Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada, a hardline religious scholar, it has gradually regained its strength and now controls and influences more territory than at any point since that time.

The Afghan government, or “Kabul administration” as the Taliban refer to it, is considered corrupt and un-Islamic. The Taliban will defeat it once Western troops and airpower leave, and they already have a sophisticated shadow structure, with officials in charge of overseeing everyday services in the areas they control.

Successive American administrations over the years rejected the counsel of both Afghan and foreign experts who said that in the end there would have to be a deal with the Taliban, because they are part of Afghan society and cannot be defeated on the battlefield.

It all started coming to an end when President Donald Trump not only began to negotiate with the Taliban, but also bypassed the corrupt Afghan government. Trump said he wanted to end “forever wars” and Washington signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020 to end the protracted conflict.

President Biden has refused to reverse the policy. The talk of democracy and women’s rights that the Americans (and others, including Canadians) brought with them after 9/11 has been forgotten.

In return for the U.S. departure and the release of 5,000 prisoners, all the Taliban have promised is not to host al-Qaeda. The Taliban have won – after two decades, they will have finally driven out the infidels.

The official U.S. departure date is the symbolic 9/11, but they are expected to be gone before that. Within months of the last soldier leaving, there probably won’t be a single human rights NGO extant, nor a single girls’ school left standing, in the entire country.

And the only army of any consequence will be the Taliban, which in one or another iteration has defeated, in turn, the British, the Russians, and the Americans.  Hey, it’s Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires.”

 

Why American Jews Celebrate the Fourth of July

 

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

On July 4, Americans will celebrate the country’s 245^th birthday. The United States is far from perfect, as everyone knows. It tolerated slavery until 1865 and destroyed, both physically and culturally, many Native American peoples as it expanded across the continent from Atlantic to Pacific.

Many Americans, in particular African Americans and women, were denied the vote into the twentieth century.

However, it created a civic culture that would regard Jews as equal citizens. Outside of Israel, America would become the most welcoming home to Jews of any nation in the world.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence signaled to the world that a nation was coming into existence predicated upon the natural and inalienable rights of mankind, rights that could not be taken away by the state.

The United States has never had a national church and the government is prohibited from establishing or favouring any religion over another. The First Amendment guarantees religious liberty to people of all faiths, while the Constitution proclaims that “no religious test shall ever be required” as a qualification for public office.

This meant Jews were free to dissent from the religious views of the majority without fear of persecution, rights almost unheard of elsewhere in the world at the time. 

The country’s first president put this in writing. George Washington’s letter of August 18,1790 to Moses Seixas, of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, is celebrated as one of the definitive statements of religious freedom under the new U.S. Constitution.

“For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support,” Washington assured him.

“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Washington’s assurance, written sixteen months after he became president, made clear that he would not permit the power of the new government to become an instrument of religious intolerance. 

The French author and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville, during his tour of the United States in 1831-32, observed that Americans had established a civil society that was diverse, tolerant, and deeply religious, a combination that rarely appeared in Europe or other parts of the world.

“Among us, I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions,” he wrote in his two-volume Democracy in America, published between 1835 and 1840. “Here I found them united intimately with on another: they reigned together on the same soil.”

Also, thanks to the impact of Protestantism, Americans were intimately familiar with the Bible. The earliest Puritan settlers established a “covenant” with one another modeled on its covenantal theology.

The inscription on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, an iconic symbol of American independence, is taken from Leviticus 25:10: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” A carved image of Moses dominates a frieze at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Therefore Jews in America never experienced systematic persecution and were welcomed as equal citizens of a self-governing republic. Thus, without renouncing their religion, they began to achieve integration.

Given the history of anti-Semitism elsewhere, Jews were also allied with African Americans in the fight for Black economic and political  rights, which had been denied so long and so flagrantly.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the oldest and largest civil rights organization, was founded in 1909 by several Black leaders, most notably W.E.B. Du Bois, and some liberal whites, a disproportionate number of whom were Jewish.

As the movement gained momentum in the 1950s, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins, some of its lobbying was coordinated by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, whose offices were at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Today, in a far more conflicted America, African Americans and Jews remain the two ethnic groups that most support the Democratic Party. This remains a legacy of that past.