Examine the conveyor belt of crises that have busied chancellor Angela Merkel in the past 15 years, and one keeps returning: Germany’s ambivalent relationship with Russia and its wily president, Vladimir Putin.
But on Wednesday evening Merkel brought matters to a head by calling out Russia on the poisoned politician Alexei Navalny.
A week after he was brought to Berlin, where he remains in a coma, a special test revealed the dissident was poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok. Merkel condemned “in the strongest terms” an attack she said challenged “all the basic values and fundamental rights we espouse”.
Privately she has no doubt Moscow was responsible but, in public, said the results raised questions that “only the Russian government can answer and must answer”.
The response from Moscow was swift and sharp: a Putin spokesman said test results on Navalny in Omsk, where he was taken after collapsing on a flight, revealed “no toxic substances”.
A chorus of Russian voices, from MPs to trusted media commentators, suggested Navalny was poisoned after arriving in Germany.
Merkel’s unusually energetic response is a reflection of a frustration with what many perceive as growing Russian impunity on German soil. German officials say the killing last year in Berlin’s leafy Tiergarten park of a Chechen rebel living in the capital was ordered by the Kremlin. The German response was limited to expelling some Russian spies posing as diplomats.
Computer hacking
Then there were multiple computer hacks by Russian intelligence on the Bundestag servers. The attack paralysed the parliamentary computer system for days and saw 16GB of data stolen, including three years of emails from Merkel’s constituency office computer.
The German leader called the server attack “outrageous” yet, asked what she planned to do about it, insisted only that Germany “reserved the right to take measures”.
But has the moment for measures finally come? As a former east German, Russian speaker and veteran of Putin mind games, Merkel knows to bide her time with the Russian leader.
After his annexation of Crimea, the German chancellor spent 17 hours in ceasefire discussions with him to avoid all-out war in Ukraine and has remained steadfast on the need to maintain economic sanctions.
Her response to the Navalny poisoning appears to be calling time on the middle road approach, of pressure and dialogue, that Germany has trod regarding Russia in the past decade – often to the despair of its allies.
The roots of the modern relationship lies in the “Ostpolitik” of Social Democratic Party (SPD) chancellor Willy Brandt, easing cold war pressures through cultural and economic exchange.
Gas pipeline
From 1998 to 2005, SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder reformulated the Brandt approach as “transformation through trade”, a hope that German investment and rising Russian prosperity would encourage democratisation. Schröder’s credibility took a hit, however, when he took a well-paid board position on a gas pipeline project he had pushed over the line for his friend Vladimir Putin before leaving office.
That 1,200km pipeline, and the soon-to-be-completed successor Nordstream 2, carries Russian gas under the sea to northern Germany.
Berlin’s EU neighbours argue its solo run undermines common EU energy policy, while Poles and Balts fear greater exposure to Russian energy blackmail. Last Tuesday, on a visit to her coastal constituency where the pipeline will land, Merkel defended the project. She brushed off as “not legal” threats by the Trump administration to sanction companies or officials who co-operate with the Nordstream consortium.
Building pressure
Pressure is building in Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to disconnect from the project. CDU foreign affairs spokesman Norbert Röttgen urged Merkel to “pursue hard politics with the only language Putin understands: gas sales”.
But party officials say many in the CDU back the project, scheduled for completion in 2021, as do many in its junior coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Traditionally more conciliatory towards Moscow, the SPD foreign minister Heiko Maas summoned the Russian ambassador on Thursday.
Despite outrage over the Navalny poisoning, Maas and other politicians know little can shake a historical need for German equidistance from the US and Russia. A recent poll found just 39 per cent of Germans believe strong ties to Washington are more important than links to Moscow.