PREAMBLE
This is Part II of Professor Yanis Varoufakis’ recap of 2024. European leaders Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron don’t appear to have impressed him in 2024.
A reposting from
MERKEL
Recently, Angela Merkel published a very long memoir.
What is absolutely remarkable is how unremarkable it is. It is a reminder of the very low level of understanding of grasp that European politicians, more generally, and German politicians, in particular, have over the circumstances that Germany is facing today. And in the case of Angela Merkel, she has missed out with this memoir, a brilliant opportunity to self-reflect, to be self-critical. It is astonishing. Never before. Have I seen a smart person, and there’s no doubt that Angela Merkel is a smart person, successfully miss every opportunity to reassess an era that she helped shape fashion from something resembling an objective point of view.
The reason why I’m being so critical of Merkel is exactly the same as the reason for which I think the historian of the future is going to be very harsh in her or his judgment of the former chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. And it is this and so that she was a bad person. She was neither very good nor very bad. She was rather indifferent. But where I do believe that she has a massive amount of responsibility for the state, very sorry state of Europe. And in particular, this collapse of the German industrial model and of the Federal Republic of Germany’s prospects is that around 2009 2010, immediately after the Wall Street collapse, which meant very, very soon after that, all the banks in Germany went bankrupt along with the French ones and the rest of European banks.
Nevertheless, because she was a very skilled politician in terms of playing the political game in the cabinets, in the European Union Councils. She was remarkable at getting her way. But what was the purpose that she was serving? What was her objective to make sure that business continues as usual in a period when business could not continue as usual.
So this is my criticism. She had immense political capital because she was so skilled, and she had managed to eliminate all her political opponents, not only in Germany but across Europe. She had a lot of gravitas. She could sway public opinion, not just in Germany but across Europe, and she wasted spectacularly momentously stupendously. She wasted that potential. She could have been a force for consolidating the European Union. And she always said “Nein, nein und nein.” to that. That is why this memoir that she just published is going to remain unread and a testimony to perhaps the most successful German politicians of the last 50 years: incapacity to grasp her own failure and wasted opportunities.
MACRON
A few words about France. Do you remember when Emmanuel Macron was first elected president of France? He was hailed as the great white hope of the liberal establishment, not only in France but in Europe and beyond Europe. He was celebrated as a young man with fresh ideas, a fresh look, smart and energetic, the young politician, the youngest president of the French Republic ever, who was going to slay the dragon of the populist, ultra-right, xenophobic, National Front.
And how did he end up? He will be remembered in history as the greatest enabler of the racist, xenophobic, National Front authorized party, which is now the largest party in France as a result of Mr. Macron’s choices, because Mr. Macron being a radical centrist. In the end, and not just in the end, but from the very first day, when he entered the Elysee Palace, he practiced the usual radical centrist policy of massive austerity for the many and one tax cut after the other for the oligarchs. This combination of generosity to the very few and harshness, a kind of punishment for the majority, created a lot of discontent, and guess who harvested this discontent?
It was Le Pen and the ultra-right, xenophobic, racist National Front. In a state of panic, resembling a man who has fallen into a sandpit. And he’s trying to get out of it, but the more he struggles to get out, the deeper he goes into that sinkhole. And Emmanuel Macron tried some desperate measures like hoping for an electoral miracle. He dissolved the French National Assembly. And what happened was he’s part of the bottomed-out. Le Pen did magnificently well. And the result was no government under the presidency of Mr. Macron. Every move he’s making is strengthening the ultra-right that he was supposed to slay like the dragon that the center, the radical center loads.
So that’s how 2024 and history from now on is going to judge him as a young man who offered the most promise to the establishment but ended up being his grave digger.