Robert Schuster: The German chancellor will come to Prague to look for new allies
It is not difficult to guess why he chose the Czech capital for this. It is related to our current six-month presidency of the Union. And his words will probably be addressed to all those who are afraid that in the near future the center of gravity within the Union could shift significantly towards large states.
Read also
In this spirit, for example, there are proposals for areas where it would be possible to decide by a qualified majority, so that a possible national veto would be eliminated. Scholz, like other German politicians, has been supporting this shift for a long time. It is not against the will of the French and their president Emmanuel Macron either.
European governments, which are problematic from the point of view of Brussels as well as Berlin – this applies to the Hungarian or Polish in the long term – would thus lose their blackmail potential, with which they can keep the twenty-seventh in check. Just remember how long it took to agree to an embargo on Russian oil imports in the spring, as Hungary resorted to a blockade that ended only when it was granted an essentially permanent exemption.
The hesitation and reputation of Germany
Read also
Even the approval of the latest EU budget and the many hundreds of billions of heavy covid recovery fund of the European Union could not be done without Hungarian and Polish obstructions. So the reasons for wanting a change are pretty strong.
another motive why Scholz is coming to Prague to present his vision may be that the Czechs have so far been relatively matter-of-fact from Germany’s point of view in EU matters. Criticism, if they had any, they formulated rather cautiously.
In Germany, it has long been said that we are not strong supporters of stronger integration. The word Euroscepticism is often mentioned, and in the same breath the name of former prime minister and president Václav Klaus. Despite the fact that he has been outside the highest levels of Czech politics for a good ten years and formulates his opinions from the position of a private person.
Read also
It is also often mentioned that the Czechs, like other Central Europeans, tried to balance the dominant German-French tandem by betting on Visegrad cooperation. But it is now paralyzed due to the war in Ukraine and the fickle attitude of Hungary. Perhaps Scholz sees an opportunity here to get his foot in the door of Central Europe and gain new potential allies. The Czechs offer themselves as the first choice – they are around the corner and, unlike the Poles, they are not acting like those who knew long ago how it would turn out with European, and therefore German, dependence on Russian gas.
For the German chancellor, his speech in Prague could thus become a way to get out of the long-term domestic and foreign policy defensiveness. The hesitancy with which he has so far approached the war in Ukraine has caused Germany to lose much of the reputation that the chancellor’s long-time predecessor, Angela Merkel, was able to build up. We can now look forward to the fact that Scholz will start an attempt to correct it in Prague.
The author is a commentator for Lidové noviny