German election campaign: the Green Party on the road to war

When the ruling class in Germany prepares an offensive for war and rearmament, it can count on the Green Party. This was the case in 1998, when the then Green Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, organized Germany’s first post-war international military intervention, sending the German Army (Bundeswehr) to war against the Serbia, and this is still the case today.

As the German government dramatically increases military spending, NATO is organizing one of its biggest maneuvers since the end of the Cold War directly at the Russian border (“Defender Europe 2021”). And while German police are equipped to quell resistance to government policy against coronaviruses and attacks on social rights, the Greens are promoting militarism and preparations for war in their campaign for this year’s federal election.

Since Annalena Baerbock was appointed potential chancellor of the Green Party, the warmongering of the Greens has taken downright hysterical forms. There is hardly a show more repulsive than a talk show or interview with Baerbock, in which the 40-year-old talks about her childhood on a farm, her early involvement with her parents in chain protests. human rights against the arms race, only then. to announce, with a smile on my face, that it is urgent to put an end to Russian aggression, to provide Ukraine with more military support and to support its admission into NATO and the EU.

We ask: has she lost her mind? Has she ever thought about what this means?

Accepting Ukraine into NATO would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Russia and immediately sound the alarm bells in Moscow. This would raise the prospect of an armed conflict with the world’s second largest nuclear power, a conflict that could cause millions of deaths in Europe and threaten all of humanity.

It is this combination of aloof complacency, ignorance and aggression that makes the Greens so valuable to the ruling class in promoting their imperialist goals and interests. This is why the Greens are currently being praised in the German and international media. Baerbock and his co-chairman Robert Habeck are currently rushing from interview to interview.

Sunday was a big day for Baerbock with a long interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) and an appearance on the TV show “Anne Will” the same evening.

The FAS sums up their interview with Baerbock by writing: “Green candidate for chancellor pleads for cooperation with America, containment of China and a stronger stance on Russia.”

When asked how, as Chancellor, she would react to “Russia’s blackmail to Ukraine” and whether she would support Kiev’s demand for the delivery of anti-aircraft guns even if Moscow is currently withdrawing its troops, Baerbock said replied: considerable. “

The most important thing, she said, was to ensure the implementation of the Minsk Agreement. The unrestricted access of an OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) observation mission “to all parts of the territory occupied by Russia” must be secured with the necessary force. This would urgently require “more resources for aerial reconnaissance,” she added.

When asked if she would also support a military intervention by the Bundeswehr in any region of the world, even if a member of the UN Security Council vetoed such an intervention, Baerbock replied that the the choice between military action and inaction is sometimes a choice between plague and cholera. . She added, “There are times when military action can prevent the worst from happening.”

In previous talks, the Green candidate for chancellor had already called for better staffing and material resources for the Bundeswehr. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, under the title “Baerbock wants to strengthen the Bundeswehr”, she pleaded for an increase in defense spending, the creation of a well-equipped European army and a German-European military policy to better prepare for war.

She reiterated in the FAS: “Germany and Europe must take more responsibility for their own security. But strategically on the cutting edge. This is why she considers “a European cyber defense center as an important contribution to burden sharing on the part of Europeans”.

The demand for two percent of GDP to be spent on the military, she said, has not been helpful and has not created more security. His objection was based on the fact that GDP is currently declining due to the economic slowdown linked to the pandemic. “According to this logic, our spending planning should be reduced.” This is absurd, Baerbock explained.

Asked by the FAS on whether the call in the Green Manifesto for “EU units” with a joint command structure was the model for a European army, Baerbock replied in the affirmative: ” These are steps in that direction. From my point of view, we need to centralize our capabilities as Europeans. Europe’s military spending is three to four times that of Russia, but our capabilities are limited because we duplicate a lot. It is not efficient. The European Security and Defense Union urgently needs to be developed and enlarged, she said.

Baerbock also gave a positive answer to the question of whether Ukraine and Georgia, which have been lobbying for years, should be admitted to NATO. Pressure on Russia to comply with the Minsk Accord and stabilization was an immediate priority, but “sovereign states themselves decide their alliances. It also includes Ukraine’s perspective within the EU and NATO. “

Baerbock complained that the current sanctions against Russia were “permanently countered” by the German government’s accession to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. “I would have withdrawn political support for Nord Stream 2 a long time ago.”

In one Spiegel Interview, the former Green Minister of Foreign Affairs Fischer also pleaded for the final stop of the construction of the gas pipeline and an increase in sanctions against Russia. Moscow’s “saber rattling” could no longer be accepted, he said.

The claim by the Greens and the media that Russia is an aggressive and expansionist power is a grotesque distortion of the facts. June 22 marks the 80th anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union by the German Wehrmacht and the deaths of 25 million civilians and soldiers in a planned “war of extermination”. These atrocities are vividly recalled in Russia. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union 30 years ago, NATO has moved closer and closer to the Russian border. Almost all of the Eastern European states that were once allied with the Soviet Union, as well as the former Baltic Soviet republics, joined the Western military alliance.

The crisis in Ukraine was also deliberately provoked by the Western powers. Washington and Berlin staged a coup against pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev in early 2014, in close cooperation with fascist forces, and replaced him with pro-Western oligarch Petro Poroshenko. The Heinrich Böll Foundation of the Greens played a leading role in the coup. Since then, the country has been increasingly plunged into civil war and corruption. The conditions of the population have deteriorated considerably.

Support for the coup in Ukraine was part of a deliberate campaign for a more aggressive foreign and great power policy. Germany is “too big and too strong economically for us to just comment on world politics on the sidelines,” said then Foreign Minister and current Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD, Social Democratic Party ) at the Munich Security Conference.

A year earlier, the Greens participated in the drafting of the SWP document “New Power, New Responsibility”, which served as a model for the return of German militarism. From now on, they consider that their primary task is to impose this policy of war and militarism in the face of enormous popular opposition.

The talks with Baerbock and Fischer show one thing above all: a new federal government with the participation of the Greens – whether in alliance with the CDU / CSU (Christian Democrats), the SPD, the Free Democratic Party or the Left Party – will only intensify the policy of militarism, internal rearmament and social cuts.