(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Donald Trump gooit de Europese NAVO-landen in het diepe)

This weekend all the leading figures of the Western defence world are gathered in Munich for the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC). The conference, founded in 1963 as the Münchner Wehrkundetagung by the former Wehrmacht officer Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist (1922-2013), has become a tradition. Von Kleist, incidentally, was part of the 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

On the programme are the usual subjects: defence, global order, sustainability and technology. But another theme dominates: the American attempt to reach a peace settlement in Ukraine. The words of the new American secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, spoken in Brussels on Wednesday, will reverberate in Munich.

Hegseth spoke in Brussels to the defence ministers of the NATO member states; it seemed as if every word had been dictated from the White House. President Trump had spoken for an hour by telephone with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and drew the outlines for a peace plan. The impact went far beyond Ukraine alone. Never before has an American president thrown the European NATO allies so ceremoniously into the deep water. It was the ‘disengagement’ that European defence experts have feared for decades. The European allies have to get to work. They must raise their defence spending drastically, and Ukraine is their ‘European problem’.

Trump wants to be rid of the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible, in order to stop the ‘bloodshed’. That is why he argues for a swift deal, with the ‘realities on the battlefield’ as the point of departure. So no drawn-out tug of war at conference venues; a process that would put a peace settlement on the Greek calendar. And so he let it be known through Hegseth: ‘We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.’

The criticism from Europe was that Trump recognises the current ceasefire lines without any negotiation at all. According to the British author Timothy Garton Ash this was a ‘senseless capitulation’ to Putin. In The Guardian he wrote: ‘Donald Trump’s appeasement of Vladimir Putin makes Neville Chamberlain look like a principled, courageous realist’. Garton Ash argues that Chamberlain was trying ‘to prevent a major European war, whereas Trump is acting in the middle of one’.

Fortunately the British know everything better where foreign countries are concerned. Trump wants a peace settlement quickly, because Ukraine is exhausted after many losses. That is a reality of the battlefield. In addition he wants to throw the Ukraine question into Europe’s lap as fast as possible. Because, as Hegseth says, the United States is also being challenged by China. That is why the European NATO member states must take responsibility themselves on their own continent

The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, holds that the United States should not have made concessions before the start of negotiations by giving up parts of Ukraine and ruling out Ukrainian membership of NATO. His French colleague Sébastien Lecornu supports him in this. Alongside the criticism from Germany and France, Italy, Poland and Spain also have objections. In a statement they say they are ‘ready to increase support for Ukraine’.

These declarations come as mustard after the meal. The United States has provided support to Ukraine over the past years to the tune of 175 billion dollars, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. European NATO countries lagged far behind. France, Spain and Italy were strong in ‘parole parole’, weak in deeds. Germany was in self-therapy over whether or not to deliver long-range missiles. The Netherlands supplied 3.76 billion euros in military aid to Ukraine (as of 29 September 2024) and sits in the leading group of supporters.

The United States is number one by a distance and Trump has had enough of the European torrent of words without deeds. Where critics do have a point is that Trump, with his speed, puts Russia in a strategically favourable position. In negotiations with the West, and above all with America, the Soviet Union used the adage: ‘what is ours is ours, and what is yours, that is what we are going to talk about’. That is the advantage Trump is now giving Putin. Russia can keep the occupied territories because Trump assumes that Putin will never give them up again. Holding on to that ‘prolongs the war’. And that is what Trump does not want.

Why? The European NATO countries have to organise themselves and pay more. The secretary-general of NATO, Mark Rutte, was also in the hall and heard Hegseth’s lashing words. Every NATO secretary-general knows the division of tasks: the European is the secretary and the American president is the general. With Trump that division of labour is literally so. Rutte had just preached the new 5 percent norm, on American instructions, with a little fabric softener added. He then heard from the American secretary of defense, until recently co-presenter of the morning programme Fox & Friends on Fox News, that Europe has to stand on its own feet.

The first steps concern the ‘security guarantee’ for Ukraine, which must be underpinned by capable ‘European and non-European troops’, according to Hegseth. Next: ‘If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not be covered under Article 5 [which guarantees NATO support in the event of an attack]. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine’. So Europe has to fill in the ‘security guarantee’ itself, on its own. Moreover the military support (both lethal and non-lethal) to Ukraine must be paid for by the European NATO countries. As a closing note the American secretary recalls that defence spending must rise from 2 percent of GDP to 5 percent of GDP.

It is not surprising that the hall stayed silent and that the words of Trump and Hegseth echo on in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. For further explanation there is an American delegation, consisting of Vice-President James David Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Lieutenant General (ret.) Keith Kellogg, special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Fair is fair: the European NATO countries have brought this ‘tough love’ from Washington D.C. upon themselves. During the Iraq war, then President George W. Bush had had so much of the European bickering that he described the European allies as a ‘bag of fleas’, because the opinions of European countries jumped in all directions.

As soon as there is a disaster in the world, Europe asks itself: where is America? If America then does something, the refrain is: that is no good, typical Yankees. But when Europe then has to do something itself, it goes wrong and America has to step in, as during the Balkan wars in the nineteen nineties. The Netherlands too has bad memories of that, after the government of the day handled the protection of the Srebrenica enclave badly, with equipment that was too light. A tragedy unfolded that was wrongly pinned on commander Thom Karremans. The conflict was settled with American bombardments of Belgrade.

The conflict in Ukraine is even more dangerous because an unpredictable nuclear power is involved in it. Europe by itself can enforce nothing. Of all people it is Trump who is forcing Europe to grow up militarily. Coming from the ‘bag of fleas’, that will be quite a circus.

The only thing Europe can do is to accelerate Ukraine’s EU membership. On 23 June 2022 Ukraine became a candidate member state. The country is not an ‘anonymous region’ as the Kremlin sees it, but a self-aware nation state whose birth has been signed in blood. That is the ultimate effect of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with which he wanted to redraw Russia within the borders of the tsarist empire or else of a Stalinist empire. As a ‘buffer state’ Ukraine is exposed to the whims of the Kremlin. A European anchoring is therefore the only alternative.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. El vértigo y la esperanza)

The whole Western world has entered a process of change at unaccustomed speed. The extreme toxicity and the abysmal political, social, economic and moral failure of the long progressive era now being left behind impose the utmost haste on the adoption of the new forms of the era now arriving. Although the great historic impulse of Donald Trump’s re-election has not yet triumphed with all its consequences in the rest of the West, everywhere the forces are advancing that want to put an end once and for all to the utopian projects that sooner or later turn into abusive and criminal power. The cannibal socialism of the murderer Nicolás Maduro, the still carnivorous socialism of the criminal autocrat Pedro Sánchez, and the vegetarian socialism of the abusive, deceitful and cowardly Von der Leyen and Núñez Feijóo all lead in the medium or long term to the same ruin and oppression and lie. The solution is to avoid them all, to fight them and to defeat them definitively as options hostile to the human being.

The political projects that defend the interests, the identity and the freedom of nations and persons are triumphing at the expense of the projects that defend the transformation of persons and the liquidation of nations and of freedom for the sake of social control, collectivism and equality among slaves rather than among masters. Many great things have begun to happen in this regard. Resignation, the great political instrument of scoundrels, is being abolished.

In Latin America too, in the Middle East too and, of course, in Europe too. Where we must watch very closely what Trump does, without any need to imitate him, because there are many in Europe who in general have the same fundamental objectives as Trump: more freedom and more truth, more nation and tradition, more individual initiative, more merit and less imposition, less State and more society. It is no secret to anyone that in the face of this historic change the immobile and corrupt forces of the system are resisting belly up.

The transformative political activity that calls for radical change in the degraded Western democracies has in a single year taken on a dizzying pace. This weekend the leaders of the European party Patriots, chaired by Santiago Abascal, who is also president of VOX, are meeting in Madrid. In the Spanish capital are many of the leaders presented by social democratic two-party politics as terrible bogeymen of fascism, Nazism, far-right extremism and every other ism. Years ago those epithets worked. Now they only bore people or invite mockery. Le Pen, Wilders, Orbán, Salvini, Kickl, Ventura and the host and president Abascal himself are not the leaders of marginal parties but the heads of parties of government, now or in the very near future. All their parties are growing. The parties of their rivals are shrinking.

At the Madrid Summit the colossal effect of Trump’s victory will be plain to see, as will the great moment for the patriotic forces, allied with other conservatives and sovereigntists, to forge the strength needed to put an end to a unitary, centralist and socialist project of the European Union that is finished by its failure in every field, the moral one first of all. The members of the European People’s Party have the chance to join the change or to sink with the left. They will soon have to take a decision on this dilemma.

In Spain we have a very special laboratory for observing this change. All the forces involved in the drift toward the degradation of democracy, of the nation, of the economy and of individual freedom have joined together to attack a single party, which is VOX. They have on their side 95 per cent of the media and of the organisations and institutions devoted to shaping opinion, including schools and universities. And yet all their joint operations, with all their tricks, aggressions, inventions and perversions, fail to make a dent in the process of growth and revival of the party of the Patriots.

There is a fundamental factor behind this. It is that what predominates in these extraordinary political moments, until recently inconceivable, is hope. And with it, mobilisation in favour of a colossal change in the way of doing politics, of governing and even of thinking. Not even Donald Trump’s fiercest enemies, those who have ridiculously always attributed to him absolute evil and a vocation to destroy the world, could have imagined the worldwide earthquake unleashed by his arrival at the White House. And only his closest collaborators and most enthusiastic supporters could believe that this dizzying irruption of a passionate and unstoppable vocation for demolition, replacement and change would occur in exactly the terms in which he announced it. Donald Trump had already said that he considers his presidency a mission. That is how he takes it on.

No one should be surprised, nor should anyone care, that his enemies are once again calling him Hitler. But nor should it be surprising that, although some feel a certain vertigo at the pace, his followers in the United States and around the world, because this figure who is by now far more than a president of the United States has them all over the world, are thrilled by two weeks that have already radically changed the world.

The capacity for resistance of all the patriotic, conservative and sovereigntist parties already makes them unbeatable for the diminished forces of the social democratic system. Then, in times as swift as these, we will soon see many changes that will make Europe great again, with sovereign nations united in common causes and in respect for the interests of each and every one of them. A Europe to which more and more Europeans aspire and which will rise from the ruins of the socialist, impoverishing and totalitarian process.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Met Bart De Wever regeert een ‘Verenigde Nederlander’ België)

With Bart De Wever (54) a different type of prime minister takes office than all his predecessors. Never before could a ‘Flemish nationalist’ take the oath before the Belgian king. A prime minister who looks critically at his own country, as if he were an outsider, was unthinkable.

For De Wever, however, Belgium is an ‘artificial construction’, a sort of slip of history. He himself dreams of a reunification of the Netherlands and is really a ‘United Netherlander’, avant la lettre. And prime minister of Belgium all the same. For the Dutch, a true mystery.

I first met Bart De Wever at the beginning of this century, after I had served for several years as political editor of the Flemish newspaper De Standaard, which back then still published under the logo: ‘Everything for Flanders, Flanders for Christ’. That was the world in which De Wever grew up as a young man. According to him the greatest tragedy of the Southern Netherlands was the fact that Spain definitively gained control of that territory, and above all of Antwerp, in 1648. The separation became a fait accompli and the Flemish grew poorer.

On 20 July 2021, a day before Belgium’s ‘National Holiday’, he said in Het Nieuwsblad: ‘I have never let go of the dream that all Dutch speakers would one day live together again in one union. If I could die as a Southern Netherlander, I would die happier than as a Belgian’.

For centuries the Flemish lived as serfs in political constructions dominated by Spaniards, Austrians, French, Dutch, Germans. Belgium became a buffer state with a French-speaking elite, and only thanks to the village priests did the Dutch language stay alive. The emancipation of the Flemish in Belgium is in fact a great success story. The Flemish hold all the cards, but they have kept a Calimero complex from their history.

A ‘Flemish nationalist’ as prime minister of Belgium is a tipping point. It indicates that not much more is left of ‘Belgium’ than a name on the world map and culinary traditions. It is de facto a divided country.

De Wever’s predecessors still worked within a ‘Belgian system’, of elites and networks in both parts of the country. I remember the late twentieth-century generation of Leo Tindemans, Wilfried Martens and Jean-Luc Dehaene, who as prime ministers dealt with French-speaking Belgium through the political elites there. That is over. Political elites too are separated, barely know one another and no longer speak each other’s language, exceptions aside.

Belgium is made most visible by the building of the public broadcasters VRT and RTBF in Brussels. A massive, ugly building. To the left of the entrance is Flanders; to the right French-speaking Belgium. On the left people speak Dutch; on the right French. The central corridor is the language border. That is political Belgium on a square metre.

It is not surprising that the king, whose task it is to hold Belgium together, is at peace with a ‘Flemish nationalist’ as prime minister. Twenty years ago De Wever would have been an uninvited guest at the Reception of the Constituted Bodies, the annual New Year drinks at the Palace for the leadership of Belgium’s institutions. The dream of a ‘Reunited Netherlands’ is now forgiven him.

Daydreaming is free. The acute problems of the Kingdom have to be tackled. The other Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Belang, wants to do away with the king and his whole family. The moment the king hears the words ‘Le Vlaams Belang’, fear strikes his heart.

Why is De Wever the man of the moment? By the yardstick of nationalism he is moderate; for him it is more a matter of cultural awareness and identity. He speaks excellent French, a skill many Flemish nationalists have. They learn the language of their opponents and with it decode their way of thinking.

Conversely, few French-speaking politicians speak Dutch, which makes them somewhat deaf. Moreover De Wever speaks other languages well, even Basque, in the eyes of Flemish nationalists an ‘oppressed people’, by now successful. As a historian De Wever knows his classics and deals wholesale in Latin sayings.

In 2009 De Wever became famous throughout Flanders when he came within a hair of winning the quiz ‘The Smartest Person in the World’. He built his New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) from a one-man group in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives into the largest party in Flanders. On television, at 140 kilos, he made a somewhat comical impression, but he turned out to be very convivial and entertaining. That weight was just a size too much. Sixty kilos came off. When I saw ‘the new De Wever’ for the first time, I thought he was somebody else.

De Wever also offers the Netherlands a perspective as a ‘United Netherlander’. He knows the Netherlands better than many Dutch people themselves. The history above all.

As prime minister, De Wever is in charge of Belgian European policy. Unlike all his predecessors, De Wever is ‘euro-critical’. He holds that Europe and the European Union are not the same thing. In his book ‘Identiteit’ he argues that the EU wipes out European history from before its own founding as ‘bad’ and recreates itself as an ‘anti-nationalist entity’, but then itself creates an ‘EU nationalism’ with all the bells and whistles. Whoever does not cheer along is ‘anti-EU’.

Prime Minister De Wever cannot take on all the EU gods at once in Brussels, but there is a kinship between the somewhat more critical attitude of the Netherlands, certainly of the sitting coalition, and De Wever’s views. That did not exist before. Belgian prime ministers were heralds of the European Union.

The prime minister of the Netherlands and the ‘United Netherlandish’ prime minister of Belgium really ought to sit down together soon at the Catshuis, to talk about the Low Countries in this ever more turbulent Europe.

The first major problem for the De Wever I government is to bring the Belgian federal budget within the budgetary norms of the euro (a national debt of 60% of GDP and a budget deficit of 3%). Belgium currently sits at a national debt of 105% of GDP and a budget deficit of 4.6%. Belgium has to lose financial weight. Walloon socialists refused this coalition, because cutting spending is not their thing.

• Jan Jambon, 64 (N-VA): deputy prime minister and minister of finance. Jambon is mayor of Brasschaat, a municipality with many Dutch residents. From 2019 to 2024 he was Flemish minister-president. Jambon will become the central figure in Belgian euro policy. Friendly, a Burgundian.
• Frank Vandenbroucke, 69 (Vooruit); deputy prime minister and minister of public health and social affairs. Vandenbroucke has a long record of service. He was a member of parliament, minister of foreign affairs, afterwards of social affairs and subsequently of pensions. During covid he was minister of social affairs and public health. He pursued a strict policy with a curfew that began at 8 p.m. Vandenbroucke has something ascetic about him, almost Calvinist. Not suited to the bar. He has the reputation of a ‘know-it-all’, with the fair observation that he also knows a great many things.
• Vincent Van Peteghem, 44 (CD&V), deputy prime minister and minister of the budget. He sits in the government on behalf of the Christian democratic CD&V, the counterpart of the Dutch CDA. In the previous government he was already federal minister of finance. His political base is East Flanders; he is titular mayor of the municipality of Nazareth-De Pinte. Cutting the budget is his thankless assignment.
• Theo Francken, 46 (N-VA), minister of defence and foreign trade. Francken is a convinced Flemish nationalist who was earlier state secretary for asylum and migration. His political base is in Flemish Brabant (the municipality of Lubbeek), where he is the champion of preference votes. Cheerful, likes a pint, right wing of the party. Defence was his dream.
• George-Louis Bouchez (38) is party leader of the French-speaking liberal Mouvement Réformateur (MR), from the Walloon city of Mons (Bergen), where he is a municipal councillor. In 2019 he became chairman of the MR, in which he drew power to himself and pushed aside the established political family Michel. At the recent chairmanship elections Bouchez succeeded himself: no rival candidates. Bouchez is a capricious figure with a robust temperament (Italian mother) and with that, from the outside, an unpredictable factor for the coalition. He remains the MR’s parliamentary group leader in the federal parliament. He understands Dutch, but does not speak it well enough.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

Copyright AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi

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(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Friedrich Merz brengt Duitse verkiezingen in stroomversnelling)

The temperature in the run-up to the German Bundestag elections on 23 February rose to boiling point after a 28-year-old Afghan attacked a toddlers’ class in Aschaffenburg (Bavaria) with a knife. He killed a 2-year-old boy, as well as a 41-year-old man who came to the child’s aid. Opposition leader Friedrich Merz, chancellor candidate of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU), will on Thursday launch a five-point plan in the Bundestag that tightens migration policy to an unprecedented degree. In doing so, Merz said, votes from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) are also ‘welcome’. The game is on.

Merz presents his five-point plan as the basis for legislation on which the Bundestag must vote. Left-wing parties such as the social democratic SPD and the Greens recoil from Merz’s hard intervention. They accuse him of demolishing the cordon sanitaire, in German jargon ‘die Brandmauer’, against the AfD. Until now the votes of AfD members of the Bundestag were ignored by the coalition of social democrats, greens and liberals, and also by the opposition group of the CDU/CSU. Merz is now seeking support ‘from whoever’.

Until recently the campaign for the Bundestag elections rippled along quietly. The theme was mainly energy and climate policy, on which Germany has cut its own fingers, above all through the abolition of nuclear energy. Aschaffenburg became the turning point, once again a ‘Zeitenwende’, and Merz, who had not really come into his own yet, occupied the epicentre of the political debate with his five-point plan. He argues for:

• Permanent controls of the German borders with the nine neighbouring countries;
• Immediate expulsion of foreigners who enter Germany without valid travel documents;
• Asylum seekers whose application is rejected may not move about freely but must go into detention;
• More support for the federal states in carrying out the obligation to expel;
• Strict rules for foreigners who have committed criminal offences, or who are ‘dangerous’ (unstable); they are placed in pre-departure detention, if necessary for an indefinite period.

Merz maintains that his five-point plan is in accordance with European law because the European system is currently ‘dysfunctional’. Just look at the Dublin Regulation (2013) that obliges asylum seekers to file their asylum request in the country of arrival. Most of them, however, want to go to Germany, and countries on the European external border let them through. Ergo: ‘Germany has the right of self-defence’. In an emergency situation it may apply national law ‘vorrangig anwenden’, because European law is not functioning.

Berlin woke up with a start at this reversal, and opponents of Merz feared he was imitating Trump. A columnist for Welt am Sonntag wrote about ‘wenn Merz den Trump macht’ and predicted: ‘Merz is going to lay claim to Mallorca and the North Sea will become the Gulf of Germany’. Donald Trump is not a popular figure in the land of his forefathers.

Ulf Poschardt, a prominent author at Die Welt, sees Merz’s sprint to the head of the peloton as a stroke of genius. ‘If the CDU takes the migration theme to itself before the elections, what is the AfD needed for?’ According to him many voters vote AfD out of disappointment with the established parties. ‘The offer now comes from “die bürgerliche Mitte”, which says: we have understood, we are putting an end to the idiotic migration policy’. Poschardt is uncommonly sharp, something he may have picked up from his Danish mother.

Merz has used at least one instrument from the Trump handbook: surprise. He comes up with a plan, outpaces the other parties, the media magnify it, and for voters Merz is suddenly at the centre, three weeks before the elections. Where before he was just one of the colourless gnomes, now he is setting the tone and thereby putting other parties on the spot.

In Berlin left-wing demonstrators took to the streets (according to the organisers there were 100,000 participants, according to the police 35,000) against the ‘Rechtsruck’ and against Merz. He was portrayed as the ‘stirrup of fascism’. It was a Berlin carnival procession that will sooner convince Germans ‘in den Ländern’ that Merz is on the right track.

SPD and Greens turned against the five-point plan on account of the ‘Brandmauer’, the total exclusion of the AfD in every way. In the Bundestag too, as with the agreement between the coalition and opposition parties never to let the votes of AfD parliamentarians be decisive. A proposal that wins the AfD’s approval must by definition be voted down. To that Merz is now making an exception. ‘I am sticking to that’, he said on Sunday to ZDF. Merz does, however, still refuse a coalition with the AfD. He wants to make that party ‘superfluous’ by taking up the grievances of the voters.

The AfD’s biggest supporter at the moment is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. Whether it helps the AfD is doubtful. Anti-Americanism lives below the surface in West Germany; in East Germany it is virulent.

A vote on the five-point plan, which Merz wants to pilot through the Bundestag unchanged, puts all the other parties under pressure. Left-wing parties (SPD, Greens) form the front of refusal. The Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW) is hesitating. The liberal FDP appears to be against. That is risky, because the FDP is hovering around the 5 percent electoral threshold in the polls. And then the AfD. If that party votes against, it is voting against its own policy programme. The parliamentarians of CDU/CSU, FDP, AfD and possibly BSW together add up to a majority. With his proposal Merz is driving all the other parties before him.

Merz’s initiative cannot be seen apart from his closest adviser and secretary-general of the CDU, Carsten Linnemann (47) from Paderborn, a municipality in North Rhine-Westphalia. Linnemann speaks briefly and clearly and thinks in strategic terms, whereas Merz, who comes from the Sauerland, still has a tendency now and then to misspeak. He often talks too fast. It is plausible that Linnemann is the architect of this operation, in which Merz was brought into line with the Bavarian CSU leader Markus Söder. Linnemann appeared in the media as the spokesman for the proposal; Merz initially made only the official speeches.

Linnemann, the son of a bookseller, is a rising star in the party and has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009, elected thanks to a Direktmandat. He is economically liberal and socially a values conservative. During the euro crisis he voted against all the financial packages to rescue Greece. He is fiscally conservative and wanted to abolish the ‘Solidarity Tax’ of 1991 (for aid to East Germany) in 2021, because this ‘temporary’ levy simply kept going. In 2017 he argued for an ‘Islam law’ to establish the rights and duties of Muslim organisations, such as a ban on the full financing of mosques from abroad.

Linnemann defends the five-point plan with unprecedented steadfastness. ‘We are not going to enter a coalition if this plan is rejected’. With that he keeps the CDU/CSU proposal, and the possible wriggling of the AfD, sharply on the voter’s radar.

The series of violence against citizens in Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and Aschaffen. Merkel has made only one appearance during the election campaign: at the CDU’s New Year reception in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Hendrik Wüst is minister-president. Symbolic, because Wüst is a critic of the CDU’s ‘right-wing policy’, and a ‘Merkellian’. He will have to keep quiet for now, because it is the voter who decides on Merz and his plans. If Merz wins on 23 February, he will be the next chancellor. If the gamble fails, Wüst will undoubtedly be standing in the line of succession.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in The Western Journal. Op-Ed: Muslim Americans Could Be Key Addition to the MAGA Movement)

The year began with a stark reminder of the challenges facing America. A shocking terror attack in New Orleans, perpetrated by an American-born extremist, underscored the persistent threat of radical ideologies.

Despite former President Trump’s decisive actions against and defeat of ISIS during his first term, the specter of extremism has not been eradicated as the group’s radical ideas continue to spread.

Predictably, some far-right pundits wasted no time in casting a wide net of blame, targeting an entire religion and calling for a draconian crackdown on mosques. While such sweeping generalizations are counterproductive, it’s equally critical to scrutinize the role of organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Although CAIR swiftly condemned the New Orleans attacker, the organization’s track record raises questions. Its past associations and controversial statements have often drawn criticism from those who view it as more focused on political agendas than meaningful reform.

This tension underscores a broader challenge: how to foster a transformative alliance between Muslim Americans and the MAGA movement without ignoring the complexities within Muslim leadership structures. In this effort, groups like the Muslim American Leadership Alliance (MALA) stand out as key allies for the Trump administration.

MALA has consistently demonstrated a commitment to promoting pluralism, individual freedom, and a constructive dialogue that bridges divides. Their emphasis on empowering Muslim Americans to engage in civic and political life aligns naturally with the MAGA movement’s vision for a revitalized and united America.

Groups like the International Quranic Center (IQC), the Islamic Supreme Council of America (ISCA) and the American Islamic Forum for Democracy have also been critical of CAIR, accusing it of promoting Islamist agendas and failing to represent the diversity of Muslim-American viewpoints.

Additionally, figures like Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions Richard Grenell have played a pivotal role in building this coalition. Leading up the election, through Arab Americans for Trump, recognizable by their tagline “Yalla,” Grenell worked to unite Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Eastern Christians, particularly in Michigan.

This electorate proved crucial in Trump’s victory, flipping a traditionally blue state red and showcasing the political strength of such alliances.

This is a breakthrough for the Republican Party and should not be taken lightly. Now is the time for MAGA to foster and cultivate the relationship with Muslim Americans and bring them back to the Republican Party which is where the majority of them roosted prior to 9/11.

Muslim Americans: An Unexpected but Natural Ally

In the 2020 election, 21 percent of Muslim voters cast their ballots for Trump, surpassing support for Vice President Kamala Harris. This was not a statistical anomaly; it was a reaction to the Democratic Party’s repeated failures.

Under Democratic leadership, anti-Muslim hate crimes surged by 70 percent in just six months. Sacred spaces were desecrated, Muslim-owned businesses destroyed in riots, and communities were left with hollow promises instead of real solutions.

President Biden’s “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate” was too little, too late. It read more like a hasty attempt to placate than a substantive plan. Discontent reached a boiling point during the Gaza conflict, where Biden’s handling drew sharp criticism from CAIR and drove his disapproval among Muslim Americans to a staggering 98 percent.

Contrast this with Trump’s policies, which resonate deeply with the conservative values held by many Muslim Americans. Limited government, strong family structures, economic empowerment, and a commitment to ending endless wars—these principles align with the aspirations of Muslim immigrants seeking to preserve their faith and the American Dream.

Trump’s efforts to broker peace in the Middle East earned him respect long before the idea of a Gaza ceasefire became remotely plausible.

And make no mistake, Hamas has agreed to return the remaining hostages because of Trump. Sadly, the majority of those hostages are no longer thought to be alive.

A Shared Vision for America’s Future

This alliance is about more than politics; it’s about preserving the pillars of faith, family, and freedom. And it has the potential to reshape American politics. Muslim Americans and MAGA supporters share a desire to resist destructive ideologies, protect traditional families while resisting attacks on them, defend unborn lives, and uphold religious liberty.

They envision an education system that prioritizes learning over indoctrination and a society where the next generation can thrive.

However, this partnership requires significant changes on both sides. Muslim Americans must critically evaluate their historical loyalty to the Democratic Party, which has often taken their votes for granted.

The MAGA movement, for its part, must confront and reject the Islamophobic rhetoric that has alienated potential allies. Before 9/11’s surge in anti-Muslim sentiment, Muslim voters were a reliable Republican constituency. A return to this shared history is not only possible but necessary for America’s future.

The Path Forward

The stakes have never been higher. America is at a crossroads, and the opportunity to unite diverse communities under the banner of shared values cannot be squandered.

For the MAGA movement, forging a genuine partnership with Muslim Americans is not just strategic; it is a moral imperative. By focusing on common ground and fostering mutual respect, this alliance can rebuild communities, restore moral foundations, and chart a path toward national renewal.

With faith, family, and freedom at its core, this coalition has the power to heal a divided nation. Together, Muslim Americans, organizations like MALA, Arab Americans for Trump, and MAGA supporters can seize this final chance to make America whole again.

Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. La senda de los mazazos)

The European People’s Party is on edge for many reasons. The first is, of course, the panic of its German component, the CDU/CSU, which is heading with an already failed candidate into an election it believed it had won hands down and which is approaching on 23 February like a nightmare. The CDU believed it could keep a good grip on the situation created by the fall of the three-party government of socialists, greens and liberals, the worst government in the history of the Federal Republic, which has brutally aggravated the already very precarious situation of all these years of social democratic and green consensus under Angela Merkel, a chancellor who has in the end turned out to be, and few apart from her now dispute it, a curse for Germany and for Europe.

In any case, Friedrich Merz has shown himself to be as weak now as he was when Merkel crushed him as a rival in the succession to Helmut Kohl. If, because of the failures of the three-party government of the inept social democrat Olaf Scholz, his party enjoyed a comfortable lead and majority of almost twenty points over the second most voted party, that gap with the second party today is seven points.

What is terrifying for them is that this second party is Alternative for Germany, the only party that has a programme for a change of policy for Germany. Merz would not be worried if the socialists or the greens were closing in on him, because he has already said that he is going to govern with one of those two parties, both increasingly left-wing and both resounding failures. Or with both, if the numbers do not add up. An alliance with the socialists and the greens would bring the same policies as the government that has just collapsed for causing the worst economic, political, social and security crisis Germany has suffered since 1949.

In any case Merz has solemnly announced that he will not make a pact with Alice Weidel, the candidate of the Alternative (AfD), which with its collective leadership has run an excellent campaign, has put the party in order and under discipline, and has not allowed the secret services or the lies of the press to mount another operation against them in a campaign orchestrated by a media landscape even more monolithic and more submissive to the orders of social democratic consensus politics than the Spanish one. That being so, the AfD’s message has been delivered by the CDU itself: if you want change in Germany you have to vote for Alternative for Germany. Because all the others are going to end up governing together, doing the same thing as until now.

If you want a vote to put an end to the incentivised invasion, to open up spaces of freedom and deregulation for people and for businesses, to restore freedom of opinion, to expel from the country those who live in a massively parasitic way and are the protagonists of the main crime and violence, so that common sense is restored as is happening in other countries and especially in the United States, you have no choice but to vote for Alice Weidel. And the CDU’s suicidal message is taking hold, and it is already clear that even if it beats the AfD by a few points and forms a government, when that government dies an ignominious death like the previous one, the AfD will be close to an absolute majority.

Hence the panic in Europe, which takes shape in all kinds of absurdities such as now, in an unprecedented resolution on Venezuela in which the People’s Party members have been left practically alone with Maduro’s accomplices, who are the Spanish socialists.

The People’s Party in Spain is an expert at falling into these traps that now grip all the parties of its group and the CDU in particular. It already allowed itself to be led into a trap by the socialists and by its own fears, complexes and ghosts, a trap that cost Alberto Núñez Feijóo the leadership of the government. That was in that ill-fated July when the soothsayers and the advisers on polls and radio convinced him that he could destroy Vox and keep all its votes for a government on his own. Ambition burst the sack, and that opened the door to the criminal government we have today under Pedro Sánchez.

Beyond the national tragedy of having a government dedicated exclusively to its own survival in power in order to prolong its impunity through the criminal cover-up of its earlier offences, the PP failed in its struggle to destroy Vox. That has come at a high price, because it means the total failure of Feijóo’s in itself pathetic strategy of seeking to destroy the only conservative force in Spain from positions that are increasingly social democratic and close to the left. The hammer blow to the PP that is the unstoppable rise of all the parties to its right, which sooner rather than later will confront it with the existential dilemma of division, has been redoubled by the hammer blow of the victory of Donald Trump, whom they attacked, defamed and despised just as much as the socialists and communists did.

And another simultaneous and terrible hammer blow is the great victory in Austria of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), Vox’s partner in PATRIOTS. After an attempt by the whole consensus brigade to form a government of three parties against the winner of the election, which was the FPÖ, they have had to acknowledge their failure, and the head of state, the sectarian green Alexander Van der Bellen, has had no choice but to comply this time with the constitution and entrust the formation of a government to the FPÖ leader, Herbert Kickl.

Within a few weeks we will foreseeably have in Austria a government in which the FPÖ will be the leader and by far the largest party, and the People’s Party will be the junior partner, which, given the results but above all given the subsequent polls, will have little chance of halting a policy of real change. The FPÖ, which won the election with 28 per cent, is already approaching 40 per cent. The PP keeps falling. This hammer blow from Vienna, like all the others, ought to advise the members of the European People’s Party to reconsider their attitude in the face of their catastrophic results. Since that is not happening, one must assume that they will carry on down this road of hammer blows that they bring upon themselves for having chained their fate to the parties of the left, which are already going down the drain of history.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Met Donald Trump krijgt Nederland nieuwe kansen in het Witte Huis)

With the inauguration, this coming Monday, of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States, a political and cultural ‘Wende’ begins in world politics. The fault line runs between the pursuit of the ‘national interest’ that Trump espouses and the multilateralism that Europe advocates, with an eye to ‘global governance’.

Trump’s aim is not a ‘Metternichian order’ with a balance of power, as in Europe after the Congress of Vienna (1815), but the ‘Trumpian world order’ with American leadership under the motto ‘America First’. In short: the new ‘Sheriff in Town’.

In Western European ears that sounds like a modern version of the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ that European colonial powers used to impose their will on recalcitrant peoples. Such as Trump’s remarks about the purchase of Greenland, at Denmark’s expense.

For the Danish government that is alarming, an offer they hoped would never come. America has at one time or another bought a sizeable part of its own territory. Such as the ‘Louisiana Purchase’ in 1803, west of the Mississippi, from France. In 1819 America bought eastern Florida from Spain. From tsarist Russia in 1867, the enormous Alaska.

Trump wants Greenland in the shop window. He is already putting pressure on the Danish government, because he does not rule out military intervention. And that toward a fellow NATO member state. The Danish king is giving Greenland a larger place on his coat of arms and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen says that Greenland is ‘not for sale’. But she leaves the door ajar: ‘It is also important what the inhabitants of Greenland themselves want.’ Suppose there is a referendum and a majority of Greenland’s 56,000 inhabitants accept America as protector. That makes more of an impression than Denmark.

Anyone who looks at the globe from above sees that Greenland, for the Dutch a ‘far away show’, is a large island (six times Germany) between North America and Russia. Strategically important, because it is the flight path of intercontinental missiles. Moreover, of the 34 critical raw materials, 25 are to be found in Greenland. Where there are raw materials, China comes around the corner, and Russia is close by. Trump wants to plant the American flag before it is too late. Geopolitics begins with geography, and power politics is his method.

In his first term Trump was successful in dealing with the ‘bad boys’ of the world order: Russia, China, the Taliban, Iran, North Korea. Vladimir Putin kept quiet. Perhaps Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump had still been president. China has a longer-term goal: to be the strongest power in the world in 2049, one hundred years after the founding of the People’s Republic. The sinologist Michael Pillsbury published a book about it: The Hundred-Year Marathon. China has a strategy: it fills every vacuum unnoticed, however small. The China of Xi Jinping, by now ‘president for life’, exercises patience. At present the country is struggling with a property crisis. The economy is sputtering. Better to wait four years until Trump is gone.

Iran also kept quiet during Trump’s first term. As did the Taliban. America dropped the MOAB (Mother of All Bombs) near their headquarters. When Trump disappeared in 2021, the Taliban went into action again and reconquered Afghanistan. The North Korean potentate, Kim Jong-un, never gave up his nuclear weapons.

With Trump’s return the ‘bad guys’ know what time it is. Trump threatened that ‘all hell will break out’ if Hamas did not release the Israeli hostages before his swearing in. Hamas had understood the message and gave way. Not under pressure from Joe Biden, but through the words of Trump and his draconian threat.

Iran can count on the hard approach. The reign of terror in Tehran that once constructed the ‘axis of resistance’ against Israel, by way of Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, is a ‘sitting duck’. Iranian allies in the Middle East have been liquidated; the relationship with Russia has soured. It is not out of the question that Israel will take out the Iranian nuclear installations, with Trump’s blessing and with precision bombs from America. The disappearance of the ayatollah regime would be a ‘game changer’ in the Middle East. With the Iranian revolution in 1979 the worldwide radicalisation of Islam began, right into the streets of Western Europe.

For quite some time Trump has been promising a peace settlement to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. His advisers mention a period of 100 days. It is evident that Europe itself can achieve nothing, apart from sanctions packages that mainly weaken its own economy. Ending the war in Ukraine is a matter for the ‘Great Powers’, such as America and Russia; for the second not because of the economy but because of the possession of 6,500 nuclear warheads. Europe looks like the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, a weak entity with a great deal of trumpet music and marching operetta armies.

Europe would do well not to lecture Trump, but to look at what America’s turnaround actually consists of. Trump II is better organised than Trump I. Susie Wiles (67), the first female chief of staff in the White House, holds the reins firmly. Whoever leaks is out. Trump is far more disciplined than before. His ministerial candidates are getting through the Senate hearings fairly easily. If he wants to make the turn to the right durable, he will have to work purposefully for four years.

After his inauguration Trump will launch about a hundred ‘executive orders’, a kind of decree. The border with Mexico will be practically closed. Americans want an end to the flow of illegal immigration, of well over 12 million people during Biden’s presidency. That influx caused enormous problems, above all in large cities, often run by Democrats.

Climate policy is going into the shredder as a ‘green scam’. Trump wants to curb inflation by raising energy production, under the motto ‘drill baby drill’. It is likely that America will leave the Paris Climate Agreement again.

Woke, the contemporary cultural revolution, is being scrapped at the American federal government; many large companies had already done so. It would be good if European countries followed that example. The ‘California model’ went up in flames; Hollywood and its surroundings burned to the ground. That was not attributable to climate change but to ‘progressive mismanagement’: woke personnel policy, irresponsible nature policy and failing water management. ‘Woke’ is ‘broke’.

In reality Trump has only two years. In 2026 come the midterms with the re-election of Congress, where Trump now has narrow majorities. He has to ‘deliver’ in a short time. In the field of foreign policy he has practically a free hand, but domestically the room is limited. He has to steer a tax-cut bill through Congress quickly, and even campaign for it in the districts of recalcitrant party colleagues.

Trump’s view of Europe is limited. His guests at the inauguration are above all conservative and nationalist politicians, such as Tino Chrupalla (AfD), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Éric Zemmour (Reconquête) and Tom Van Grieken (Vlaams Belang). A pity that the attendance of Geert Wilders did not work out. Trump sees Europe through the lens of nation states. For him the EU is a regional organisation, like the Organization of American States (OAS). European states can play a larger role, but most are strongly divided internally, Germany and France above all.

The Netherlands gets a chance to raise its profile more strongly in Washington with a ‘right-wing’ cabinet. Doors will open more easily in Trumpian circles. Appropriate emotional intelligence is required, though, by not immediately taking the measure of Americans, above all Trumpists. Begin by listening.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Krijgt Oostenrijk dan toch een ‘Volkskanzler’?)

Herbert Kickl (56), leader of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), stands on the threshold of the Bundeskanzleramt in Vienna. He was given the assignment of forming a new Austrian government by President Alexander van der Bellen (80), a Green no less. Austria is going through what the Netherlands went through last year. And for the third time at that.

In the parliamentary elections of 29 September last year, the FPÖ became the largest party in Austria for the first time. Christian Democrats (ÖVP), Socialists (SPÖ) and Liberals (NEOS, in full ‘Das Neue Österreich’) sat down at the table together to keep the ‘Freiheitlichen’ outside the door. After three months it blew up behind closed doors so violently that the formation attempt failed. The Liberals walked away angry because the economic reforms were ‘too thin’. Hard measures were needed, because Austria is exceeding the budget deficit of 3 percent, the European norm. With Socialists, cutting spending is difficult. Christian Democrats and Liberals have a majority of one seat in the Austrian parliament. ‘Unworkable’, they concluded. President Van der Bellen had to knock on the door of the man they all wanted to avoid: Herbert Kickl.

In the Netherlands the PVV became the largest party in 2023. But Geert Wilders did not become prime minister, because a government at arm’s length had to be formed, with the parliamentary group leaders as the school board. Austria does not work that way. Kickl got the bone on his plate and he intends to strip it. Van der Bellen, who hates Kickl and his FPÖ, had no other option. The ÖVP, the only partner that qualifies, faces the same impasse the CDA faced in 2010. The party is internally torn, but the situation is more hopeless than on the previous occasions, in 2000 and 2017. The ÖVP was the largest then and called the shots over its junior partner, the FPÖ.

The roles are now reversed. Kickl read the ÖVP the riot act: ‘No games, no tricks, no sabotage and no obstruction. Otherwise there will be new elections and we are ready for them.’ ‘Neuwahlen’ are a nightmare for the Christian Democrats, because according to opinion polls the FPÖ would grow even larger and the ÖVP shrink even further.

In 2000 the ÖVP, with Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, was still lord and master. The FPÖ, then led by Jörg Haider, had to bow. He himself took no seat in the government. He bombarded it from the outside, quarrelled at home and eventually left his party to found a new one. In 2008 he was killed in a car crash, heavily under the influence. Politically speaking, Haider was an eternal adolescent. Because of the split, the FPÖ sank in the polls. Although Kickl, like Haider, came from Carinthia and was his pupil, he did not follow the ‘Obmann’ in his split.

In 2017 the FPÖ grew like wildfire again because of the migration crisis. The party, by then led by Heinz-Christian Strache, was needed once more. This time it was the young ÖVP politician and chancellor candidate Sebastian Kurz (38) who came knocking. It clicked with Vice-Chancellor Strache, and Kickl became interior minister. In 2019 Strache’s career went into a nosedive because of the Ibiza video, which, and the timing was good, had been secretly recorded two years earlier. The party leader, then still in opposition, discussed proposals with a woman who presented herself as the niece of a Russian oligarch. It concerned a ‘deal’ cum ‘dirty trick’ not unusual in Austria, whereby government contracts are awarded in exchange for positive publicity. Strache resigned, Kickl was dismissed on the spot by Kurz, and after that the remaining FPÖ ministers left as well. The party fell into a deep hole again.

The new leader of the FPÖ became… Herbert Kickl. At first sight not a charismatic figure. A small build, and too ascetic for a party where the beer flows abundantly, as in the bygone days of the ‘Burschenschaften’, student associations with a national-conservative character.

Kickl rebuilt the party from the ruins, and received a gift while doing so: covid. He painted government policy, including vaccinations and lockdowns, as an ‘attack on freedom’. He presented himself as the future ‘Volkskanzler’, which immediately set off alarm bells among opponents. Was there not also that other Austrian, A. Hitler, who once proclaimed the same? Kickl said he wanted to present himself as the chancellor ‘für den kleinen Mann’, in order to protect him against ‘Staatsgewalt’ and against the immigrating outside world. Austria was to become ‘eine Festung’. Kickl himself does not come across as a tribune of the people. He speaks with sharp formulations, purposefully and in a calm tone. No blustering torrent of words.

After the swearing in of those elected, the Austrian parliament became a bastion of the FPÖ, which supplied the speaker in Walter Rosenkranz, the highest office of the Republic after the president. With 57 members, of whom 13 women, the FPÖ group became the largest. Rosenkranz struck at once with his first foreign guest: Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. As if the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy (1867-1918) were making its re-entry. The speaker had the European flag removed from the reception salon and invited no parliamentary groups other than the FPÖ. I cannot see Dutch parliamentary speaker Martin Bosma pulling such stunts any time soon.

Relations changed not only domestically, with the FPÖ as the largest party, but abroad as well. There are now numerous right-wing governments, in various versions (the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden), while in France and Germany the front women Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel are hammering on the gates of power.

It has become far more difficult for the European Commission and the European Parliament, in which the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) form the third group, to nail Austria to the cross as they did in 2000 and 2017. Among European heads of government, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is the Madonna of conservative Europe. Whoever offends her gets it back in a double portion. Just ask French President Emmanuel Macron.

The most pressing theme in the negotiations in Vienna is indeed European: the budget rules, in particular the 3 percent norm for the budget deficit. Before the elections the government said the deficit was 2.8 percent, but shortly afterwards it turned out to be 4 percent! That meant 18 billion in extra cuts. The liberal NEOS wanted hard measures; the Socialists dug in their heels and the ÖVP looked toward the FPÖ. So Kickl, as formateur, gets the 18 billion euro invoice pushed under his nose. FPÖ and ÖVP have already agreed to cut 6.3 billion euros in order to avert a so-called ‘excessive deficit procedure’ by the European Commission, and with it a downgrade of Austrian creditworthiness on the financial markets.

The negotiations with the FPÖ are reminiscent of those with the PVV. The first thing the FPÖ heard from ÖVP negotiator Christian Stocker: ‘Ein Öxit kommt nicht in Frage’. Öxit is the Austrian variant of Brexit and Nexit. Kickl may voice criticism, but there is a hard limit.

The FPÖ criticises sanctions against Russia and, like the PVV, will have to change course. Vienna of course hopes the blessing will come from elsewhere: a peace settlement via Donald Trump. And a ‘Bundeskanzler Kickl’ will have to abide by the rule of law. In short: constitutionality, à la Pieter Omtzigt. Remarkable: immigration is barely a point of contention, except that the ÖVP uses a different vocabulary. Most important: will the ‘Kickl mayonnaise’ set, as far as mutual trust is concerned?

That is relevant, because in December an old acquaintance suddenly appeared on the German ARD talk show of Sandra Maischberger: Sebastian Kurz. He said he was happy in business, but ruled nothing out. Admittedly he has meanwhile received a suspended sentence of eight months in prison for making false statements. A trial over the buying of newspaper advertisements in exchange for positive opinion polls, along the lines of the Strache method, is still running.

Kurz and Kickl have buried the hatchet, they say, but if formateur Kickl fails and thereby provokes ‘Neuwahlen’, the ÖVP still has one vote-getting cannon standing ready: Sebastian Kurz!

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.