Late last year, old leftist Oskar Lafontaine, 78, a historic leader of German social democracy, a former finance minister and a defeated prime minister, walked out of politics with a warning of rising militarism, a again in Germany.
He focused fire on “the greens and their supporters in journalism”, he who, ironically, made his farewell in one of the newspapers of the right-wing chain Axel Springer, Die Welt. He said that if the Greens were to occupy diplomacy, “it would be a catastrophe”, with “increased risk of war”, because they “uncritically follow the American policy of confrontation with Russia”.
On social media, shortly before, he had already written that “the Greens have gone from a party of peace to a party of war”, criticizing their defense of “wars that violate international law, rearmament, the delivery of weapons, the siege of Russia by the US”. . He described it as “a horror” to imagine the “US-controlled Greens” in a “crisis in Ukraine”.
With a mixed signal, praising, the Washington Post then published, under the headline “Rising Green Party Echoes US Policies”, that the group that had emerged as “a mix of peace activists and skeptics of Western power” was now putting “a tough towards Moscow at the center of foreign policy promises”.
That was half a year before the Greens took over the foreign and economic ministries, the most confrontational with Moscow, even before the invasion. But with the persistence of the war, between arms to Ukraine and sanctions to Russia, even the “supporters of journalism” begin to question, case of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
This week, with a headline pointing to the group as the new German right, but “ecological”, the newspaper highlighted the “Farewell to pacifism and anti-militarism: the party freed itself from its old roots” by approving the shipment of weapons, “with fervor and moral passion”. The Süddeutsche was told by Antje Vollmer, 79, a leader for decades, that “it betrays the green soul”.
But Lafontaine hadn’t just turned against the greens in Die Zeit. He also warned then about the now prime minister Olaf Scholz, “his former friend from the days of social democracy”. Scholz, he said, today represents “armaments, military operations of the Bundeswehr”, the German armed forces, “and social cuts”.
It was Scholz who on February 19, speaking in Germany shortly after visiting Vladimir Putin, called his denunciation of the suppression of ethnic Russians in Donbas “ridiculous”. The Kremlin reacted by saying that “it is not up to German leaders to make fun of genocide issues”. Five days later, the invasion began.
A hundred days later, in the headlines this Friday (3) by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and almost the entire country, Scholz approved in parliament “the rearmament of Germany”, establishing a fund of € 100 billion for the Bundeswehr, officially for the defense of the country.
But the Süddeutsche is already projecting this Friday, at the top, “a new war by proxy in the most oil-rich country in Africa”, Libya, and with the same protagonists of the current one in Ukraine: NATO and Russia.
“Most Libyan oil is on the border with Egypt, and Moscow is in charge there,” says the paper – which last week accompanied Scholz on an African tour of oil.
