Some major Anglo-American titles have belatedly admitted to “the threat to Europe’s industrial might” in the New York Times or “factory production in Europe” in the Wall Street Journal. The Economist is more specific, “Germany faces imminent threat of deindustrialization.”
Die Welt, like other Germans, was already warning, including in the headline, that “production in Germany is no longer competitive”, this “because of electricity and gas prices”. The energy purchased now from American and other producers is more expensive than Russian energy.
But the same Die Welt doesn’t want to back down and has set its sights on a second target for Germany: China, which buys its cars. He even talks about going further, as in his highlight on the summit of the Organization for Cooperation in Shanghai, closing the week.
“China, Russia, Iran and India have come together to form an alternative power bloc to the West,” he stressed. “But free countries have a trump card against fake giants.” That trump card would be that “the West has a unifying idea: justice and freedom are the best foundation for security and prosperity.”
Angela Merkel’s Germany “has disdained this idea in recent decades” and now the country “must learn again to choose its friends”, underlines the chain’s prestigious newspaper Axel Springer. In addition to China, India may also no longer be friends with Germany. Maybe even Turkey.
The United States is left as a giant friend. Axel Springer, which is Germany’s leading press group, “wants to be the leading digital publisher in democracies around the world,” its CEO and largest shareholder Mathias Döpfner said in an interview with the Washington Post. For that, first of all, it wants to conquer the USA.
In his “expansionist impulses”, as the Washington newspaper describes it, Döpfner in recent years bought Business Insider, now just Insider, and then Politico, among other American sites. And he went on to criticize potential competitors NYT and WaPo as partisan, pro-Democrats.
But competitors do not passively watch the German advance. As the executive was negotiating Politico, a year ago, the NYT released a report on sexual harassment in the popular Axel Springer newspaper. “That’s how it works at Bild: whoever sleeps with the boss gets a better job,” denounced one journalist.
Now the Washington Post has set a trap for Döpfner in the interview. At the moment when he declared himself more impartial than American newspapers, an email from 2020 was presented in which he called on other executives of the German group to “pray” for Donald Trump’s re-election.
His first reaction was to say that it was “false”, but when he saw the copy of the message, he went on to argue that it was a joke. In any case, Trump liked it enough to publish, on his own social network: “Thanks to the brilliant Mathias Döpfner. good news is: WE WIN” (top image).
A few more days and also the London Financial Times came out with an attack on the German CEO. In short, Döpfner “used his record-breaking tabloid to campaign against Adidas’ decision to stop paying rent during the pandemic, without revealing that he was the company’s landlord.”
There were more than two dozen texts against the sports brand in Bild, leading to threats of boycott by consumers and retaliation by politicians from different parties, until Adidas came back and apologized. Questioned, Axel Springer said it was “a mega-scoop”.
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