Brexit sees chickens come home to roost for Angela Merkel

The dust has not yet settled after the United Kingdom’s referendum decision, but the Brexit blame game is already in full swing. And as always when things go wrong, Brussels gets blamed. What will English politicians do when they’re finally out?

David Cameron, for instance, told French officials it was the EU's refusal to allow him a cap on immigration that broke his back. No it was not. It was his foolish pledge to cut immigration to "tens of thousands" back in 2010, when he urged voters to "kick him out" if he didn't succeed.

Others are just as bad. Before the referendum, Boris Johnson was blithely comparing the EU to the empires of Napoleon and, yes, Hitler. Now it seems the Leave vote will achieve what the Corsican and the Austrian failed to do: dismember the United Kingdom.

The British now know, or they should know, that Johnson would rather be prime minister in Little England than just another politician in Great Britain. On the other hand, they should have known that before.

If the British political class, including the invertebrate Jeremy Corbyn, blundered, the electorate chose to believe stupid slogans such as "Taking our country back", as if Brexit would suddenly deliver them power on a plate with watercress around it.

I’ve spent the last couple of years warning that Angela Merkel’s leadership of Europe – this, after all, is what “Brussels” boils down to – would lead to disaster. It has. And it is not going to stop here.

Front National leader Marine Le Pen is promising the French a referendum if they elect her president next year. Considering that it was the French who voted down the European Constitution in 2005 and that 61 per cent of them, according to a recent poll, have a “negative view” of the EU, Le Pen might have found a winning formula. Without France, the EU collapses, no ifs and buts about it. Champagne corks are already popping in the Kremlin.

Even if the EU stays together, it is a different animal without the British. Southern European statists and European federalists are rubbing their hands: Now that the awkward British are going, they can get down to the business of cementing a euro zone where Germany bankrolls everybody else’s deficit spending; and of creating an ever closer European Union.

Underscoring this latter point, Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker used Wednesday’s crisis summit to inform the EU heads of state that the free trade deal between Europe and Canada would be ratified by the European Commission and the European Parliament alone.

However, Juncker's chutzpah prompted Angela Merkel to say tersely that she would like to "consult" the Bundestag, while the German Greens, who hitherto would only pronounce the word "national" between gritted teeth, demanded a vote on the CEPA treaty by "our national parliament".

Germany is in a state of shock, denial and anger. Shock because they didn’t really believe the British would vote against their economic interests. Denial in that all sorts of conspiracy theories are flying around about how in the end the British government is just bluffing and won’t actually trigger the divorce proceedings.

Meanwhile, there is anger, too, directed towards Cameron and those around him, which culminates in a desire to punish the English by annexing the Scots and if possible the Northern Irish and isolating London.

Watching the English being humiliated by Iceland at Euro 2016 in a Berlin pub, I was struck by the level of derision among people who would have normally been happy to see the English team make it to the final. The Germans are hurting, and they want to see England hurt. Obviously, Merkel doesn’t think in these categories. But as a politician, she has to take them into account.

Indeed, if anything apart from the sheer stupidity of English politicians got us where we are, it is Merkel’s habitual opportunism. When the banking crisis morphed into a sovereign debt crisis, Merkel first heeded the German banks’ plea to bail Greece out in order to rescue their loans, then imposed austerity on southern Europe to placate popular German rage at the bailout. The result is zero growth in the euro zone, youth unemployment at record levels, the rise of radical parties, the growth of Euroscepticism and the isolation of Germany.

Having mismanaged the euro crisis, Merkel immediately went on to mismanage the immigration crisis. Obviously, Germany is not responsible for the millions of refugees, though. However, it could have done a lot more to help Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and other countries deal with the problem.

Meanwhile, it did nothing to stop Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad or Isis, to stabilise Libya or to beef up the EU’s Frontex border control system. As for the millions who made it to Europe, Germany was happy to let Spain, Italy and Greece deal with the problem. Shielded behind the Dublin agreements, which requires refugees to claim asylum in the first EU state they reach, Germany could complain about Italian border officials who waved immigrants through while implicitly admitting that the Italians were overwhelmed.

Even while Turkey – angered by the EU’s inaction on Syria, its failure to solve the Cyprus question and its foot-dragging on Turkey’s membership application – opened the floodgates and let refugees pour into Greece, Germany was demanding further cuts to Greece’s civil service and budget.

When Hungary moved to erect a fence on its border with Serbia, hardly different from the fences around the EU enclaves in north Africa, this was decried by German officials and media; Merkel then decided unilaterally to open Germany’s borders for refugees, in direct contravention of the Dublin protocol and Germany’s constitution. She hurriedly backed down in the face of nativist protests.

However, this happened only after she had tried to ram a redistribution scheme down the throat of the European Council via majority vote, prompting open rebellion from Hungary, Poland and other states. Now Germany is even more isolated in Europe and totally reliant on the fences put up by Balkan governments and an agreement with Turkey’s really nasty President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has led to the flow of refugees to Germany becoming little more than a trickle.

“Operation successful, patient dead,” goes a German saying. It certainly applies to the refugee crisis. Watching all of this, one could hardly blame some in Britain for believing they will be better off managing their own affairs.

They won’t be, but that argument has became a much harder case to make as one EU crisis morphed into another. And what are the smaller and newer nations of the EU supposed to make of the initial German reaction to the Brexit vote? Who got invited to Berlin? The original six members of the club, the “Charlemagnian” core of the union.

Why? Why is the Netherlands more important than Poland? Italy more important than Spain? Luxemburg more important than Ireland? What message is Berlin sending? Everyone is equal in the EU, it seems, but some are more equal than others. Which is precisely what the Brexiteers have contended all along.

Today, the nationalist “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD), which is set to win seats in the Bundestag in next year’s German federal elections, is demanding a referendum on Germany’s own membership of the EU – a plan already marked with the soubriquet, “Dexit”.

Germany’s internal politics are in turmoil, too. It is an open secret that Merkel would like to form a coalition with the Greens and ditch her partners from the left-of-centre SPD. They, meanwhile, are toying with the idea of a “Red-Red-Green” coalition including the Ex-communists of the “Linke” or Left Party, their only realistic option to gain the chancellorship.

Seeming deliberately to seek the wrong moment, Germany’s foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier chose the week of the Brexit referendum to criticise Nato manoeuvres on the eastern borders of the alliance as “sabre-rattling”, in an article for a US foreign policy journal. Germany, unlike other unnamed nations, was a “reflective” power, he said. In fact, he said it four times in one essay.

Unhampered by British hawks, one could imagine a left-wing government in Germany leading the EU towards a grand bargain with Russia, in which the European aspirations of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova are traded for Russian help in “pacifying” Syria and other hotspots, all in the name of peace.

This would lead to serious rifts within the Atlantic alliance and would deepen the divide with Britain. It would, interestingly, be applauded by the AfD, which favours a “Bismarckian” policy of neutrality between the West and Russia, which has always been a temptation for Germans, and a danger for Europe.

In this situation, Merkel is behaving true to form: playing for time and speaking out of both sides of her mouth. To placate the eager federalists and angry Britain-bashers, she has said that divorce is inevitable and that there must be no British “cherry-picking”. At the same time, she is hoping that the markets – and the Scots – will scare whoever succeeds Cameron into accepting a Norway-type deal in principle, with carefully worded opt-outs designed to enable precisely the kind of cherry-picking that she rules out. And admittedly, this would be the best bad deal for which one can currently hope.

The question is whether Merkel still has the political clout to resist the federalists, pacify the Brit-bashers, give the southern Europeans some of what they want, mend fences with the eastern Europeans, in other words, keep Europe together while an agreement with Great Britain – or Little England – is being negotiated.

Opportunism has been good to her, because it always seemed she had time; and in time things often sort themselves out. Now, however, as the chickens come home to roost, time is running out and opportunism has never seemed so unattractive.

If only there was an alternative. But like the British Labour Party, Germany’s Social Democrats are clueless and lack leadership. And unlike the Conservatives , Merkel’s party has a dire shortage of Brutus-types prepared to lift the knife.

• Alan Posener is a correspondent and commentator for Die Welt and Welt am Sonntag in Berlin and one of Germany’s most influential bloggers.