* Evolving Middle East Balance of Power
* Germany in Transition: Snap Election 2025
By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
A New Syria
Now that rebels have ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad, Syria must remake itself.
The question is: How? And What will it become?
These are the questions explored by CNN’s master presenter Fareed Zaakaria in his ‘Global Briefing, together with editor Chris Good (Dec. 18).
The main rebel group that is now forming the government and seeking international legitimacy – Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) – is just one of Syria’s rebel factions, as The Economist has noted.
Others include Turkish-backed rebels in Syria’s north and north-west, and US-backed mostly-Kurdish rebels in Syria’s north-east.
Diving deeper into the panoply of groups in his This Week in Northern Syria newsletter, Alexander McKeever adds to that list a coalition of southern groups that reconciled with the Assad regime in 2018.
“The country remains divided between four primary actors,” McKeever writes, “three of which are nominally allied under a broad opposition umbrella.”
There are also pockets of ISIS and suspected sleeper cells.
Despite the welcome news of Assad’s sudden fall, James Corera for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s The Strategist blog, Syria might well succumb to fundamentalist Islamic rule or become a patchwork of fiefdoms.
“Chaos,” Corera writes, “is likely to follow” the collapse of Assad and the loss suffered by his Russian and Iranian patrons.
As Zakaria has pointed out, Syria risks devolving into civil war – as neighbouring Iraq did after US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Discussing the “jigsaw puzzle” of Syria’s territorial control on last week Sunday’s CNN Global Public Square, Zakaria heard from veteran former US diplomat and ex-chief of The Council on Foreign Relations that it’s reminiscent of the Balkans.
The military commander of HTS tells The Economist that the new government will respect minorities – a key pledge, given the vicious dangers of sectarianism in a fragile country. He also says Syria’s rebel groups must be folded under the control of the state.
Given the different interests at play, that could be daunting. “There is no denying that many forces are conspiring to drag the country into further bloodshed,” The Economist writes. Syria is a mosaic of peoples and faiths carved out of the Ottoman empire [1299-1922]. They have never lived side by side in a stable democracy.”
To The Economist, “the essential condition for Syria to be stable is that it needs a tolerant and inclusive government. The hard-earned lesson from the years of war is that no single group can dominate without resorting to repression.”
Writing for Project Syndicate, Charles A. Kupchan and Sinan Uelgen argue Syria needs “ an inclusive political transition” that brings together the various groups that hold territory – and “a new social contract that provides Syrians adequate levels of security and economic opportunity.”
The New Yorker’s Robin Wright notes uncertainty over the path toward such an outcome: “For the rest of the world UN Resolution 2254 remains the legal premise for a transition. It calls for a new constitution and free elections stretched over eighteen months. But it was written nine years ago. Time is moving much faster now in a country where the economy is collapsing and millions have been displaced or forced into exile. ‘We should accept instability, because it is part of the process,’ Sawsan Abou Zainedin, who leads Madaniya, an umbrella organization for two hundred Syrian civil-society groups, said. ‘We’re all standing on good will, but we can’t stand on good will for long.”
Regardless, Syria’s fate likely won’t become clear immediately, Collin Meisel writes for West Point’s Modern War Institute: “The truthis, we don’t know what the future holds for Syria. What we do know is that political events often have effects that unfold across many years, even decades, sometimes boomeranging in ways that are difficult to anticipate at the outset.”
Could ISIS Come Back?
ISIS lost its territorial caliphate in 2019. Its former leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US raid that October. And yet pockets of control have lingered in Syria and sleeper cells are thought to exist.
Now that dictator Bashar al-Assad ‘s regime has fallen to rebels, there is genuine worry that ISIS could return.
Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute writes in a New York Lister writes: “There is…a palpable sense of trepidation growing in northeastern Syria, where the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, once controlled swaths of land…Its threat has not dissipated. On the contrary, the Islamic State has conducted nearly 700 attacks in Syria since January, by my calculations, putting it on track to triple its rate of last year. The sophistication and deadliness of ISIS attacks have also surged this year, as has their geographic spread. In addition to ISIS’ months long campaign of attacks on Syria’s oil industry, the group’s infamous extortion network is also back, giving it Times guest opinion essay that it’s a real concern.
renewed funding and indicating a level of local intelligence that is cause for alarm.”
As to the question of what can be done, Lister suggests Washington should keep its small number of troops in northwest Syria, collaborate with local tribes and militias, and engage more deeply with the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who have controlled northeast Syria for years.
German Political Parties Present Campaign Platforms
Germany’s political parties have begun presenting their draft election manifestos ahead of the snap general election in February 2025. They focus on income, the economy and jobs (DW/Deutsche Welle/Jens Thurau, Dec. 17).
CDU/CSU Election Programme
Germany’s centre-right bloc of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) has unanimously voted in favour of an election programme that promises lower taxes for companies to 25 % percent.
It promises not to cut old age pensions and plans to encourage those who want to continue working beyond retirement age of 67, allowing them to earn up to Euro 2,000 per month tax free on top of their pension.
The problem according to critics is that the bold ideas principally of CDU chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz will cost billions of euros, and will be extremely hard to implement if the CDU/CSU refuses to ease the “debt brake”.
Enshrined in Germany’s Basic Law (Constitution), the brake limits fresh debt to a maximum of 0.35 % percent of national output (GDP).
Although he himself is not popular with the electorate, Merz’s party is currently significantly ahead in opinion polls, and he has a good chance of becoming the next chancellor after the snap election on February 23 (DW).
Social Democrats Want to Boost Investment, Increase Public Debt
The centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) want to reform the debt brake in order to make billions of euros available for urgently needed investments, for example in the ailing infrastructure.
The party is also focusing on tax incentives for companies to increase investment.
In line with its message to low-income voters, the SPD wants the super-rich with assets of more than Euro 100 million to pay a wealth tax.
In the Bundestag (the lower house of parliament) last week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised that he would raise the statutory minimum wage once again: “In the last election campaign, I promised a minimum wage of Euro 12, and I have kept that promise. That’s why I’m fighting for a Euro 15 minimum wage in the next federal election.”
[Chancellor Olaf Scholz is confident that his Social Democrats have the right message to win. This will be an uphill task, but he seems to be on the right track. The best strategy would be to assign special spokespersons for the various topics – economy, general security, domestic and external challenges (Trump, Putin)]
Greens: Not Just Climate Protection
In the past three years of government, the Greens have been facing criticism over their climate protection plans. Now the party has scaled back its demands to reduce greenhouse gases compared to the 2021 election campaign.
The Greens also want to reform the debt brake [like the SPD], introduce subsidies for electric cars, and propose a new “citizens’ fund” to secure pensions. This fund should also be fed with state money.
They also want a billionaire’s tax, as current vice-chancellor and leading candidate Robert Habeck has said.
According to expert estimates, there are currently 249 billionaires in Germany: “If you taxed a small amount of their wealth, you would have around five to six billion euros,” was Habeck’s calculation. He said this money could be invested in education.
Free Democrats: A New Economic Policy
Like the Greens, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) is also calling for a reform of pensions. Party Leader Christian Lindner is campaigning for the introduction of a share-based pension.
The FDP’s demands for a fundamentally different economic policy were the main reason for the collapse of the coalition government with the SPD and the Greens in November.
[Unfortunately, the FDP doesn’t seem to recognize the difference between what is necessary and what is possible. For the forseeable future, the FDP cannot be a reliable partner for the SPD, whereas the Greens will remain so].
Left Party: Focus on Social Justice
The socialist Left Party wants to introduce higher taxes for the wealthy, including an inheritance tax of 60 % percent for those with an inheritance of Euro 3 million or more [the amount taxable is too low, the rate to high to be generally acceptable].
The Left Party also wants to raise the minimum wage to Euro 15 percent) of the recipient’s net income.
It wants to boost public transport to make sure there is at least an hourly bus and train service to rural areas, and to ban flights that are shorter than 500 kilometers or five hours by train.
[The SPD will also have to attack the Left Party for unnecessarily taking away votes without the werewithal to achieve anything concrete].
AfD: Soft on Russia, Tough on Immigrants
According to its draft election manifesto, the extreme far-right Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) wants Germany to leave the European Union (EU) and abolish the Euro.
It denies the existence of man-made climate change and advocates setting up new coal-fired power plants and nuclear power-stations, and to resume the import of Russian natural gas.
The AfD also wants even tougher border controls that push back refugees who have travelled through other EU countries to get to Germany. They even want to detain asylum-seekers at the border while their applications are processed.
The CDU/CSU is also in favour of turning back refugees at the borders.
Following the fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, CDU chancellor candidate Merz does not want any more people from Syria to come to Germany.
Russian Threat
Last Sunday, the German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius declared that his country was particularly targeted by Vladimir Putin’s hybrid attacks. According to him, Germany must not ignore this threat (Tagtik, Dec. 22).
Speaking to a German newspaper group, Pistorius affirmed that the Russian president knew Germany well [among others, from his time as boss of the Soviet KGB in Dresden, Communist East Germany] and that he knew “how to trap us”.
During the election campaign, Pistorius will surely expose the machinations of the extreme right-wing elements, who are doing Russia’s bidding.
This is particularly relevant as the latest public surveys in Germany have revealed that the electorate fear Russia’s moves and political instability at home.
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