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Jeremy Cliffe Profile picture
Jeremy Cliffe
@JeremyCliffe
Special Advisor & Chief Speechwriter @OpenSociety | Contributing Writer @NewStatesman | Formerly Columnist & Bureau Chief @TheEconomist | All views my own
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Apr 17, 2023 • 17 tweets • 9 min read
Just got back from a week of reporting in Turkey ahead of its general election on May 14, meeting figures from all the main political parties as well as trade unions & 🇹🇷 civil society. 

Some thoughts on probably the most important election in the world this year: Image Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has governed the country for two decades now, first as prime minister (2003-2014) and since then as president (2014-today). He has remade Turkey and its place in the world. Image
Dec 8, 2022 • 11 tweets • 7 min read
“Europe” is fundamentally not a peace project, but a post-empire project (and that’s OK).

@TimothyDSnyder’s central observation about the continent’s modern history has never been so relevant:

Lots of really interesting & thoughtful comments in the replies to this, many critical of @TimothyDSnyder's argument about the nature of the European project. For what it’s worth, the above clip is just a brief dip into it; he makes it at much greater length and depth elsewhere.
Dec 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Wild, this: early this morning 3,000 police officers raided 130+ homes across Germany and made 25 arrests linked to a far-right coup plot. Conspirators said to include the aristocrat Prince Heinrich XIII, a former AfD MP & a former Bundeswehr commander.

zeit.de/gesellschaft/z… Of the 52 suspects several have military backgrounds and are suspected of stashing weapons. The group had set up a political "Council" and a military wing tasked with seizing power, which had considered storming the Bundestag and taking MPs hostage.

zeit.de/gesellschaft/z…
Oct 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
🇫🇷-🇩🇪 partnership is never fully as close as its grandest ceremonial moments entice one to believe, but rarely quite as bad as the semi-frequent "Paris-Berlin crisis" moments like the current one imply. It's a more transactional, mercurial alliance than either likes to admit. Partnerships like De Gaulle-Adenauer or Giscard-Schmidt or Mitterrand-Kohl get romanticised in the collective memory (like any political project, the European project needs its myths) but all experienced sporadic periods of tension/animosity like the current one.
Oct 12, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
For decades, Britain has been on the run from the reality that it can't have a European social model on a mid-Atlantic tax take. Now it really seems to have run out of road. In that respect there is a certain underlying intellectual honesty to the Truss-Kwarteng project. They clearly want UK to make a choice: for a more US-style safety net and tax take. You don't have to like that choice (I find it abhorrent) to recognise its internal consistency.
Oct 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Only days after NordStream pipeline blasts: rail traffic in much of northern Germany suspended this morning, with @derspiegel’s security sources talking of possible sabotage. Cables important to GSM-R (mobile comms between drivers, signalers etc) found severed in two locations. Now confirmed by Deutsche Bahn:
Sep 27, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Morgan's hot take on Meloni is a good example of a much broader phenomenon: doomed attempts to categorise Western conservatism without reference to the breakdown of the old distinction between extreme right and mainstream right in many European countries and the US. Potted history. During the Cold War decades there was a relatively clear distinction between a Western right that defined itself in opposition to radical-right fascism (Christian Democracy, Gaullism etc) and a Western right that sought a more "nuanced" relationship with it.
Sep 26, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
One way of looking at Italy's election result: post-fascist Giorgia Meloni triumphs

Another way of looking at it: a right-wing block on 44% of vote triumphs over centre & centre-left parties on 49% because it worked together and they didn't

My write-up:

newstatesman.com/world/europe/2… The reasons why the centre & centre-left (broadly defined, so: Partito Democratico, 5 Star, Azione/Italia Viva) are various. PD & 5 Star fell out over Draghi government. Azione/Italia Viva consider 5 Star reckless populists. Rift between PD’s Letta & Italia Viva’s Renzi (ex PD).
Sep 25, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Italy election exit poll: right-wing block (Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia + Lega + Forza Italia) on track for clear majority in both upper and lower houses of Italian parliament. Exit polling puts Fratelli d'Italia close to latest campaign polling results but the big surprise seems to be the surprisingly strong performance of the Five Star Movement.

Sep 23, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Silvio Berlusconi claims his old pal Putin was “pushed by the Russian population, his party and his ministers” to attack Ukraine and just wanted to “replace Zelensky’s government with a government of decent people and be back in a week”.

Significant as i) Berlusconi's Forza Italia is supposedly the "moderate" part of the right-wing coalition likely to govern 🇮🇹 after Sunday's election (his ally Antonio Tajani is reportedly being lined up to be its Brussels-compatible foreign minister).
Sep 22, 2022 • 18 tweets • 8 min read
The post-fascist party Fratelli d'Italia is leading polls ahead of Italy's election on Sunday and its head Giorgia Meloni is on track to become prime minister. How did that happen? And what does it mean for 🇮🇹?

My @NewStatesman essay from Turin and Rome:

newstatesman.com/world/europe/2… Even by the volatile standards of Italy's party-political landscape since 2018, the rise of the FdI (dark blue line below) has been remarkable. The last polls before the pre-election purdah put it just under 25% - up from 4% in 2018 and 2% in 2013.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_p… Image
Sep 10, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The prospect is still a way off, but it’s time to start thinking about what outright defeat for Russia would mean:

- regime change in Moscow?
- other fragmentation in 🇷🇺?
- where does 🇨🇳 draw a line?
- Marshall Plan for 🇺🇦 reconstruction?
- a refoundation of rules-based order? - further centrifugal effects in Russia’s erstwhile “near abroad”?
Aug 12, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Germany's Greens - the one party that saw the crisis of gas dependency coming, opposed Putin constantly, and has a clear answer to the ensuring problems - are now level with the CDU/CSU at 1st place in the polls. Robert Habeck in 2016 on what he would tell Putin as chancellor:

1) We will end NordStream 2 and phase out trade relations.
2) Russians who bomb Syria and then go shopping in Munich are banned.
3) Russians who believe in liberal Europe get speed visas.

Aug 9, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"Debt brake advocates promise it will protect future generations. In reality, it cripples them by preventing the necessary public investment in a prosperous future."

@thorstenbenner calls for a fiscal Zeitenwende in Germany:

newstatesman.com/world/europe/2… The constitutional debt brake can only be changed/abolished with a two-thirds majority in both Bundestag and Bundesrat. So that requires support of CDU/CSU as well as left-of-centre parties.

@thorstenbenner calls on the Union to rethink its "fetish":

newstatesman.com/world/europe/2…
Aug 7, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Germany is facing a very hard winter. Yet the most apocalyptic scenarios are now looking less likely: despite Russia reducing the gas flow in Nord Stream 1 to 20% of capacity, 🇩🇪 gas stores are now over 70% full. Berlin's goal of 75% by early September now looks very attainable. The main reason: Germany is using less gas than before and energy-saving measures are having an effect (with gas use lower than in 2021 every month in 2022 so far, including an unusually hot July).
Jul 27, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
When presented with a new European far-right force, today's mainstream UK right goes one of two ways:

a) "This is 1933 all over again" (case in point: AfD)
b) "Thanks goodness for this anti-woke warrior who says it like it is" (case in point: Zemmour) The reason? Most of them have heard of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, and have unquestioningly inhaled US culture wars, so basically see anything emanating from the European far-right as either one or the other.
Jul 13, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
What is the basis for Sunak’s supposed gravitas and seriousness? He has been a poor chancellor and comes across as bland and superficial, but most sensible opinion seems to consider him the best of the lot. What am I missing? UK economy underperformed its counterparts during the Sunak chancellorship and his signature policy seems to have cost lives without much positive economic impact. His claim to seriousness merely seems to be that his fiscal plans aren’t totally laughable. Is the bar that low?
Jul 10, 2022 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
The UK has low tax and regulatory burdens by rich-world standards. If lower taxes and more deregulation are your fundamental answers, you’re asking the wrong questions.

Props to any Tory leadership candidate with something serious to say on 🇬🇧’s core problem: low productivity. And no, the answer is not to become more like Germany. 🇩🇪 strengths are path dependent and anyway facing some serious challenges in next years. Answer is a steely focus on UK’s own strengths: global services, university-based R&D, high-end niche manufacturing, pharma & creative.
Jun 29, 2022 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
NATO is back. But for how long? My @NewStatesman cover feature on an alliance dangerously dependent on the power of an America sliding towards political ruin:

newstatesman.com/international-… Russia's invasion of Ukraine has reinvigorated the alliance. But without an engaged America the story would have been very different.

Europe's reliance on US power is growing once more, and progress towards serious capabilities of its own painfully slow.

newstatesman.com/international-… Image
Jun 15, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Germany hosts some 2m refugees, the UK hosts about 173k. Yet public services in Germany are not in crisis and housing is less dysfunctional than in Britain. Refugees, the ECHR, human rights lawyers etc are *not* the problem.

newstatesman.com/chart-of-the-d… It's morally repulsive that the British government blames (and uses as a distraction) the negligible number of refugees who reach the country for its own inability to deliver working public services and rising productivity.
Jun 14, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Angela Merkel is back: modest, thoughtful and profoundly unconvincing about her record on Russia and Ukraine.

My @NewStatesman piece on why the former 🇩🇪 chancellor's self-justification simply does not add up.

newstatesman.com/world/europe/2… Some have compared Merkel to Neville Chamberlain. I don't think that's right:

1) Chamberlain was naive about Hitler - Merkel was not naive about Putin.
2) Chamberlain used the time bought by his appeasement to prepare for European war - Merkel did not.

newstatesman.com/world/europe/2…