Barley's statement about a nuclear protective shield puts the SPD in turmoil

The statement by Katarina Barley, SPD's leading candidate for the European elections, about Europe's own nuclear protective shield is causing the left wing of the SPD to be in turmoil. A comment from Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis.

The old aunt SPD would probably never have dreamed that it would one day be vilified as a party of “swashbucklers”. Since her EU top candidate Katarina Barley brought a nuclear umbrella for Europe into play, the left camp is upside down, led by the inevitable Ralf Stegner and left-wing leader Martin Schirdewan. He recommends that comrades focus on a “policy of de-escalation and civil conflict resolution” instead of rearmament. That's right, that's worked really well with Putin in recent years! And Schirdewan has another left-wing hit up his sleeve. Never before have more atomic bombs made the world safer.

For the time being, the central security promise for Germany remains NATO

Unfortunately, this argument is as ineradicable as it is false: precisely because nuclear deterrence, the “balance of terror,” has made nuclear wars unfeasible for all sides, Europe was able to enjoy the longest period of peace in its history after the Second World War. And it is significant that the fury of war is raging in Ukraine today, i.e. in a country whose residents have not been covered by a nuclear protective shield.

Helmut Schmidt even sacrificed his chancellorship for the principle of deterrence when, at the beginning of the 1980s, he pushed through NATO's retrofitting with medium-range missiles against the resistance of the pacifists in his SPD. At the beginning of the Ukraine war, the left-wing realists a la Schmidt were more likely to be found in the Green Party. The Social Democrats with their Mützenich wing and the old penchant for Moscow romanticism still needed a moment of reconsideration. But it speaks for their newly awakened sense of reality that the debate about whether Germany should slip under the nuclear defense umbrella of France and Great Britain now emanated from the declared “peace party” SPD. However, none of this changes the fact that the central security promise for Germany remains NATO for the time being – even if the AfD, the Left, Sahra Wagenknecht and Donald Trump absolutely cannot stand them.

George Anastasiadis