The embarrassment of the SPD and other parties on the eve of the meeting between Putin and Scholz
Gerhard Schröder, 77, former German Chancellor (1998-2005), extends his embrace with Moscow again, obtaining a new position as a lobbyist in the Russian gas sector. He will join the supervisory board of the giant Gazprom. This was announced by the company itself: his appointment will be submitted to the Shareholders’ Meeting scheduled for June 30 in St. Petersburg. The former Social Democratic leader will take over from Timur Kulibayev, son-in-law of former Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who was ousted following the January riots. He is the only foreign candidate on the list of new members. The news comes at the height of the diplomatic efforts that Germany is making to persuade Putin to mediate on Ukraine, and it does not fail to create new embarrassments in his party, the SPD. Just a few days after a meeting of the German leader Scholz with the Russian president.
Schröder’s ties with Moscow are ancient, he is a personal friend of Putin and he is already head of the supervisory board of the Russian energy company Rosneft (since 2017, re-elected in June 2021 with a salary of 600 thousand euros), as well as chairman of the Committee Nord Stream AG shareholders and CEO of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. It will soon extend its influence to Gazprom as well. And by expanding his Russian network, the former chancellor returns to fuel the controversy. In recent days, he had not let the opportunity pass by to criticize Ukraine’s requests for arms deliveries to defend itself against threats from the Kremlin. He also blamed NATO for the deployment of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, creating bitter reactions and highlighting the internal rift among Scholz’s Social Democrats, between those who are shy in reacting to Putin’s provocations and those who, in the SPD and also in the government, are in favor of the use of sanctions. An outcry also comes from the conservatives of the CSU, former allies of Merkel when the chancellor was running the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project and today to the opposition: «Schröder not only damages his party. He harms Germany and German politics as a whole, ”said former Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber.
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