Merkel’s Campaign Takes a Hard Line on Russia

The chancellor talks a good game in trying to appeal to German voters wary of left-wing sympathy for Putin.

By John Vinocur, WSJ

With their re-election next year very much in mind, Angela Merkel and the members of her Christian Democratic Union are staking out positions on Russia that, for now, make them the toughest tough-talkers in the West.

The chancellor’s line on the likelihood of Germany’s 2017 political and voting process being hacked: “I say this simply—these cyber-attacks, including those that are called hybrid measures in Russia’s doctrine, now belong to every-day occurrence.”

Her view of the attacks by Russia and Iran in support of Syria’s assault on its civilians: “Crimes that must be punished.”

In verbal terms, this puts Germany where it ought to be—trying to rally a notional Western legion that currently struggles to respond to Russia with appropriate, consistent and real-time resolve.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a German-led response to Russia’s role in Aleppo. But the chancellor’s convictions are apparent in her newly direct and sharpened description of Russian aggression.

“Just as Germany often wasn’t hard enough in relation to Russia from an American point of view, in the future this kind of warning can go in Washington’s direction from Berlin,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote on Sunday concerning the chancellor’s apparent turnabout.

Mrs. Merkel and the CDU’s hardened stance is reflected in a party position paper on Russia published this month. In it, the party confronts the kind of Moscow-coddling notions that include U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s branding as “ridiculous” those reports from America’s intelligence agencies claiming Russia interfered with the U.S. presidential-election process.

To her advantage, Mrs. Merkel is at one with the heads of German external- and internal-security services that, according to the German press, have “precise findings” concerning a major Russian hack on the Bundestag’s computers last year.

The newspaper Tagesspiegel reported that the same entry tracks found on the Parliament’s servers were also identified on the hacked equipment of the U.S. Democratic National Committee. German intelligence services are said to expect similar attempts from Moscow leading up to Germany’s election in September. Both the Netherlands’ national elections in March and France’s in April-May are described in Berlin as choice test-runs for Moscow.

It’s a context in which Mrs. Merkel and her Christian Democrats do not appear ready to bend.

Bolstering the chancellor’s approach is the most solid of domestic reasons: practical, winning politics. Christian Democrats are calling a potential coalition victory for the Putin-friendly Social Democrat and Left parties, supported by the Greens, a frightening alternative to Germany’s safety. The CDU can brand this alliance as destabilizing, even disloyal, to Germany’s democratic values. To voters at the left- and right-wing edges of the German middle, resisting such an alliance gets cast as a matter of conscience.

In the process, Mrs. Merkel will have to work hard to make clear that, for Germany, Mr. Putin is no alternative to America, all the while trying to bring her influence to bear on Mr. Trump. Should she be spurned by Mr. Trump, she can attack him for turning his back on the West. That might go down well. A poll published after Mr. Trump’s November election found 85% of Germans had no good opinion of him.

Leading a resolute resistance against Mr. Putin, however, isn’t simple. It poses two major problems for Mrs. Merkel. One is that the Social Democrats will continue until election day to be the junior partners in her governing coalition.

By way of payback for her latest positioning on Russia, big voices within the Social Democrats have already begun savaging the inconsistencies in her unloved immigration policy. Among the prime hecklers is former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who since 2005 has been shilling for Gazprom’s Nord Stream Russia-to-Germany natural-gas pipelines, which together would undermine the energy security of the rest of Europe.

The other issue, over which the chancellor retains control and has been outspoken, is the necessity to “punish” Russia for its actions in Syria. But to gain international credibility, she must follow that language with a response that hurts.

Neutral Sweden, historically no mouse when it comes to Russia, set a remarkable, ready-to-imitate example last week. On the basis of advice from its foreign and defense ministers about the security threats now posed by Russian forces, authorities on the Baltic island of Gotland announced they were withdrawing plans to rent docks to Gazprom for the construction of Nord Stream 2.

It would take nothing but determination for the chancellor to sink Gazprom’s pipeline at its German terminus. Certain to approve: Her own staff, the European Parliament’s German-led democratic right-wing and Greens (a desirable 2017 coalition option for the chancellor) and—at least until Jan. 20—the United States.

If this new Angela Merkel really arrives, while wanting to hear out Mr. Trump and his nominee for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, the Russian-speaking chancellor is casting herself as a Western pole of courage and authority.