(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Duitsland moet nu stoppen met moraalpolitiek en aan machtspolitiek gaan doen)

Europe has come adrift in a turbulent world because Germany had lost its bearings. In the Bundestag elections the red-green camp was voted out. The initiative now lies with the CDU/CSU, and in particular with their candidate for chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said: ‘We need a functioning government. The world out there is not waiting for us. Germany is back!’ Let us hope that last part is true.

At present Germany behaves in the world like a small country, such as the Netherlands or Denmark. Invisible, overlooked, but full of good intentions. Europe’s strongest country is laid up and needs to get back on its feet quickly. Americans and Russians are negotiating about the future of Ukraine, without Ukraine. This week French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer travel to Washington D.C. to talk with President Donald Trump. Germany is sitting at home.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) is a decent man, but his party took an enormous beating: its worst result since 1890, when the SPD entered the Reichstag during the German Empire. The party of Friedrich Ebert, Reich President during the Weimar Republic, and of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, both chancellors of West Germany, has been demoted. It lost heavily in its strongest regions, such as the Ruhr area. In Gelsenkirchen the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) even became the largest party. Telling. Ordinary men and women have deserted the SPD.

With Friedrich Merz as chancellor things could turn out differently, but first he has to form a coalition with the SPD. That may take a while.

Germany must, however, return to the front rank of Europe, with insight and self-confidence. That is the task facing Merz. With a paralysed Germany, Europe becomes a playground for other, larger powers in the world. It would be good if the Dutch showed a little more trust in Germany, giving the country more self-confidence so that it becomes more self-assured.

Germany lived far too long under the illusion that the world improves if you give in and transfer money. Christoph Heusgen, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference (MSC), found that out recently. American Vice President J.D. Vance gave the hall a cold shower with his criticism of German migration policy and the restriction of freedom of expression. The criticism left the complacent conference-goers gasping for breath.

When Heusgen closed the conference, he said: ‘We have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore.’ At that he burst into tears. Yet it was this same Heusgen, a confidant of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in 2018, as German ambassador to the United Nations, burst out laughing during the General Assembly when President Trump warned Germany about its dependence on Russian gas through Nord Stream 2. He was sitting there with the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas. They have since lost their appetite for laughter.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s re-election, the world has been in a ‘new era’. Some call that ‘geopolitics’, but geography has been the basis of all politics since antiquity. It is only that Europe, and above all Germany, assumed that ‘European core values’ would heal the world. Europe behaved as if it were morally superior.

Germany above all, among the large European countries, clung to ‘values politics’. Smaller countries do that because they have little else with which to make themselves bigger. Germany, the most populous country in Europe, actually makes itself smaller because it does not want to appear too big.

The differences between the German dream and the real world became visible after Trump’s return. Three great powers now have the same view of the world: the United States, Russia and China.

• For the trio, politics is by definition power politics; German politics believes above all in moral politics.
• The big three believe in hard power; Germany in soft power.
• Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping think unilaterally; the Germans multilaterally, and advocate a rule-based world order.
• The three presidents, two of them ‘president for life’, see themselves as the ‘Strong Man’; a concept Germany has (understandably) difficulty with.
• The three great powers think purely in terms of ‘national interest’. Germany thinks in terms of ‘common values’, such as climate policy.
• The US, Russia and China are proud of their armies. A soldier in Germany is defined as a ‘Staatsbürger in Uniform’.
• The big three are ideologically ‘anti-woke’; Germany rapidly became ‘woke’.

What applies to Germany applies to the Netherlands as well, but the difference is that Germany is the largest country in Europe and has to display ‘Führung’, while making itself nervous in the process.

It is up to Merz, chancellor-in-waiting, to fulfil that role, as quickly as possible. He must show leadership in Europe and on that basis enter into talks with larger powers. The key word is power. The first test: Ukraine.

Trump and Putin want to settle the Ukraine question between themselves, without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was brusquely pushed aside by Trump. He did so in a blunt manner, just as he did during the campaign with rivals in his own country. In 2016 Marco Rubio, senator from Florida, was a presidential candidate, but Trump ridiculed him as ‘little Marco’. Rubio broke out in a sweat and gave up, which did not prevent Trump from later appointing him secretary of state. After the punishment Trump is friendly again. Diplomacy, however, works differently from the practices of ‘Saloon Donald’.

In the negotiations around Ukraine, Merz will have to hold his own against Trump. Merz knows the Americans; for years he was the top man in Germany for the American asset manager BlackRock. There he had to think in terms of power and money, not morality.

According to the former head of the British intelligence service MI6, Sir Alex Younger, Trump makes the mistake of thinking that Ukraine is about ‘land’. Yet no country has more land than Russia. ‘Trump thinks this is about territory, characteristically as a real estate guy. It’s about land, giving land to Russia in return for peace. And Putin said it’s about sovereignty’, Younger said recently on BBC Newsnight. ‘He will not stop until Ukraine isn’t a country anymore.’ On the other side of the world Chinese President Xi Jinping is watching. If Trump bungles Ukraine, what does that mean for Chinese aspirations regarding Taiwan?

Germany and its new chancellor must learn again to think in terms of Otto von Bismarck. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) of 22 February, Jochen Buchsteiner observed that European NATO member states may have to take on the costs of the American military presence in Europe. That means, alongside the necessary extra investments in defence, an additional price tag. Which raises the question: who is going to pay for that?

Poland advocates a ‘European Defence Fund’ modelled on the Corona Recovery Fund, which raised 800 billion euros in loans on the capital market. Many European euro countries already have a national debt above the ceiling of 60 percent of GDP: Germany is at 63, France at 113, Italy at 130. The Netherlands sits neatly below 50 percent.

Europe has to get used to the world of hard power. In October 1944 Winston Churchill travelled to Moscow to conclude a ‘secret agreement’ with Joseph Stalin on the division of spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, preferably around 50/50. When the Soviet army stood in Berlin, the division became very simple: Eastern Europe 100/0 for Stalin. Putin is an admirer of Stalin and repeats his recipes.

Germany must therefore not ‘play Holland’ but once again be part of the club of large countries, in order to throw its geopolitical weight into the scales. It is time for Chancellor Merz to begin the ‘cultural turn’ in his own country.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. El pánico al cambio imprescindible)

I reported on German elections for more than three decades, before and after unification, and although elections in the most powerful country in Europe were always important, they had never aroused the interest generated by this Sunday’s. There is a great deal of interest, but it is generated by anguish. And there is a great deal of fear, which in some cases borders on panic. Not only in Germany. In principle there seems to be no reason for it. The polls say that the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a member of the European People’s Party, is going to win. That it will need a coalition with someone. And that it is going to replace a government led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Which governed in coalition. That has happened many times. But that is where the similarities between this election and past ones end.

The fear in the great traditional European parties and the panic in the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels have reasons, and weighty ones. Because they all already know, although nobody dares to put it this way, that this election is going to be the last in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany in which the hegemonic social democratic ideology prevails against the interests of the German population. Because for the first time there is an alternative of real change, and Germans know that the current drift is making their lives worse day by day.

The system parties do not want to ally themselves with the only party that carries common sense on its banner, Alternative for Germany. Therefore, in order to set themselves apart from the “far right”, they have stopped using common sense, and they all share in the magical thinking of the left with total contempt for reality until reality runs them over, with tens of thousands of layoffs, with mass business closures, with people murdered in the streets, with a collapse of services and schools that are often in third-world condition.

This is a snap election, something that has hardly ever happened in Germany. The government of the socialist chancellor Olaf Scholz has had to throw in the towel a year early because his two partners knew that staying together to the end was suicide. It has been, and few doubt it, the worst government since the founding of the republic in 1949. Practically everything it has done has had negative, when not catastrophic, effects on the population, on the economy and on the country’s security.

The “traffic-light coalition” of reds, greens and yellow liberals has acted as a catalyst that has aggravated and set off all the ills of a Germany that has spent two decades now defying common sense, rationality and reality with an overdose of ideology, social engineering and uncontrolled illegal immigration.

All the polls say that the CDU will win, and its candidate Friedrich Merz has already said that since he is going to need an alliance to form a majority he will make it with Scholz’s socialists or with Habeck’s greens, or with both if one alone does not add up. In other words, German voters go to the polls in the certainty that Scholz’s catastrophic government will be followed by a government containing two parties from Scholz’s catastrophic government. And probably with the incompetent Scholz himself in it. Anyone who thought that experience had taught them a lesson was mistaken. They will go back to the same thing.

Some will ask whether there is any option other than that utter tedium which has those three parties governing together or in a jumble, as they have done for decades, and therefore responsible for the dizzying degradation of every indicator. There is, of course. There is the possibility of a grand alliance of the forces of the right, of the CDU/CSU with Alternative for Germany, which is already the second party and which some even fear seeing come first on Sunday. Which is what happened in Austria, where the FPÖ overtook and now doubles the other two parties, the ÖVP and the SPÖ, and is nevertheless still denied the right to lead the government. In large part because of the obscene and massive interference from Brussels and Berlin.

In Germany, Merz has said that he will never make an alliance with a party made up in large part of activists and voters of the CDU who are fed up with the drift toward the left, radical environmentalism, uncontrolled immigration and soaring crime, the hyper-regulation of green fanaticism and the ever more oppressive lack of freedom of expression and of academic freedom, imposed without distinction by those three parties which do the same thing and defend the same thing only because they want to be governing always, without real changes that would expose their colossal failures of this century.

A coalition of the CDU and the AfD could undertake, with a broad majority, the absolutely necessary reforms to pull Germany and Europe out of a disastrous, paralysing and impoverishing lethargy. The gap between the European economy and that of the United States, and even of China with its problems, widens by the day. But in Germany the debate is about controls and rules for regulations on controls of control rules, about how many drag-queen shows there should be in kindergarten, or about the heating appliances that the government imposes, ruining families, only to change the regulations afterwards. Politics is bent on obstructing everything that is not its business. And everything it ought to do and decide is left undone in order to avoid friction.

So, foreseeably, after months of negotiations there will be a coalition of the CDU with the socialists, with the greens or with both in another three-party government, in which the only thing they will agree on is to carry on down the road to ruin. Until that government succumbs. Then, foreseeably, the AfD will already be the largest party in Germany and will be close to an absolute majority. Although nobody can rule out that this very Sunday the nightmare of the traditional party interests, of the media and of the elites may be consummated, and that Germans may decide to bang their fist on the table by voting for the AfD, as Elon Musk recommends to them.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Met vooruitziende blik, strijdend tegen valse profeten: Frits Bolkestein (1933-2025))

In September 1991 I met Frits Bolkestein for the first time. He had just taken office as parliamentary leader of the VVD and I was starting as political editor at NRC/Handelsblad, a newspaper he once appreciated but later grumbled about a great deal. Only the column by mr. J.L. Heldring could he still stomach.

On 12 September of that year Bolkestein had published an article in De Volkskrant, the rival, on migration and minorities policy; a debate that would intensify over decades. He struck me as a stately man, almost mayoral, and formulated his sentences in a Dutch that had been put out with the bulk rubbish in the 1960s. He spoke like a book. I had never met a politician like that.

What was striking about Bolkestein was his versatility, his international orientation and his farsightedness. A distinctive figure in the history of postwar Netherlands. Most politicians in the corridors of the Tweede Kamer are busy with a dossier, or a fragment of one; or want to slip in one more little comment. The most enjoyable was Frans Weisglas (VVD), who once called me on a Friday morning with a quote. The conversation could not last too long, because he did not have enough small change (quarters) on him in the phone box.

In terms of knowledge Bolkestein was different because he had studied a great deal: mathematics, philosophy, Greek, law and economics at various universities. No other member of parliament could boast of that. His level of knowledge towered above others, who saw it as ‘arrogance’. Moreover Bolkestein had missed the turbulent 1960s in the Netherlands. He was working for Shell at the time in East Africa, El Salvador, London, Indonesia and Paris. The cultural revolution had changed the Netherlands.

Bolkestein wanted to combat the excesses of that spirit of the age, from within the Netherlands, and in 1977 made an attempt to become a member of the Tweede Kamer. That was not easy from the outside, because nobody knew him. He had to travel the length and breadth of the country to the VVD’s regional branches to show his face. His friend Peter Rauwerda led him around the party sections and also past a party grandee such as Hans Wiegel, who, however, did nothing for him. The relationship between Bolkestein and Wiegel was never smooth; the characters chafed. Bolkestein the intellectual; Wiegel the entertainer. Only in 1978 did Bolkestein enter the Tweede Kamer, after the second Den Uyl cabinet failed to materialise. It was precisely that cabinet he wanted to fight.

His political driving force was the struggle against communism. He was proudly an ‘anti-communiste primaire’. When Bolkestein was in Paris for Shell, he read the book ‘Chinese Shadows’ by the Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans (the author’s pen name was Simon Leys) about the devastation of the Chinese cultural revolution. Bolkestein commuted between Paris and Amsterdam and preferred to read the book on the train. He denounced Western intellectuals who had great admiration for communist dictatorships such as those in China, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe. And also politicians such as the mayor of Rotterdam, André van der Louw, who laid flowers on Mao’s grave on behalf of the city council for ‘his humane values’. The number of victims Mao claimed, estimated at between 40 and 70 million, was apparently a footnote in history. As soon as the subject was Western intellectuals, Bolkestein’s fury was ignited.

His broad historical knowledge and experience abroad gave Bolkestein the ‘farsightedness’ that was lacking elsewhere. When the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, he was proved right. The same happened with migration and minorities policy. He foresaw what a large influx of people from different cultures, some with a pattern of values different from that of the West, would lead to.

He also pointed to the consequences of Africa’s enormous demographic growth. These were subjects that made the intellectual and progressive public ‘uncomfortable’. Bolkestein once marched in a demonstration against discrimination and racism, while some demonstrators carried banners with the text: ‘Fuck de Bolk’. He was marching in a demonstration that was directed against him personally.

As VVD parliamentary leader, Bolkestein opposed the enlargement of NATO in an opinion article of 8 February 1997, once again in the Volkskrant, which acquired the nickname ‘Bolkskrant’. In a parliamentary debate on 4 March of that year he said: ‘Enlargement of NATO will not increase the stability of Europe, but reduce it. Enlargement of NATO will lead the Russians to increase their pressure on Ukraine. Dormant pro-Russian forces there will feel supported in seeking rapprochement with Russia’. What Bolkestein pointed to in 1997 has meanwhile happened.

Bolkestein then opposed the enlargement of the eurozone to include Italy, because he feared the criteria of the Stability Pact would be watered down. Under considerable pressure from the Kok cabinet and the guarantees it promised, he eventually had to give way. He lost the debate, but was proved right on the substance. The eurozone has meanwhile become a transfer zone.

He turned against the Iraq war in 2003 because it would lead to great chaos. The invasion only strengthened Iran. He was also against EU membership for Turkey, because that country is ‘too big, too poor and too different’. In 1999 the EU decided to make Turkey a candidate member state, but 25 years on nothing has been achieved. Here too: Bolkestein had foreseen it. Not as a clairvoyant with a crystal ball, but through thorough knowledge of history, politics and economics. A rare combination. As someone with first-hand experience in Third World countries, he had already seen the failure of development cooperation with his own eyes.

In 1995 I had left for Belgium to work for the Flemish newspaper De Standaard, which back then still had ‘Everything for Flanders, Flanders for Christ’ prominently on the front page. A new adventure, it seemed to me. When you leave the Binnenhof, contacts quickly fade. It is rather like leaving the stadium during the football match. But Bolkestein always stayed in touch; he invited me to dinners he held at home in Amsterdam. Together with his wife Femke he assembled a ‘mix of people’ who had something to say to one another. Frits kept the conversation at a high level and enjoyed it. He also invited me to lunch when he and Femke drove via Brussels to their country house in Ramousies in France. We would then meet in Hoeilaart on the Brussels ring.

On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1999 he called me. ‘Good afternoon Derk Jan, this is Bolkestein. As you may have heard, I am nominated to be appointed European Commissioner. Would you be prepared to work in my cabinet?’ I answered yes, whereupon Bolkestein concluded: ‘Good, that is settled then, I wish you a pleasant afternoon’. I had never had such a short job interview.

Working for Bolkestein was of course different from visiting him. I became part of the cabinet of the Commissioner responsible for the Internal Market and Taxation, in a group of 6 people: 3 Dutch and 3 other EU nationalities. I dealt with: contacts with the European Parliament, contacts with the Dutch media, liberalisation of the European postal market and speechwriting.

The first was difficult because Bolkestein was not a European federalist, and therefore an unbeliever. The second was full of ‘old sores’, because Bolkestein was ‘irritable’ the moment the domestic press was concerned. On the third, a majority of the member states and the European Parliament were against. And writing speeches was fascinating, casting his ideas in a style and context that made a substantive point without sending the cabinet of the President, Romano Prodi, up the wall.

Bolkestein’s management style was schematic, everything at the right moment. On the meeting table stood a small clock, and if in Frits’s view things were dragging on, he drummed his fingers on the table. He did the same during interviews: this has to end! Though he had more patience for the big British papers such as the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) was a regular in the house. Quite a few Dutch correspondents he described as ‘whiners’.

A European Commissioner has a cabinet to push his or her policy through the bureaucracy, and to protect the Commissioner against traps and intrigues from within the civil service. That means being constantly on guard in meetings and forming the right coalitions with the cabinets of other Commissioners who think along the same lines.

During his time as Commissioner, relations with the British government of Tony Blair were cordial, with the French government stiff and with the German Bundeskanzler bad. That was Gerhard Schröder, the Genosse der Bosse. The state of Lower Saxony has a decisive stake in Volkswagen (VW) and the Commission wanted to put an end to it. Schröder was also a former minister-president of Lower Saxony, and telephoned in a furious tone. In negotiations Bolkestein always stayed calm as a nobleman.

He also spoke his languages well. Fluent English, French, and in Spanish too he could manage. His German, however, was rather weaker, above all because as a perfectionist he wanted to have the cases exactly right. And then it sometimes stalls. He even took German lessons during his time at the Commission.

His relations with fellow Commissioners were quite good. After initial doubts, most found Bolkestein congenial and authoritative. He also went to breakfast with his colleagues in the Commission’s top restaurant, la Convivialité, because good personal relations are more important in European politics than in national politics.

Yet Bolkestein was overtaken by Dutch politics: the rise of Fortuyn! In 1998 Bolkestein put forward Hans Dijkstal as the new parliamentary leader, a friendly man incidentally whom I got to know during a parliamentary mission to Indonesia in 1994. Dijkstal, a former alderman in Wassenaar, was a cheerful type with whom you could go in any direction. Ideologically too. With Bolkestein’s departure the VVD shifted to the left and the party lost its ‘unique selling point’: migration.

Pim Fortuyn dived into the gap. Had Bolkestein appointed the wrong successor? In the official car with Frits and Femke I once asked him. Was Dijkstal the right man? Femke said immediately: ‘No, he cannot do it’. Frits: ‘But who should I have taken then? Hans was a member of parliament, a minister, a deputy prime minister. You would expect him to be able to be lead candidate’. The latter you only see after the appointment. If it does not work out, the party is stuck with it. The choice of successor was a disappointment for Bolkestein.

Pim dived into the gap and Bolkestein, who did appreciate Fortuyn as a person, wanted to do something. But what? At a certain moment he came into my little office, which he did from time to time, to test something out. He wanted to pin the label ‘pleefiguur’ (a laughing stock, literally a lavatory figure) on Fortuyn: Pim as Dutch prime minister in Europe would amount to that. I was not convinced and said that Pim as the ‘underdog’ enjoys the sympathy of many voters. The term ‘pleefiguur’ would make him even more of an underdog and strengthen him electorally. Weeks went by and I hoped the term had vanished. Suddenly Frits came out with it; a few days later, on 6 May 2002, Pim was murdered. That came back like a boomerang.

Bolkestein as a negotiator was not easy. The moment he took a position, he was almost impossible to move. The Latin approach was not for him. I noticed that in the negotiations on the liberalisation of the postal market. Digital traffic would displace letter traffic and the postal sector would only have a future as a modern logistics business. That trajectory had to be adjusted in the Directive so that companies could invest. But the mystique of the postman was still alive. Certainly among their trade unions.

It was difficult to move Frits; it was always ‘not fast enough’. Under the Belgian EU presidency it proved possible to build a bridge to Southern Europe and an agreement came out of the Council of Ministers. Frits preferred an Anglo-Saxon approach.

In the European Parliament Bolkestein had a good many enemies, but that changed gradually. A great many lunches were needed for that. He enjoyed Strasbourg, contrary to what I expected. We went to the European Parliament together and Frits felt free there. He also loosened up there. In the evening he wanted to eat well, in a restaurant right next to the European Parliament. He told jokes, about Dutch politics too. Ultimately it was the Tweede Kamer that formed him politically. The relationship with Hans Wiegel, Ed Nijpels, ‘Nickel Neelie’. All three open to improvement, to put it euphemistically.

In the end he chose not to continue his period at the European Commission. Femke could not find her footing in Brussels and was very attached to Amsterdam and her friends there. They had an apartment on the Louizalaan in Brussels. At 9.00 he arrived at work by official car and at 19.00 he went back. He did not have much company, and on an extension he would have to keep commuting for another 5 years. He cut the knot: I am stopping. The members of the cabinet all found a place. I moved to the cabinet of the Estonian European Commissioner Siim Kallas, in order to look at Europe from the perspective of Eastern Europe for a change. Yet another experience.

Bolkestein did put one more European directive to his name: the Bolkestein Directive on the liberalisation of the European services market. Service providers from Eastern Europe were allowed to provide services in Western Europe, under the conditions prevailing in Eastern Europe. The directive led to a storm of protest in the streets of Brussels, with the ‘Polish plumber’ as the bogeyman. Trade unions took action against Bolkestein, but he had already left, because the directive was approved by the Commission at the end of his term, and later adjusted somewhat. Twenty years on, however, there is a great shortage of plumbers in Western Europe, whether from Poland or other Eastern European member states. Plumbers, bricklayers, construction workers: they are indispensable as ‘labour migrants’.

Frits stayed active, he wrote books and published articles. In 2011 he presented his book ‘De Intellectuele Verleiding’, which was to become his opus magnum. Bolkestein warned against new ideologies with totalitarian traits that would once again seduce Western intellectuals. A version also appeared in English; The Intellectual Temptation: Dangerous Ideas in Politics.

On 27 June 2013 there was a symposium in the Amstelkerk on the occasion of his 80th birthday, a sort of Bolkestein high mass. Friend and foe came with contributions, among them his former opponent Jan Pronk. Bolkestein saw the symposium as his formal farewell to the great debate, although he continued to write columns, such as on climate policy, in which he discerned a glorified planned economy. In Elsevier Weekblad of 12 January 2017 he called himself a ‘climate realist’. Intellectuals, in his view, allowed themselves to be seduced by ‘prophecies of doom’.

I continued to visit Bolkestein regularly in his workspace on the Amstel, right by the Amstel Hotel. In that apartment he wrote, received guests, and even organised dinners as he used to do at home. For lunches he liked to go to ‘Bar Lempicka’ on the corner of the Amstel and the Sarphatistraat. That became a bit too noisy. After that we went to the Amstel Hotel, preferably on the terrace by the Amstel. But Frits was becoming less mobile. He walked with a stick but wanted to stay independent as much as possible.

Eventually Frits and Femke ended up in the Rosa Spier Huis in Laren. I visited him there too, in the middle of the woods of Het Gooi. We sometimes talked there for several hours. They would tell, for instance, where each of them had been standing when Winston Churchill made his triumphal procession through Amsterdam on 8 May 1946. It was always fascinating, over a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Gradually, however, things went less well, at the end in leaps. Last Thursday I was there on a visit. It was clearly not going well. On leaving, Frits wanted to sit in his wheelchair by the window in the sunshine. There he sat contentedly, in the warmth and the light of the sun. His body could go no further, but the name Frits Bolkestein lives on as a monument in Dutch politics.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

Some people get emotional when delivering closing remarks at a security conference, but I assure you, I will not be one of them.

At the Munich Security Conference last week, Christoph Heusgen, the event chair, was so shaken by JD Vance’s speech that he was moved to tears. And he wasn’t alone. The audience reacted with shock, disbelief, and unease. Why? Because JD Vance’s words forced them to face a reality they have ignored for decades.

Vice-President Vance stated: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values. Values shared with the United States of America.”

Vance was speaking about our Western values—freedom, sovereignty, and prosperity.

External threats exist, and we must take them seriously. We spoke about that today. But before we can resist these dangers, we must first address the internal threats—those who reject their own nations, dismantle our free markets, erode traditional families, and push for open borders, inviting radical ideologies that threaten our way of life. They cripple our energy independence, suffocate economies, and advocate absurdities, like the notion that men can bear children. These are the same people who claim

the EU was founded for peace yet panic when President Trump speaks of ending war in Europe.

The Trump administration’s message is clear: The U.S. wants to cooperate with Europe, but Europe must first clean up its own mess.

That message is to us. Our mess is the left-liberal bureaucracy—the overregulated EU dismantling our energy and food systems, crippling our economies, and flooding Europe with unchecked migration.

The Trump administration is willing to work with us, but not with EU bureaucrats who created this chaos. As JD Vance said: “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”

We, we must be strong. Conservatives often underestimate the left’s deeply entrenched power. Winning elections is not enough. It’s just the beginning, and time is short.

Consider our colleagues of Poland’s Law and Justice party. They held power for eight years but failed to uproot leftist influence. Now, the left liberals have returned stronger than ever. We saw this in Brazil after Bolsonaro, in the U.S. after Trump’s first term, and even in Hungary before Orbán secured his grip. But he learned, fought back, and took decisive action.

As the saying goes: You have to lose to know how to win.

So, let me be clear and I’m not holding back: When we return to power – each of us – we must dismantle the corrupt left-liberal network. We must defund their institutions and militant NGOs, expose their corruption, replace national broadcast leadership, secure free speech, promote our cultural heritage, control our borders, reclaim education, cancel harmful international treaties, restore reliable and affordable energy, and cut through EU bureaucracy.

This is exactly what President Trump is doing now. He has built a team of exceptional individuals, learning that time is limited and the left’s influence runs deep. We must be equally prepared and act decisively when our moment arrives. Leftist corruption must be uprooted completely. It must be eradicated, root and branch.

Beyond governance, we must protect our farmers—the stewards of our land—who provide natural, healthy food. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wisely said: “We can have a thousand wishes, but if you are ill, you have only one wish left.”

We, as conservatives, understand this. Our modern Western culture has distanced itself too much from nature. That is why the Make America Healthy Again movement is as crucial as Make America Great Again.

And the same applies to Europe. We also have people of the MAHA movement here today and they are working to bring MAHA to Europe later this year. Alongside Make Europe Great Again, let us also Make Europe Healthy Again. A sound mind resides in a healthy body, and a healthy nation depends on the well-being of its people.

It is up to us to restore true democracy by making ‘We the People’ the focus of governance. And ‘by us’, I mean patriots—those who love their countries, cherish our continent and honor our cultural heritage. Those who respect the achievements of our ancestors and want to pass on peace and prosperity to future generations. Good governance can only come from a place of deep national love. It must come from the heart.

We must secure our freedom, economy, and security. Only then will Europe be a strong partner for the U.S. in this new era of MAGA. This is how we Make Europe Great Again.

Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Gold Institute for International Strategies and as the former Vice President of New Direction and the ECR, I sincerely thank you for your engagement today. Staying connected and supporting each other is essential.

And, as promised—I am not crying. We are at a pivotal moment in history, and I am filled with optimism. The future is bright, and I cannot stop smiling. Let’s enjoy lunch, then get to work reclaiming our nations and our future.

Thank you very much.

Hon. Rob Roos is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Donald Trump gooit de Europese NAVO-landen in het diepe)

This weekend all the leading figures of the Western defence world are gathered in Munich for the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC). The conference, founded in 1963 as the Münchner Wehrkundetagung by the former Wehrmacht officer Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist (1922-2013), has become a tradition. Von Kleist, incidentally, was part of the 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

On the programme are the usual subjects: defence, global order, sustainability and technology. But another theme dominates: the American attempt to reach a peace settlement in Ukraine. The words of the new American secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, spoken in Brussels on Wednesday, will reverberate in Munich.

Hegseth spoke in Brussels to the defence ministers of the NATO member states; it seemed as if every word had been dictated from the White House. President Trump had spoken for an hour by telephone with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and drew the outlines for a peace plan. The impact went far beyond Ukraine alone. Never before has an American president thrown the European NATO allies so ceremoniously into the deep water. It was the ‘disengagement’ that European defence experts have feared for decades. The European allies have to get to work. They must raise their defence spending drastically, and Ukraine is their ‘European problem’.

Trump wants to be rid of the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible, in order to stop the ‘bloodshed’. That is why he argues for a swift deal, with the ‘realities on the battlefield’ as the point of departure. So no drawn-out tug of war at conference venues; a process that would put a peace settlement on the Greek calendar. And so he let it be known through Hegseth: ‘We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.’

The criticism from Europe was that Trump recognises the current ceasefire lines without any negotiation at all. According to the British author Timothy Garton Ash this was a ‘senseless capitulation’ to Putin. In The Guardian he wrote: ‘Donald Trump’s appeasement of Vladimir Putin makes Neville Chamberlain look like a principled, courageous realist’. Garton Ash argues that Chamberlain was trying ‘to prevent a major European war, whereas Trump is acting in the middle of one’.

Fortunately the British know everything better where foreign countries are concerned. Trump wants a peace settlement quickly, because Ukraine is exhausted after many losses. That is a reality of the battlefield. In addition he wants to throw the Ukraine question into Europe’s lap as fast as possible. Because, as Hegseth says, the United States is also being challenged by China. That is why the European NATO member states must take responsibility themselves on their own continent

The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, holds that the United States should not have made concessions before the start of negotiations by giving up parts of Ukraine and ruling out Ukrainian membership of NATO. His French colleague Sébastien Lecornu supports him in this. Alongside the criticism from Germany and France, Italy, Poland and Spain also have objections. In a statement they say they are ‘ready to increase support for Ukraine’.

These declarations come as mustard after the meal. The United States has provided support to Ukraine over the past years to the tune of 175 billion dollars, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. European NATO countries lagged far behind. France, Spain and Italy were strong in ‘parole parole’, weak in deeds. Germany was in self-therapy over whether or not to deliver long-range missiles. The Netherlands supplied 3.76 billion euros in military aid to Ukraine (as of 29 September 2024) and sits in the leading group of supporters.

The United States is number one by a distance and Trump has had enough of the European torrent of words without deeds. Where critics do have a point is that Trump, with his speed, puts Russia in a strategically favourable position. In negotiations with the West, and above all with America, the Soviet Union used the adage: ‘what is ours is ours, and what is yours, that is what we are going to talk about’. That is the advantage Trump is now giving Putin. Russia can keep the occupied territories because Trump assumes that Putin will never give them up again. Holding on to that ‘prolongs the war’. And that is what Trump does not want.

Why? The European NATO countries have to organise themselves and pay more. The secretary-general of NATO, Mark Rutte, was also in the hall and heard Hegseth’s lashing words. Every NATO secretary-general knows the division of tasks: the European is the secretary and the American president is the general. With Trump that division of labour is literally so. Rutte had just preached the new 5 percent norm, on American instructions, with a little fabric softener added. He then heard from the American secretary of defense, until recently co-presenter of the morning programme Fox & Friends on Fox News, that Europe has to stand on its own feet.

The first steps concern the ‘security guarantee’ for Ukraine, which must be underpinned by capable ‘European and non-European troops’, according to Hegseth. Next: ‘If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not be covered under Article 5 [which guarantees NATO support in the event of an attack]. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine’. So Europe has to fill in the ‘security guarantee’ itself, on its own. Moreover the military support (both lethal and non-lethal) to Ukraine must be paid for by the European NATO countries. As a closing note the American secretary recalls that defence spending must rise from 2 percent of GDP to 5 percent of GDP.

It is not surprising that the hall stayed silent and that the words of Trump and Hegseth echo on in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. For further explanation there is an American delegation, consisting of Vice-President James David Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Lieutenant General (ret.) Keith Kellogg, special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Fair is fair: the European NATO countries have brought this ‘tough love’ from Washington D.C. upon themselves. During the Iraq war, then President George W. Bush had had so much of the European bickering that he described the European allies as a ‘bag of fleas’, because the opinions of European countries jumped in all directions.

As soon as there is a disaster in the world, Europe asks itself: where is America? If America then does something, the refrain is: that is no good, typical Yankees. But when Europe then has to do something itself, it goes wrong and America has to step in, as during the Balkan wars in the nineteen nineties. The Netherlands too has bad memories of that, after the government of the day handled the protection of the Srebrenica enclave badly, with equipment that was too light. A tragedy unfolded that was wrongly pinned on commander Thom Karremans. The conflict was settled with American bombardments of Belgrade.

The conflict in Ukraine is even more dangerous because an unpredictable nuclear power is involved in it. Europe by itself can enforce nothing. Of all people it is Trump who is forcing Europe to grow up militarily. Coming from the ‘bag of fleas’, that will be quite a circus.

The only thing Europe can do is to accelerate Ukraine’s EU membership. On 23 June 2022 Ukraine became a candidate member state. The country is not an ‘anonymous region’ as the Kremlin sees it, but a self-aware nation state whose birth has been signed in blood. That is the ultimate effect of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with which he wanted to redraw Russia within the borders of the tsarist empire or else of a Stalinist empire. As a ‘buffer state’ Ukraine is exposed to the whims of the Kremlin. A European anchoring is therefore the only alternative.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. El vértigo y la esperanza)

The whole Western world has entered a process of change at unaccustomed speed. The extreme toxicity and the abysmal political, social, economic and moral failure of the long progressive era now being left behind impose the utmost haste on the adoption of the new forms of the era now arriving. Although the great historic impulse of Donald Trump’s re-election has not yet triumphed with all its consequences in the rest of the West, everywhere the forces are advancing that want to put an end once and for all to the utopian projects that sooner or later turn into abusive and criminal power. The cannibal socialism of the murderer Nicolás Maduro, the still carnivorous socialism of the criminal autocrat Pedro Sánchez, and the vegetarian socialism of the abusive, deceitful and cowardly Von der Leyen and Núñez Feijóo all lead in the medium or long term to the same ruin and oppression and lie. The solution is to avoid them all, to fight them and to defeat them definitively as options hostile to the human being.

The political projects that defend the interests, the identity and the freedom of nations and persons are triumphing at the expense of the projects that defend the transformation of persons and the liquidation of nations and of freedom for the sake of social control, collectivism and equality among slaves rather than among masters. Many great things have begun to happen in this regard. Resignation, the great political instrument of scoundrels, is being abolished.

In Latin America too, in the Middle East too and, of course, in Europe too. Where we must watch very closely what Trump does, without any need to imitate him, because there are many in Europe who in general have the same fundamental objectives as Trump: more freedom and more truth, more nation and tradition, more individual initiative, more merit and less imposition, less State and more society. It is no secret to anyone that in the face of this historic change the immobile and corrupt forces of the system are resisting belly up.

The transformative political activity that calls for radical change in the degraded Western democracies has in a single year taken on a dizzying pace. This weekend the leaders of the European party Patriots, chaired by Santiago Abascal, who is also president of VOX, are meeting in Madrid. In the Spanish capital are many of the leaders presented by social democratic two-party politics as terrible bogeymen of fascism, Nazism, far-right extremism and every other ism. Years ago those epithets worked. Now they only bore people or invite mockery. Le Pen, Wilders, Orbán, Salvini, Kickl, Ventura and the host and president Abascal himself are not the leaders of marginal parties but the heads of parties of government, now or in the very near future. All their parties are growing. The parties of their rivals are shrinking.

At the Madrid Summit the colossal effect of Trump’s victory will be plain to see, as will the great moment for the patriotic forces, allied with other conservatives and sovereigntists, to forge the strength needed to put an end to a unitary, centralist and socialist project of the European Union that is finished by its failure in every field, the moral one first of all. The members of the European People’s Party have the chance to join the change or to sink with the left. They will soon have to take a decision on this dilemma.

In Spain we have a very special laboratory for observing this change. All the forces involved in the drift toward the degradation of democracy, of the nation, of the economy and of individual freedom have joined together to attack a single party, which is VOX. They have on their side 95 per cent of the media and of the organisations and institutions devoted to shaping opinion, including schools and universities. And yet all their joint operations, with all their tricks, aggressions, inventions and perversions, fail to make a dent in the process of growth and revival of the party of the Patriots.

There is a fundamental factor behind this. It is that what predominates in these extraordinary political moments, until recently inconceivable, is hope. And with it, mobilisation in favour of a colossal change in the way of doing politics, of governing and even of thinking. Not even Donald Trump’s fiercest enemies, those who have ridiculously always attributed to him absolute evil and a vocation to destroy the world, could have imagined the worldwide earthquake unleashed by his arrival at the White House. And only his closest collaborators and most enthusiastic supporters could believe that this dizzying irruption of a passionate and unstoppable vocation for demolition, replacement and change would occur in exactly the terms in which he announced it. Donald Trump had already said that he considers his presidency a mission. That is how he takes it on.

No one should be surprised, nor should anyone care, that his enemies are once again calling him Hitler. But nor should it be surprising that, although some feel a certain vertigo at the pace, his followers in the United States and around the world, because this figure who is by now far more than a president of the United States has them all over the world, are thrilled by two weeks that have already radically changed the world.

The capacity for resistance of all the patriotic, conservative and sovereigntist parties already makes them unbeatable for the diminished forces of the social democratic system. Then, in times as swift as these, we will soon see many changes that will make Europe great again, with sovereign nations united in common causes and in respect for the interests of each and every one of them. A Europe to which more and more Europeans aspire and which will rise from the ruins of the socialist, impoverishing and totalitarian process.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Met Bart De Wever regeert een ‘Verenigde Nederlander’ België)

With Bart De Wever (54) a different type of prime minister takes office than all his predecessors. Never before could a ‘Flemish nationalist’ take the oath before the Belgian king. A prime minister who looks critically at his own country, as if he were an outsider, was unthinkable.

For De Wever, however, Belgium is an ‘artificial construction’, a sort of slip of history. He himself dreams of a reunification of the Netherlands and is really a ‘United Netherlander’, avant la lettre. And prime minister of Belgium all the same. For the Dutch, a true mystery.

I first met Bart De Wever at the beginning of this century, after I had served for several years as political editor of the Flemish newspaper De Standaard, which back then still published under the logo: ‘Everything for Flanders, Flanders for Christ’. That was the world in which De Wever grew up as a young man. According to him the greatest tragedy of the Southern Netherlands was the fact that Spain definitively gained control of that territory, and above all of Antwerp, in 1648. The separation became a fait accompli and the Flemish grew poorer.

On 20 July 2021, a day before Belgium’s ‘National Holiday’, he said in Het Nieuwsblad: ‘I have never let go of the dream that all Dutch speakers would one day live together again in one union. If I could die as a Southern Netherlander, I would die happier than as a Belgian’.

For centuries the Flemish lived as serfs in political constructions dominated by Spaniards, Austrians, French, Dutch, Germans. Belgium became a buffer state with a French-speaking elite, and only thanks to the village priests did the Dutch language stay alive. The emancipation of the Flemish in Belgium is in fact a great success story. The Flemish hold all the cards, but they have kept a Calimero complex from their history.

A ‘Flemish nationalist’ as prime minister of Belgium is a tipping point. It indicates that not much more is left of ‘Belgium’ than a name on the world map and culinary traditions. It is de facto a divided country.

De Wever’s predecessors still worked within a ‘Belgian system’, of elites and networks in both parts of the country. I remember the late twentieth-century generation of Leo Tindemans, Wilfried Martens and Jean-Luc Dehaene, who as prime ministers dealt with French-speaking Belgium through the political elites there. That is over. Political elites too are separated, barely know one another and no longer speak each other’s language, exceptions aside.

Belgium is made most visible by the building of the public broadcasters VRT and RTBF in Brussels. A massive, ugly building. To the left of the entrance is Flanders; to the right French-speaking Belgium. On the left people speak Dutch; on the right French. The central corridor is the language border. That is political Belgium on a square metre.

It is not surprising that the king, whose task it is to hold Belgium together, is at peace with a ‘Flemish nationalist’ as prime minister. Twenty years ago De Wever would have been an uninvited guest at the Reception of the Constituted Bodies, the annual New Year drinks at the Palace for the leadership of Belgium’s institutions. The dream of a ‘Reunited Netherlands’ is now forgiven him.

Daydreaming is free. The acute problems of the Kingdom have to be tackled. The other Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Belang, wants to do away with the king and his whole family. The moment the king hears the words ‘Le Vlaams Belang’, fear strikes his heart.

Why is De Wever the man of the moment? By the yardstick of nationalism he is moderate; for him it is more a matter of cultural awareness and identity. He speaks excellent French, a skill many Flemish nationalists have. They learn the language of their opponents and with it decode their way of thinking.

Conversely, few French-speaking politicians speak Dutch, which makes them somewhat deaf. Moreover De Wever speaks other languages well, even Basque, in the eyes of Flemish nationalists an ‘oppressed people’, by now successful. As a historian De Wever knows his classics and deals wholesale in Latin sayings.

In 2009 De Wever became famous throughout Flanders when he came within a hair of winning the quiz ‘The Smartest Person in the World’. He built his New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) from a one-man group in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives into the largest party in Flanders. On television, at 140 kilos, he made a somewhat comical impression, but he turned out to be very convivial and entertaining. That weight was just a size too much. Sixty kilos came off. When I saw ‘the new De Wever’ for the first time, I thought he was somebody else.

De Wever also offers the Netherlands a perspective as a ‘United Netherlander’. He knows the Netherlands better than many Dutch people themselves. The history above all.

As prime minister, De Wever is in charge of Belgian European policy. Unlike all his predecessors, De Wever is ‘euro-critical’. He holds that Europe and the European Union are not the same thing. In his book ‘Identiteit’ he argues that the EU wipes out European history from before its own founding as ‘bad’ and recreates itself as an ‘anti-nationalist entity’, but then itself creates an ‘EU nationalism’ with all the bells and whistles. Whoever does not cheer along is ‘anti-EU’.

Prime Minister De Wever cannot take on all the EU gods at once in Brussels, but there is a kinship between the somewhat more critical attitude of the Netherlands, certainly of the sitting coalition, and De Wever’s views. That did not exist before. Belgian prime ministers were heralds of the European Union.

The prime minister of the Netherlands and the ‘United Netherlandish’ prime minister of Belgium really ought to sit down together soon at the Catshuis, to talk about the Low Countries in this ever more turbulent Europe.

The first major problem for the De Wever I government is to bring the Belgian federal budget within the budgetary norms of the euro (a national debt of 60% of GDP and a budget deficit of 3%). Belgium currently sits at a national debt of 105% of GDP and a budget deficit of 4.6%. Belgium has to lose financial weight. Walloon socialists refused this coalition, because cutting spending is not their thing.

• Jan Jambon, 64 (N-VA): deputy prime minister and minister of finance. Jambon is mayor of Brasschaat, a municipality with many Dutch residents. From 2019 to 2024 he was Flemish minister-president. Jambon will become the central figure in Belgian euro policy. Friendly, a Burgundian.
• Frank Vandenbroucke, 69 (Vooruit); deputy prime minister and minister of public health and social affairs. Vandenbroucke has a long record of service. He was a member of parliament, minister of foreign affairs, afterwards of social affairs and subsequently of pensions. During covid he was minister of social affairs and public health. He pursued a strict policy with a curfew that began at 8 p.m. Vandenbroucke has something ascetic about him, almost Calvinist. Not suited to the bar. He has the reputation of a ‘know-it-all’, with the fair observation that he also knows a great many things.
• Vincent Van Peteghem, 44 (CD&V), deputy prime minister and minister of the budget. He sits in the government on behalf of the Christian democratic CD&V, the counterpart of the Dutch CDA. In the previous government he was already federal minister of finance. His political base is East Flanders; he is titular mayor of the municipality of Nazareth-De Pinte. Cutting the budget is his thankless assignment.
• Theo Francken, 46 (N-VA), minister of defence and foreign trade. Francken is a convinced Flemish nationalist who was earlier state secretary for asylum and migration. His political base is in Flemish Brabant (the municipality of Lubbeek), where he is the champion of preference votes. Cheerful, likes a pint, right wing of the party. Defence was his dream.
• George-Louis Bouchez (38) is party leader of the French-speaking liberal Mouvement Réformateur (MR), from the Walloon city of Mons (Bergen), where he is a municipal councillor. In 2019 he became chairman of the MR, in which he drew power to himself and pushed aside the established political family Michel. At the recent chairmanship elections Bouchez succeeded himself: no rival candidates. Bouchez is a capricious figure with a robust temperament (Italian mother) and with that, from the outside, an unpredictable factor for the coalition. He remains the MR’s parliamentary group leader in the federal parliament. He understands Dutch, but does not speak it well enough.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

Copyright AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi