Here Comes Bush
When the US president arrives in Berlin this week, police and protestors will be waiting for him in record numbers
"Germans Don't Like Bush" was the headline for this weekend's edition of the Berliner Zeitung. This blunt assertion is based on a recent poll conducted by Der Spiegel that finds that, while the US president's approval ratings may be soaring at home, a mere 19 percent of Germans give him the thumbs up.
And now the man Germans don't like is coming to pay them a visit. As Lothar Glauch reports in Telepolis, they'll be ready. Tens of thousands are expected to participate in a series of demonstrations all across the country, but the hub of protest, of course, will be Berlin. That's where Bush touches down on Wednesday for two days (he then travels to Moscow and St. Petersburg and will head back home via Paris).
A political tug-of-war over how Bush should be received began weeks ago when Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, a Social Democrat (SPD) announced that he wouldn't be around to welcome him. He'd made plans to be in Australia, and after all, Germany has "other important allies." The snub was obvious and infuriated conservatives; what's more, with Wowereit gone, greeting duties would fall to Gregor Gysi, deputy mayor and one of the more outspoken leaders of the Party for Democratic Socialism. Since the PDS is actually the reformed version of the communist party that once governed East Germany, the symbolism alone was too much for conservatives to bear, never mind what Gysi, a harsh critic of military action in Kosovo and Afghanistan, might actually say.
Chancellor and SPD boss Gerhard Schröder put his foot down, and Wowereit will stay home to shake hands with Bush after all. Meantime, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who heads up the Greens, junior partners in the national governing coalition, is strong-arming Green parliamentarians to show up and smile when Bush speaks in the Reichstag on Thursday. If Berlin is going to warmly welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin -- which it has, more than once -- it'll have to show the same courtesy to Bush.
The demonstrations begin officially on Tuesday. The PDS has called one; an umbrella group of anti-war organizations, the Axis of Peace, has called a whole series of them. The Cowboys for Peace will ensure that the demos won't all be fiercely humorless.
But these aren't the protestors the government is worried about. Just three weeks ago, Berlin saw the worst May 1 riots in four years, and there were no posters or flyers officially announcing all that stone throwing, window smashing and car burning. Schröder has sent out warnings that an unprecedented number of police -- 10,000 from all over the country -- have been instructed to crack down hard on anyone causing trouble. "No tolerance" will be the rule of the day.
What Schröder hasn't publicly addressed, though, is why there's so much animosity towards Bush simmering throughout his country. What the Cowboys for Peace, who plan to march dressed as cowboys and cowgals, and the cover of the current issue of Die Zeit (which also includes open letters to Bush from the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Herbert Achternbusch and Christian Schlingensief) show is that German perceptions of Bush haven't changed much since he was "elected".
Yes, there was a tremendous outpouring of sympathy for the US immediately following September 11. But when the Bush administration reverted back to the stubborn unilateralism it'd shown before 9/11 (unceremoniously backing out of the Kyoto Protocol, for example), Germans reverted back to their vocal criticism (see Europe to America: Blow It Out Your Axis).
One of the most telling numbers in the Spiegel poll has to do with the question of whether Germany is a mere subordinate to the US. Back in 1993, when Bill Clinton was just beginning his presidency, 53 percent of Germans thought so. Now, that number is a full 73 percent.
Elsewhere
Will Hutton (The World We're In) and Timothy Garton Ash (A History of the Present) discuss the future of Europe and its relationship with the US in Prospect.