Editorial
Stern editor-in-chief
Merkel’s farewell and the danger from Trump – Gregor Peter Schmitz on the new star
The cover of the current one star
© Star
In the current one starmagazine, in addition to the cover story on “Lustgain”, it is also about the political situation in the USA and Angela Merkel, who has left the Adenauer Foundation. Editor-in-chief Gregor Peter Schmitz classifies the issue.
Olaf Scholz can give great speeches and inspire people. This was heard and read in response to the Chancellor’s passionate appearance at the SPD party conference. However, this only seems to apply with restrictions. Scholz is able to get people moving when he tells the people in the room exactly what they want to hear: No social cuts with the SPD, that’s it! And if he practically refrains from making unreasonable demands. Saving, was there something? SPD party leader Saskia Esken whispered to him afterwards that he was one of them. This results in two problems: According to current surveys, “them”, i.e. SPD supporters, only make up 14 percent of the voters. Many doubt that he is a strong leader of the traffic light coalition. Scholz clings to his party. His predecessor Angela Merkel was mostly able to rely on her popularity ratings, even though she was at odds with her party. The former Chancellor has now left the party-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Will Merkel soon also leave the CDU? It would be consistent.
The US journalist Robert Kagan wrote years ago that Europeans come from Venus, but Americans come from Mars, which is why they rarely think together when it comes to foreign policy. This upset many Europeans, but has since been proven by reality. Now Kagan is predicting with similar force that a dictatorship is imminent in the USA, since Donald Trump can hardly be prevented as a presidential candidate and his election is very likely – and after that he will no longer accept any barriers. Anne-Marie Slaughter, head of planning at the US State Department under President Barack Obama and one of the most influential American thinkers, also sees this danger and is also very worried about Joe Biden’s re-election due to the Middle East conflict. My colleague Steffen Gassel’s conversation with Slaughter doesn’t put you in a good mood, but it does give a good overview of the fear in the USA.
After 20 years, the Forsa Institute repeated a large study for the stern on the spread of anti-Semitic attitudes in Germany. The good news: The proportion of German citizens with latent anti-Semitic attitudes has fallen from 23 percent to seven percent since 2003. At the same time, however, Germans have the impression that the mood towards Jews has worsened in recent years: 53 percent say that attitudes towards Jews have become more negative. In 2003, only 30 percent saw it that way. Almost one in four (24 percent) shares the statement “Many Jews today are trying to take advantage of the past of National Socialism and make the Germans pay for it” (2003: 38 percent). Almost every second person (45 percent) no longer wants to talk so much about the persecution of Jews under National Socialism and wants to draw a line under the past; However, in 2003 this value was still 61 percent. Despite falling values, experts see no reason to give the all-clear. The Federal Criminal Police Office recorded a significant increase in anti-Semitic crimes in the weeks after the Hamas attack on October 7th. The state of Berlin’s contact person on anti-Semitism, Samuel Salzborn, told my colleague Jan Fedders: “The hard core of anti-Semites is becoming more radical, more brutal, and possibly even more violent.”
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