Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 375. Germany's Fight Against the Far Right About this episode Has Trump already become a strategic adversary to Europe? Will Starmer’s White House visit be his ‘Love Actually’ moment? How can Europe actually become independent from the US?
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Transcript 10,873 words · 6 speakers
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2:43 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
2:53 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
2:59 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze to death. That's what.
3:03 Speaker 05 With great power comes great deniability.
3:07 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
3:08 Speaker 05 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.
3:20 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
3:22 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
3:24 Alastair Campbell? And Rory, we have a lot to talk about, and a lot of it European, a lot of it Ukrainian, a lot of it American. I think we should kick off with the German election, huge event. The Brücke, a bridge, to talk about what's been going on in Washington, not least Macron, who was there Monday. We're recording Tuesday. Keir Starmer, who is going on Thursday and who just before we started recording, Rory, I don't know if you've been able to catch up with this in the States, has announced that the UK will be increasing defence spending to 2.5 within the next couple of years. And one of the means by which they're going to do so. Is to cut, and we felt this was coming, we've talked about it before, cut overseas aid and development. So we can say how very unhappy we are about that. So lots to talk
4:09 Alastair Campbell? about going on the States as well. It seems like every day there's something big and something new. But should we kick off with Deutschland?
4:15 Rory Stewart? Yeah. So as listeners to the podcast will be aware, Alistair is our German expert. So the tradition here is I give my vague idea of what I think happened and then Alistair tries to fill us in. So essentially, this was an election in which the big stories were that Friedrich Merz, who ran an alliance of the sort of traditional conservatives, not the far right conservatives, traditional conservatives, was predicted to win. And indeed, he won, but not by as much as some people hoped. There were moments in the polls when he was well over 30% and he came in on the high 20s. The second really big story is that the AFD, which is this far right party, and we can get into what we mean by that, because we're often challenged by people saying, why do we call them a far right party?
4:57 Rory Stewart? They're a very, very nasty party, managed to get 20% of the vote. But the most dramatic thing is that they did incredibly well in former East Germany, where they really seemed to sweep the board. And in some areas got 30%, and in some of the cities, even in areas, 40% of the vote. So it was out in the East, the AFD performed incredibly well. Meanwhile, Scholz, who was running the equivalent of the Labour Party in Germany, went to their worst defeat since the 1880s. So that was the Chancellor who had been running the country just previously collapsed. And the left did surprisingly well, getting up to about 10%, partly because young people were very worried by some of the stuff that Merz had been saying about immigration. And then the final thing is that Sarah Wagenknecht, who we've talked
5:41 Rory Stewart? about, who's a far left politician, just dropped below the numbers that she needed to qualify. So she, instead of getting 5%, which is the threshold, the German system's not like the Israeli system, where basically everybody gets in on anything. She got something like 4.97%. And she will probably take that to the Constitutional Court, because there are some questions around overseas ballots, and that may even mean a rerun of the election. Anyway, that's my rough idea of what happened. Over to you, Alistair.
6:07 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think that's pretty good, Rory. I think you've got the the basic outlines right. I think the biggest thing to come out of this is that Friedrich Merz will be the Chancellor, probably in a coalition with the Social Democrats. And the big thing that they were worried about, because the reason that Scholz's coalition ultimately collapsed, I mean, we can argue about whether Scholz was any good anyway, he'd been a Very well respected finance minister, but I don't think ever really cut it in the way that people need to in the modern age, as it were, as the number one. But he had this three party coalition. All three constituents of the three party coalition went backwards and the FDP, the more liberal leaning conservative, liberal conservative party, as it were, they
6:49 Alastair Campbell? fell below the 5% as well. So Schulz, Harbeck, the Green leader and the guy who's been leading the FDP, they've also, they've all basically said, right, that's game over for us, we're out of politics, or we're gonna, we're gonna step back. What I think will happen now, I could be completely wrong about this, a coalition will be formed called a grand coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. I have to say, I think if they've got any sense, they will put this guy Boris Pistorius in charge. He is the most popular politician in Germany by a, quite a considerable margin. He is currently the Social Democrat Defence Minister, very, very strong on Ukraine. And what has been really interesting over the last three
7:33 Alastair Campbell? or four days in particular, and you mentioned the, the rise of Die Linke, the left wing party, I actually think they benefited from Elon Musk's attempted intervention. I think they also benefited from the fact that Merz had been talking so much about needing to increase the defence infrastructure. And there was this buzz went round that this was going to mean conscription of the young. And so all sorts of things went on. It's not a simple picture. And Die Linke, the AFD did particularly well amongst young men, Die Linke did particularly well amongst young women. So that was going on there as well.
8:08 Rory Stewart? So when you're saying Pistorius to be the boss, you, you mean Pistorius to be the boss of the, the, the major left wing party? So he would lead them into an alliance with Merz as the Chancellor, leading the major right wing party?
8:19 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And if not the boss, then certainly doing a very, very big job. Now, you could argue just keep him as Defence Minister. The guy that I mentioned last week, who, who came back, who'd been on the, who's one of the kind of the leading figures in the Social Democrats, he's already, I was a bit alarmed by this, he's already talking about, you know, we're going to be driving a hard Bargain, we're going to be asking for a change of course, et cetera. I think if they've got any sense, Merz and whoever is going to be leading the social democrats negotiations should really try to get together a programme pretty quickly.
8:50 Rory Stewart? Again, on that, my understanding is that in the German system, Scholz remains as chancellor until such time as the new coalition can be formed.
8:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
8:59 Rory Stewart? If they try to do what some German governments have done in the past, which is negotiate incredibly detailed hundred-page coalition agreements down to every last dot. Scholz will be stuck as a dead duck chancellor for a long time at a time when Germany is facing this incredible challenge. So, speed is of the essence.
9:19 Alastair Campbell? I think so.
9:19 Rory Stewart? That means pragmatism, that might mean sorority and charge. In terms of the two biggest issues, I guess, that this new government needs to deal with, I would reckon they are immigration and defence. And actually, we had a really interesting conversation. People who haven't listened are leading with Frans Timmermans, who was a very senior figure in the EU and is now the leader of the Labour Party in the Netherlands. But he was suggesting that in Belgium, the right had done very well and defeated the far right by not talking about immigration at all, just talking about cost of living. I don't think that's an option in Germany because the numbers of people that have come in are so enormous. And basically, Scholz tried to do that. He tried to not talk about immigration, didn't work for him. So, we've got Merz and his immigration policy seems to be twofold.
10:01 Rory Stewart? Firstly, it has to be a, what I would call a safe third country policy, which is something like the EU-Turkey deal, which is where you sign a deal with a country like Turkey and that effectively stops the flood of, or stops enormous numbers of migrants coming across the border. I don't want to use the word flood because it seems a bit kind of unpleasant. The second thing is being realistic about doing some, but they're largely symbolic, returns of foreign criminals. So, there are eighty Afghans who've been convicted in one of the lander who could be sent back. They need to do those things quite practically and quickly. And then they need to get numbers down. If they can do that, then I think they can move on to other things. Just over to you on immigration for a second before we do defence.
10:45 Alastair Campbell? What Merz said when he Was when it was clear he was going to win and they have this extraordinary tradition in German elections where on the night as the results are still sort of coming in, the leaders do a TV round table. So if you probably heard that Metz did this thing, we'll come on to what he said about the United States, but he did it sort of sandwiched between Vidal and the F D and Scholz. He had quite a good attack on her, but he basically was saying for him, you've got two of the three that he said, immigration, the economy, cost of living and defence and foreign policy and Europe's place in the world. And I think on immigration, this is where I think it could get very tricky in the coalition because of course what the A F D are going to do and the longer this goes on, the more they
11:30 Alastair Campbell? will be able to try to use this as saying, this is just the old politics still at work. Look at Scholz there, he lost and he's still the chancellor. Look at Pistorius, he lost and he's still the guy who's running Ukraine. And Metz, he only got twenty, less, under thirty percent of the votes. He's got the lowest approval ratings of any chancellor that we've ever had elected, blah, blah, blah. We're the shiny new thing. So that's why I think they've got to do it fairly quickly. But I think that some of the stuff that Metz was saying during the campaign in order to kind of keep the A F D at bay will kind of be very, very difficult to get through the social democrats. I thought what was for me, the standout moment of this round table, which I'm sure you've seen, and it's so interesting, this about translation. So I got back from Germany and I, when the
12:15 Alastair Campbell? result, I went to the German embassy for the results coming in and being a bit of a show off, Roy, there was a BBC there and then the German people were through there watching the German television. So of course I went through and watched the German television. But when they were doing this round table, he said this thing about America being gleich gutig about Europe. Now gleich gutig, if you put it into Google Translate, I think will say indifferent. Okay. But interestingly, the translation that then I presume was being translated simultaneously. But there was obviously translated by whoever was doing the translation as doesn't care about, which I think sounds harder.
12:52 Rory Stewart? How do you make sense of these kind of linguistic differences in translations? How hard do you think it is? Can you think of contexts in which that phrase is used? And can you give us an example where someone might use it in ordinary speech? Let's say my mother-in-law was, and then you inserted that phrase towards me. What would that imply about her views?
13:10 Alastair Campbell? No, I think more it would be that your mother-in-law is guilty about whether you go on holiday to France or Spain. It's like, I'm not that bothered, I'm not that bothered.
13:21 Rory Stewart? Not that, it's not sort of passive aggressive. She's a bit sort of peed off with the whole thing.
13:26 Alastair Campbell? I don't, listen, there'll be some German listeners who will understand this better than I do, but when I heard it, I didn't hear it as he doesn't care about Europe. What he said was, what's been happening in the last few days, and it was a very, very strong statement, means we, Europe, have got to learn to be independent when it comes to defence and foreign policy. He said that he found the interventions of Musk, he didn't mention them by name, but Musk and Vance, he said they were shameful and on a par with Putin's interference in elections. That's a very, very strong statement. So maybe he did mean, and he doesn't care about Europe. We had Macron in Washington yesterday, Keir Starmer on Thursday, and everybody sort of
14:07 Alastair Campbell? seems to want this Love Actually moment, when Hugh Grant stands up and basically says to the American president, well, you could fuck off.
14:15 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
14:15 Alastair Campbell? And I remember at the time, I was, I'd obviously seen that film in the cinema, and Hugh Grant does his thing, because people have seen me arriving, and they're all sort of looking back, yeah, that's what Blair should have done. So Matt's got quite close to the Love Actually moment, and I've got no doubt Trump would have been told about it. But I think on immigration, they will have to at least come up with some of the things that Matt's has been talking about during the campaign. And if the Social Democrats have seen to soften that too much, I think that gives Matt's a problem. Because what vital has been her line of attack at the moment is, well, there you are, one in five of you voted for us, these people are saying that your votes don't count, you're illegitimate, you're all neo-Nazis, et cetera, which of course they're not saying, but this is what they're sort of pushing back.
15:00 Alastair Campbell? And therefore, we actually are going to become your big voice in the new Bundestag. And so it's it's quite a powerful line of attack.
15:10 Rory Stewart? This matters not just for Germany, it matters for Britain, every country in Europe. And the question is, can you come up with a policy that controls immigration, massively reduces the number of people coming in to Europe without breaking European Union and international law? And there's sort of three positions, isn't there? There's the kind of status quo, business as usual, which in the case of many countries, populations feel is just not working. So I think Germany had something like 800,000 asylum seekers last year. Extraordinary numbers. On the other extreme is what's being pushed now by the far right right across Europe. And that involves two things.
15:54 Rory Stewart? It involves putting police on borders, basically breaking Schengen. So Schengen at the moment, as listeners will remember, means that there's free movement without border checks in Europe. So these parties are basically saying, let's leave Schengen and let's put up these very strong borders. And secondly, they're talking about forced deportation of enormous numbers of people, including for the for the extremists on the far right, forced deportations of nationals, you know, German, Austrian nationals who they they want out of the country. And so the challenge for MaaZ, and I think everybody who wants to beat the far right in Europe, and this is the existential fight, and increasingly it's an existential fight, as you've just pointed out, not just against the far right, but the far right's backers in the United States.
16:38 Rory Stewart? There's a clear attempt, incredible attempt by Vance and Musk and to some extent Trump, to undermine our own democracies from inside.
16:46 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
16:47 Rory Stewart? Listeners don't quite understand, we do not interfere in other countries' elections. For a very, very long time, the tradition has been you let the election happen for obvious reasons, because you don't know who's going to win, like you want to be friendly with whoever wins. And they have gone right out, Vance, Trump, Musk, to try to back the far right. They're doing it, the F D, they're now talking about doing it, Vox in Spain.
17:07 Alastair Campbell? You said they're talking about it, the leader of Vox was at. The CPAC, this right wing conservative conference where Bannon was doing his Nazi salute and Liz Truss was speaking to three people in a hundred chairs. And when Trump was there, the leader of Vox was there and he singled him out in the crowd and basically talked about Vox as the future of Spain.
17:24 Rory Stewart? That's right. And Elon Musk has now tweeted out saying Vox will win the next election, will be the next Spanish government.
17:30 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, he did say AFD would win the last one in Germany.
17:33 Rory Stewart? But for some reason, though, when I get election predictions wrong, Musk's supporters get very angry with me. But when he gets election predictions wrong, it never seems to have any effects on their view on his judgement.
17:42 Alastair Campbell? We can maybe talk about Musk in the second half because I think the views of Musk are not quite as the social media platform might be projecting it. What I think is interesting about Merz, you know, because I was in Germany, I've written my column this week about some of the German election stuff and they had so many TV debates, I can't tell you. Fiona was with me and most evenings we would have something to eat, they'd go and watch a TV debate, but Fiona doesn't speak German. So she'd be sort of, you know, lying on the bed, reading a book or whatever. But it is really, really interesting how just watching them as they came on and seeing how they spoke and seeing how people reacted to them, she got a sense of them that was really close. And honestly, Rory, basically sometimes what they do with the politicians, well, it actually matters what they say.
18:24 Alastair Campbell? So she sort of looked at Merz, oh, he's kind of growing on me, you know, he's looks sort of serious and strong and confident. He's quite reassuring. Scholz just looks like it's all over, the game's over, he's given up. Harbeck looks like a really nice guy, but he's not going to win. And that Vidal, she's really, really unpleasant. So you've sort of got them. But the thing about Merz that I find very, very interesting is that, so this is a guy, Rory, there's something in this for you, let me tell you. This is a guy who was first talked of as a possible chancellor several decades ago. He was in the running when Merkel first became councillor candidate for the CDU. When she was in power. He became one of her biggest critics. He got no progress through the party. He left
19:09 Alastair Campbell? Parliament and he went off to be a kind of corporate lawyer and make lots of money. He was still firing potshots and all of you. He then lost two leadership elections. First of all, he lost, well, he lost, he didn't run against, eventually against Merkel because he knew he wasn't going to win. He then lost against Merkel's chosen successor for a while, Annegret Karrenbauer, and then he lost to Armin Laschet, who was, who eventually became the candidate that lost to Olaf Scholz. So this is a guy who has really been through it. And I just think he's one of those politicians who, because he has been through, through so much. I think Fiona was right. You look at him, he's got strength. He's got a real strength there.
19:44 Rory Stewart? I know we get pulled into overstatement, hyperbole, because of the world we're living through and the way that Trump's conducted himself in the last four weeks. But I think it's reasonable to say that this is probably the most consequential German government since Adenauer's in, in the late 40s, in terms of scale of challenges facing. And, and again, to remind listeners, Germany is an enormous economy, third largest economy in the world, largest population in Europe, the big economic engine of Europe, even with the economic challenges it's facing. So he's going to have to find that middle way on immigration, find a, a policy that reduces numbers dramatically without breaking European law.
20:23 Alastair Campbell? Yep.
20:23 Rory Stewart? He's then going to have to come up with a defence strategy, which we can maybe get into a little bit, rebuild the German economy. And I think those two things could be connected. And then I'd also argue that he needs to reimagine or help with other European leaders to completely reimagine what Europe is. Now, the question, I suppose, is now that I've laid out all this kind of grand vision, he's obviously got the right instincts. He often says the right thing. The question is, has he got the temperament? I mean, there have been these brief moments, there was this completely unnecessary, non-binding vote where he got himself in a muddle with the AFD before the election.
20:59 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
20:59 Rory Stewart? And he can seem, I don't know, is there a, a sort of slight Rishi Sunak sense of occasionally being a little bit thin-skinned and rebellious?
21:08 Alastair Campbell? I think he's, because of the experience he's been through, I think he's a lot tougher than he probably was. I think there was a time when he was a bit thin-skinned. I think the temperament stuff is really interesting. I've actually just been. While I was there, I bought lots of books. There's quite a few biographies of him. And there's one I read by a guy called Volker Hazing, which is called Der Unvermeidbare, which means the unavoidable one.
21:28 Rory Stewart? I mean, that's rather interesting. There are so many biographies of him, given that he's never been a mayor, he's never been a minister. It's fascinating that he's had so many biographies.
21:37 Alastair Campbell? But the thing is, his first Spiegel front cover, now you know the Spiegel is like the big weekly magazine, his first Spiegel front cover was 25 years ago this week. He was a big player around then. And he's one of those politicians that people, even if they don't like him, which a lot of people don't, they sort of find him quite interesting. And he's very conservative. He comes from a conservative background. And I said to you about the last book, the book I read, Der Unvermeidbare, that had this, which was written by a woman, which talked a lot about his, quote, "problem with women." This book had his wife's version of what he was like. And she had this wonderful quote, "I love my husband as though he were a complete work of art." She talked about it being, you know, love at first sight. He's quite religious, I think. He said at one point he would never
22:21 Alastair Campbell? marry somebody who wasn't a churchgoer. He's got, here's a real, this is my favourite, very trivial fact, Rory. He's one of four children, two of whom have sadly passed away, but four children, two of them with brown eyes, left-handed, and two of them with blue eyes, right-handed. I was fascinated by that. He's a qualified pilot, flies himself around in his own plane.
22:44 Rory Stewart? Like Grant Shapps.
22:45 Alastair Campbell? Correct. He's, unlike Grant Shapps, he's never changed his name. He's very wealthy by political standards, because when he went out in the wilderness, he worked as a very senior corporate lawyer, he worked for Blackrock, he made millions out of that. People say he's a bit arrogant, but I think he's a very, very interesting guy. And I think he's somebody who's going to be very conscious of his own power. And I thought that was what came through in the immediate aftermath of the campaign.
23:10 Rory Stewart? Let's try to push, if we can politely, follow up on our Syrian president interview with an interview with Chancellor Metz as soon as we can on leading.
23:17 Alastair Campbell? We'd love to. And he speaks very, very good English with a slight. Annoying American twang. The thing that's so interesting about him, day one, before he's even, well, not day one, but on the day of the campaign as the results came in, him coming out with this thing about, you know, basically what Trump and Vance have been doing and saying, we've got to understand how dangerous and how serious this is. This is a guy who was chair of something called the Atlantic Brücke, the Atlantic Bridge. His political hero is Ronald Reagan. He's somebody who really does feel that the the transatlantic relationship is fundamental to Germany's national interest.
23:53 Rory Stewart? I mean, I think we'll see quite a lot of this from conservatives. I mean, it's certainly true for for somebody like me in a much smaller way than him. I mean, I grew up very much believing deeply, deeply in the transatlantic relationship and therefore watching what Trump's doing is almost more traumatic, more startling. Whereas if you came from the far left and you always thought America was sort of brutal imperial power, I guess you're you're not that surprised by it. Just to finish off as we go into the break, he's going to take over. He's got an amazing lift in which he's going to have to come up with an immigration policy. He's going to have to address cost of living in the German economy. He's going to have to win back East Germany somehow, make them believe again in his government.
24:35 Rory Stewart? And then in defence, now, Germany is in a very interesting position there. Scholz, as listeners will remember, announced this 100 billion euro package and it felt at the very beginning of his tenure as though Germany was really going to become a major defence power. But a lot of problems have emerged since, which are a little bit reminiscent, unfortunately, of some of the problems that Britain faces. So serious problems in recruitment. When they were trying to deploy German troops to Lithuania, they could barely put 5,000 troops together and deploy them in the field. There's a real sense that for 30 years, NATO hasn't really taken the Russian threat seriously. I was talking to a German engineer yesterday who was saying that they used to test their bridges to make sure they could take tanks. They haven't done that for 30 years.
25:19 Rory Stewart? Now, part of the point here, though, is that if Germany really invested in defence, this could also be part of their industrial strategy and their economic revival. Because actually, in the United States and Israel... Big defence spending has actually been completely central in terms of innovation, tech developments, this thing called DARPA that the ghastly Dominic Cummings is obsessed with, in which US defence spending basically contributed to the development of everything from GPS satellites to the internet. So I think there could be a possibility of saying, look, Germany has exceptional engineers. Yes, the car industry has been in a bit of trouble, but it can be repurposed and start thinking much more about military production. And it could also be a way of rebuilding those bridges, rebuilding those roads,
26:03 Rory Stewart? really thinking about how to get the German economy off the ground. Now, think about that for Britain, think about that for France, think about defence spending as an enormous industrial opportunity.
26:13 Alastair Campbell? Before we go back to that, Rory, did you put the adjective ghastly in front of Dominic Cummings? Because he appeared to be calling for you to be killed on social media this week. Did I read that correctly?
26:22 Rory Stewart? It's a reminder of being realistic about who people like Dominic Cummings and Musk and Vance and the far right are. Because it's very easy to say to yourself, and lots of my friends here in the US, I'm talking the US at the moment, will say, well, they have a point about this and a point about that. And you begin to treat them as though they're reasonable people. So, you know, I knew Dominic Cummings and I would have a meal with him and he would talk to me about civil service reform and inefficiencies. And I'd think, oh, you, you know, we've got a lot in common, you know, we both want to improve efficiency, make government more serious, make it more agile. And I deluded myself into thinking that he was somebody in good faith who you could have a reasonable conversation with.
27:03 Rory Stewart? And then, as you say, he's literally just put out a tweet in which he's accused me of conspiring with, and this goes all the way back to Brexit, accused me of conspiring with Dominic Grieve to flout the biggest electoral event in world history. And I quote, "I should face the penalty that used to be given to traitors. In other words, I should be executed, should be put to death." Now, there's a lot of things wrong with it, including the fact that actually, yes, I was strongly in favour of Remain and I voted for Remain, but I also tried very hard to get a moderate soft Brexit deal through.
27:33 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I would have called you a traitor because you weren't loyal enough to the anti-Brexit cause.
27:37 Rory Stewart? Exactly.
27:38 Alastair Campbell? But I wouldn't have killed you.
27:39 Rory Stewart? Exactly. So yes, there's that, that he's completely rewriting history. But it's also the astonishing idea that, I mean, it's not a safe world out there. This is a world in which in the United States, there are a lot of people with weapons with crazy conspiracy theories. There are politicians getting death threats and it's not very helpful for him to have 1.2 million of his followers and 6,000 likes saying that Rory Stewart should be killed.
28:06 Alastair Campbell? We should put in the newsletter if somebody wants to see an absolutely brilliant positive use of Twitter. Ben Wallace did a thread about Dominic Cummings, which is really, really worth reading. Basically, you get to the end that Ben Wallace essentially says, I mean, the problem with Dominic is that he thinks he's a guru, but nobody treats him as a guru. All he's ever done really is come up with quite a good slogan, which I don't think Dominic Cummings would like very much at all. Back to the more serious matter of the new German Chancellor. There's another point, Rory, which I wanted to draw to your attention that came from this book. He wrote a book when he was in exile called What Now? Germany 2.0, with a former social democrat minister by the name of Wolfgang Clement. So Rory, part of his political rehabilitation was to do a political media project
28:52 Alastair Campbell? with somebody from the other side. And look where he is now.
28:55 Rory Stewart? So in 15 years' time, maybe, you know, I can have a comeback.
28:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
28:59 Rory Stewart? I like the vision. It's great.
29:00 Alastair Campbell? One other thing I wanted to tell you from this very interesting book is that is very good on why Merz and Merkel didn't get on. It's more, I think, than just they were both ambitious for the same job, which she talked about in her own book. He was one of the first kind of culture warriors and he used to talk about this thing called, you know, talked about German culture and she felt he was pushing the wrong buttons at the wrong, at the wrong time. And then once she became Chancellor, he then started to really become almost like a bit of a rent-a-quote critic of everything that she did. And so there's a wonderful quote from when he was going for the leadership to become the Chancellor. And she had this quote that basically said, well, you know, he must have qualities to have got as far as he has.
29:46 Alastair Campbell? Which is one of the best sort of dammings with fake praises. And there's a wonderful account of when they met, he was invited to her 70th birthday. And there was this very, I'm sure you've seen lots of this in Conservative Party of people that you know to be sworn enemies, you know, oh, dear Angela, oh, dear Flanery, how lovely to see you. Click, click, click, click, click. So anyway, I think he's going to be a very interesting Chancellor. And I think how he builds the power, that's partly about the coalition and then how he does with the public, but also how he uses that power, I think is going to be fascinating.
30:15 Rory Stewart? Let's take a short break and then let's come back and maybe integrate all these really interesting questions about Europe and defence into what's now going on with Trump, NATO and Ukraine.
30:27 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rear. On October 2. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
30:37 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
30:43 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped moving? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.
30:47 Speaker 05 With great power comes great deniability.
30:51 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
30:52 Speaker 05 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.
31:02 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to the Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
31:05 Alastair Campbell? And with me, Alastair Campbell.
31:07 Rory Stewart? And of course, the reason I think that, you know, we're, well, many reasons, but one of the major reasons we're focusing so much on Germany now is that this is the hinge moment in which Europe now feels completely different to what it felt like four weeks ago. And feels completely different because as I think we've said on this podcast, we're suddenly realising that we have spent 80 years creating an entire system that totally depends on the United States. We're vulnerable to the US in every way. We've built our complete security and defence infrastructure in a little American cocoon. We buy American planes. We rely on American tech. The seven largest tech companies in the world are American. And at no point in
31:50 Rory Stewart? the last 70, 80 years, certainly has the British foreign policy elite, or at least since Who is really questioned whether America isn't its ally. And, you know, we can, we can get into that a little bit because of course that's central to the way that you and Tony Blair thought about George W. Bush and it's central to the wars that I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of American coalitions. And suddenly now we have entered a world in which, as you've pointed out, Friedrich Merz is saying that America may be indifferent to us. What's that German phrase again?
32:21 Alastair Campbell? Gleichgültig.
32:22 Rory Stewart? Right. So now that is a really interesting word because if America shifts from being the unquestionable ally to something that is even neutral towards us and in relation to Ukraine, and this is what's really brought it to the fore, potentially even slightly allying with Russia against Europe over Ukraine, then everything is suddenly turned on its head.
32:50 Alastair Campbell? I don't think it feels slight, Rory. I don't think it's slightly. I think it feels. I mean, maybe this is a good point to just say a bit about Emmanuel Macron's visit yesterday because on the one hand, they did the whole bonhomie and the, you know, touchy feely and the headline in the Spiegel this morning was lots of shoulder slapping, but not much agreement. Let's just take a couple of things. He was asked directly, you know, I've been in these White House situations with presidents and visiting foreign leaders, both when I was a journalist and when I was with a foreign leader. And what normally happens is you get greeted, Tony Blair, Macron yesterday, you get greeted, you get taken through. There was some very nice footage actually behind the scenes of Macron being introduced to Trump's team and including some of the backroom team and my view.
33:34 Alastair Campbell? And you go in and then they bring in what they call this pool spray, which is dozens of sort of guys with big sticks and it's very chaotic and badly organised. And, and normally you have like a couple of questions. And Trump just turned it into one of his kind of long rambles.
33:51 Rory Stewart? Well, let's let's talk about it a second because I think it's really important. So I'll do a little bit of explainer on background and then we'll get get into the the texture of the thing. So just to remind people on the basic background, we're now at the third anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Last week, we reminded people of the fundamentals, which is that Russia feels that it's been making progress on the frontline and it's found it easier to mobilize troops, partly with the help of North Korea. And Ukraine has struggled to mobilize troops. And Ukraine has been kept alive with about a hundred and twenty billion dollars worth of US funding and about a hundred and forty billion.
34:32 Alastair Campbell? Or three hundred and fifty billion if you're Donald Trump.
34:35 Rory Stewart? A hundred and forty billion worth of European commitments have kept this thing going. So Europe's committed about twenty billion more than the US, but between the two of them, enormous amount of commitment to Ukraine. Trump, of course, said he was going to fix it when he came in. There was a meeting in Saudi Arabia, which we were just leading into in the last pod. And an astonishing flurry of statements came out of that in which Trump said that Zelensky was a dictator, that he had a net popularity rating of four percent. He implied that Ukraine was responsible for starting the war. And essentially, no demands, no serious demands were made against Russia and no security guarantees were offered for Ukraine.
35:19 Rory Stewart? And Marco Rubio, who was a real Russia hawk, in fact famously embarrassed Rex Tillerson, who was the first Secretary of State, by asking repeatedly, is Putin a dictator? And has been on the record again and again, saying you can't trust Putin with anything. Putin doesn't want to make a deal with the United States, he just wants to make the United States weaker, has flipped around, along with all of Trump's teams, into a position of deference and trust towards Putin. And you can see the Russian media absolutely celebrating.
35:47 Alastair Campbell? Loving it.
35:48 Rory Stewart? Yeah, the Russian media is saying, we've won, yep.
35:50 Alastair Campbell? Well, yeah, yesterday, in the pool spray at the top, as they call it, one of the questions that got through was asking Trump. Um. Whether he'd called Zelensky a dictator, did he think that Putin was a dictator? And he just wouldn't answer. And Rubio, Rory, I, I, as you know, I'm a big, big fan of Foreign Affairs Magazine. Twenty sixteen, Rubio wrote a piece about his fundamental foreign policy beliefs and the, and the big pillars for foreign policy. Military strength, well, they're cutting the military right now, protecting free trade, well, they're not doing that. And moral clarity in defending freedom. This is the other one, he said.
36:33 Alastair Campbell? Russians aggression in Ukraine is an historic affront to the post-World War Two global order on which the entire global economy depends. And I actually felt, looking at them yesterday, I don't know if you they had, so you had Trump and Macron there, you had JD Vance, then Rubio, and I think it was Susie Wiles, the Chief of Staff, and Hesketh with his ridiculous Stars and Stripes Handkerchief was in the, in the back with all the hacks. But Rubio genuinely looked uncomfortable to me because they're having to sit there and they then had to sit through the press conference, where Trump just comes up with the most extraordinary nonsense.
37:08 Rory Stewart? So this was also the day in which the US decided astonishingly not to abstain in a vote with the United Nations, but to vote with North Korea, Russia and Hungary in the United Nations on Russia's side against Ukraine.
37:23 Alastair Campbell? You forgot Belarus and Eritrea.
37:25 Rory Stewart? Fantastic, fantastic. So, I mean, unbelievable. So Macron then gets on a plane and of course what he's doing is he's setting off to save the world. So he's, he's, he's jumping on a plane and he's going to go and convince Donald Trump that he should provide above all security guarantees. Macron keeps coming back and back saying there's going to be security guarantees, US deterrence is going to behind us, you know, we're going to get a peace deal together. And there was a really great article in the New York Times, we'll share for subscribers and others in our news letter in which they interviewed various former British ambassadors to the US, talking about what a strategy might be in that very strange fantasy world that we all live in that we can
38:07 Rory Stewart? Actually change Trump's mind on something, you know, so they had lots of ideas about, you know, don't, don't get into a discussion on what Zelensky is like, because that's, you know, going down a rabbit hole and we'll just annoy Trump. Don't contradict him when he says three hundred billion and try to just get him to and play to an idea of strength. Anyway, enough. So Macron arrives, he goes in to see Trump, there's a thing before, there's a thing afterwards, and how do you then read? What results actually Macron gets out of this charm offensive?
38:37 Alastair Campbell? It's really hard to know. I, like you, watched the whole thing. I watched his arrival. I watched the pool spray at the top. During which you say that you, you know, these ambassadors are all saying, don't correct him. Macron did correct him because Trump was going off on one about we've spent three hundred and fifty billion dollars, which isn't true. And Europe has just done all this stuff, but they're going to get it all back because it was all done in loans. And Macron put his hand on his arm and said, no, no, no, that's, that's not right. Let me tell you in fact. And you could see Trump almost like shrinking in. Because his instinct would be to say, don't dare talk to me like that. Do you know who I am? But he kind of knew he couldn't quite go that far. And then in the later press conferences, there were several moments where
39:21 Alastair Campbell? I saw Trump, while Macron was speaking, particularly when he was speaking in French and Trump was having to get his earpiece in. Where he started tapping his index fingers against, against the side of the lectern. And I think that was a bit of sort of, you know, I'm the main act here. This is going on too long. So I think when you say what was the outcome, it depends on what he said afterwards. But what I think Macron did very, very effectively, he got the balance right between the sort of puke making ego stroking that you have to do. Which Keir Starmer, and people are going to hate it when he does it, you, you just wait, Keir Starmer will say, Donald Trump's arrived in the White House, has changed the game, there's now a new opportunity, we've got to work together to seize it. He's going to say that. And he's going to say, just get ready for it. He will say,
40:04 Alastair Campbell? you know, we have to, the, the leadership that he's showing on this issue and other issues, he's going to say all that. But what Trump, what Macron also did, and I hope that Keir does something similar. When talking, without saying, no, he's not a dictator. What Macron did, he talked about the courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people, and I think we know what he meant. Three or four times, he said, you know, this, this Russian aggression. And one of the most powerful moments for me. Was when they were talking about, um, Trump was droning on about he's going to get his deal and the minerals and the rare earths and all that stuff. And Macron, literally on back of that, saying, if there's compensation and the people who have to be compensated are Ukrainians, because of course it was the Russians that started this war. And you can
40:48 Alastair Campbell? see Trump sitting there thinking, do I contradict this? I noticed Vance sort of shuffling in his seat at that point.
40:54 Rory Stewart? I mean, it's a very interesting, uh, what, having, forcing myself to watch Trump that long. Firstly, he was more courteous towards Macron and more sort of charming than I was expecting. So he did do a lot of praising him about Notre Dame and talking about D-Day. And there was a lot of that back and forth, as you remember. There was, of course, an enormous amount of the trademark, let's use this opportunity to attack Biden and talk about how Biden let all these very dangerous, you know, millions of illegal immigrants into the United States and, you know, move off the subject Ukraine to just boast about what an amazing president he's been and how well he's done. He managed to get a journalist asking him, you know, are you pleased about the fact that you're doing really well in the polls?
41:37 Alastair Campbell? Roy, let me jump in there. Somebody who I've read on social media, who I follow and who actually I think is usually accurate, said, the journalist who asked that question, who would Trump call that journalist first? Brian, I think you have a question. And the question was, you must be very pleased with this poll that says that you're the most popular president since George Washington. Right. According to this guy on Twitter, that guy is the boyfriend of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mega maga person, right? So if that is wrong, I'm happy to apologize to Brian. But in any event, you talk about a planted question. So you've got the president of France there, effectively representing the whole of Europe. And your first question is a planted question
42:20 Alastair Campbell? to say how amazingly popular you are, when the real polls are actually showing anything but. That says to me, not strength, that says weakness.
42:29 Rory Stewart? So we had all that, but, but the, the, there was another thing going on all the way through, which is Macron kept saying, it's been a great meeting.
42:40 Rory Stewart? And we've agreed in this meeting that there's going to be security guarantees from the United States, haven't we, Mr. President? And Trump scrupulously never says that.
42:49 Alastair Campbell? Didn't engage.
42:51 Rory Stewart? Absolutely never says that. In fact, actually, in the pre-meeting, Trump said, yeah, he's a great guy, but you know, I remember when we had dinner on the Eiffel Tower and he came out and he gave this great speech in French. And I can't understand anything in French, but afterwards I discovered that he'd said that we'd agreed all these things, we'd never agreed. He's a cheeky guy, right? So basically what Trump is signalling is that he thinks that Macron's technique is to come out of these meetings saying, we've got all these agreements on all these wonderful things, and that that will be the fact. And actually, Trump isn't even pretending. He refuses to use any of Macron's language. He's refusing to say there will be American security guarantees, there'll be American deterrents or anything of that sort.
43:33 Alastair Campbell? When Macron challenged him over the facts on the European spending, and the facts are clear, you know, Europe has spent more than America, and he sort of just looked at the press and says, you can believe that if you want. He was totally in his alternative facts mode, or the disinformation space, as Zelensky calls it. I don't know if you had time to read it, but I sent you a report by the Institute for the Study of War. Now, this is not a liberal pink organisation. I think your friend David Petraeus is on the board. This is like, these are serious military people, they're close to the military. And they put out a report this week, very factual, but it essentially was debunking all of the claims that Trump has been making.
44:16 Alastair Campbell? One, Zelensky is not at risk of losing Ukraine right now. They have this extraordinary stat. At the current rate of advance, it would take Russian forces 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine. So they've got 20%. So, and then they're not risking it. Most Ukrainian cities are still standing. They're very, very, they were very clear, this point that Trump keeps making and these mini-me farage in the UK as we say, why doesn't Zelensky hold elections? Answer, because they're prohibited to hold elections under the Ukrainian constitution when they're at war. On the losses, pointing out that the numbers, Trump keeps talking about millions, not true, states is a fact, Europe provides as much direct aid as the US.
45:01 Alastair Campbell? Ukraine did not misuse half of aid, they had these reports from people who've been monitoring the aid, that it has not been misused, and if it has been misused, most of that money stayed in America anyway. And also debunking the fact that Ukraine have been trying to avoid negotiations with Putin. And I think it's going to be very hard for Keir Starmer. Macron thought did it well, in terms of, don't, you know, Franz Timmermann who said that thing, don't get in a fight with a pig, because the pig loves rolling around in mud. I think Keir will have to sit there when Trump comes out with lots of this nonsense. But, like Macron did, find one or two points that you are going to be very, very clear about making. And I, I, I've been thinking a lot about this, I don't know how you make this argument
45:42 Alastair Campbell? to his face, but I actually think that somehow Macron, Keir Starmer, Meares when he gets there and the rest of them, they've got to get it inside Trump's head, that people like Xi Jinping and Putin, when they look at Trump surrendering so much and boasting about what a great dealmaker he is, he's actually coming over to them as unbelievably weak.
46:05 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
46:06 Alastair Campbell? He gave Trump so much, he gave Putin so much with getting nothing in return. And Xi Jinping thinks, so this guy's weak.
46:14 Rory Stewart? That's right, and I think that's what they're gambling on. They're gambling that they can appeal to Trump's vanity and that they can say, you're being ripped off by Putin, he's going to betray you. The problem is that that weighs against another instinct, which is, Trump basically doesn't want to have anything to do with the rest of the world. He's not interested. And you can explain to him that Putin is a threat to Moldova, or that Putin is going to go into Lithuania, which is a NATO country, and if he gets into Lithuania, that's the end of NATO, there's no common defence. And Trump doesn't care. Because I think we keep misunderstanding him. I mean, we've got this story that keeps being
46:57 Rory Stewart? produced that he's transactional, pragmatic and transactional. He's not pragmatic and transactional. There's nothing pragmatic about the idea of turning Gaza into, you know, a beach resort on the Mediterranean. It's not practical, right? And there's nothing transactional about what he's doing with Ukraine. I mean, remember, a transaction implies there's two sides. You're doing a deal, the art of the deal, but it's not the art of the deal. What he said to Ukraine is, give me $500 billion worth of your minerals. Now, the US at most has spent 120, 130 billion. And when Ukraine says, uh, why? The answer is, give it to me. And when they say, and what do we get in return? Are we going to get security guarantees in return? He just says, no, give it to me. In other words,
47:40 Rory Stewart? it's not actually transactional, it's not a deal at all. It's robbery. It's extortion. He's just saying, give me stuff.
47:47 Alastair Campbell? Same with Denmark.
47:48 Rory Stewart? Same with Denmark and Greenland. So, okay, let's say we've got that kind of personality. Obviously, deterrence, NATO, is psychological. It's not down to exactly how many troops the US has. It's down to Russia's calculation that when push comes to shove, the US will launch nuclear missiles ultimately to defend NATO. And again, what's defending Taiwan against China? It's psychological. It's just the belief that the US might do something. And God knows, one doesn't want anyone to test that belief, right? You test that belief, then the nukes have to start flying. So the whole point about deterrence is this belief,
48:30 Rory Stewart? the confidence. So, at the very least, we're in a situation in which Trump just doesn't care. At the worst, in relation to the Panama Canal or Greenland, potentially this guy's becoming a strategic adversary in which he's going to leverage his money and troops to actually go after us. Now, the problem with that is we don't have any doctrine to deal with that. We have no way of thinking about the United States as a strategic adversary. We haven't even planned for it. There's no war college in Europe that's thought about what would be involved in fighting the United States.
49:03 Alastair Campbell? There's nobody alive who actually has ever envisaged that this might happen. That's what's so extraordinary about it.
49:09 Rory Stewart? No.
49:09 Alastair Campbell? But actually, you know, the question I get asked more than any other going around the place, and it was the same in The same in Germany, but also two, literally, it's a very small sample, two people at the swimming pool today. This question, you must get this the whole time as well. What has Putin got on Trump?
49:25 Rory Stewart? As the tech bros get involved, there's a combination of Trump trying to run America like one of his property companies, and in other words, treating the Europeans in the way that he treats his suppliers, which famously in New York means he doesn't pay his suppliers and they all go bankrupt, right? But Mike Brock has written quite a good substack piece that I shared with you.
49:46 Alastair Campbell? It's terrifying.
49:46 Rory Stewart? Yeah, which is, it follows on the stuff that you're talking about with the sovereign individual. And in that case, it's this intellectual dark web. It's Curtis Yavin, it's Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel being the person who financed J D Vance, for whom J D Vance worked. And the way that Musk, Thiel, and others like Marc Andreessen, who also talks about this, basically don't believe in democracy. They think that we're in a new world, fast moving world, and the US government needs to be run in the way that they think they run their tech companies. So a lot follows on from that. They're very authoritarian in the way they run these companies. They're very much move fast and break things. They're not about checks and balances. They don't believe, of course, in data
50:27 Rory Stewart? privacy, which is why we've got all this stuff going on, going on in AI. So put all those things together. Now, just, but you, you then said, you know, nobody's thought about how we think about a world in which the US could be our strategic adversary. Well, of course, the last person famously to be interested in this idea and really develop was, of course, Charles de Gaulle, the, the, the French president. And France had a shattering experience in Suez and in Algeria, where they realised that the United States could pull the rug out from under themselves, which is why France, unlike Britain, developed a completely independent nuclear deterrent that did not have
51:05 Alastair Campbell? La force frappe.
51:06 Rory Stewart? Yeah, that didn't have US components in it, right? And that's why we get mocked by the French for the idea that maybe we can't even use our Trident nuclear missiles because it's, we're reliant on the US for the whole thing. And they withdrew from NATO and tried to develop a vision of France and even of Europe, which was more dependent to the United States. And we, for nearly 50 years, slightly mocked them for that, thought it was unnecessary, expensive and absurd. And I, you know, I honestly, if I talk about it myself, I actually remember Back in the day, people like me 10 years ago, thinking, well, maybe the British military should become like the US Marine Corps, it should become just an expeditionary force
51:46 Rory Stewart? that bolts on to a whole US system to go around the world. And now we all have to become Gaulists. And becoming Gaulists is a massive shift.
51:57 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
51:58 Rory Stewart? Because I think I cannot begin to explain the many ways in which it would take 15 years at least, and probably 5% of our GDP by the end of that 15 years of the whole of Europe, before we began to have the kind of military forces that could provide a genuine independent force from the United States.
52:19 Alastair Campbell? And that was the other word that that Merz used, unabhängig, independent of the United States. And Merz also said, by the way, he floated this idea, Germany, for obvious reasons, has no nuclear weapons, right? Germany, he is saying, is going to have to build up its own defenses. But he's already talking about whether it's possible to get Germany and other European countries under the Anglo-French nuclear umbrella. But of course, there isn't an Anglo-French nuclear umbrella. There's a French nuclear umbrella-ish, but as you say, we are so tied in to the American systems that that is going to have to be looked at. And of course, the other thing that's fascinating in this, you know, I know you, we probably were going to run out of time and maybe do this, something on this in Q and A, and you
53:01 Alastair Campbell? want to talk about the way that defence itself was changing. And I was looking at some of the numbers of drone use in Ukraine. I mean, you're talking about in the near future, the potential for millions of drones to be used. It's gone from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and it's growing exponentially. But if you think, this goes back to your point about the tech bros who think that democracy's had its day and they should be in charge. The influence that Elon Musk, remember we talked to Ian Bremmer? He said that you could make the case that Musk has done more for Ukraine than anyone because of when he did give them access to Starlink. But Musk is now just echoing the Trump idea that Zelensky is a gangster and, you know,
53:43 Alastair Campbell? he can't be trusted and everybody hates him and all this sort of nonsense that he says. But the fact is, Starlink, owned by SpaceX, is now fundamental to some of these military battles. Now, that is why, I guess, world leaders are a bit wary about taking this guy on. But if Europe is serious about getting its act together, and you and I have been saying for some time, it needs to get its defence act together, then we are talking about sums of money, and Keir Starmer's maybe started a process today. I thought one of the most moving things this week, Rory, I don't know if you caught sight of any of the Zelensky event with all those, Trudeau was there, von der Leyen was there, Costa was there, Jansker Stora was there from Norway.
54:28 Alastair Campbell? Two of the best speeches were his, Prime Minister of Norway, and Mette Frederiksen, who we spoke to recently, Prime Minister of Denmark, and Stubbe, the Prime Minister of, the President of Finland. They made absolutely brilliant speeches about why they feel this threat and why Europe has got to get its act together, together on defence. And this, by the way, is, this is what's so important about Keir Starmer's visit on Thursday. This is a massive challenge and opportunity for Keir Starmer's leadership, because I've always felt the route back to some sort of proper grown-up relationship with Europe for Britain is through defence and security.
55:12 Alastair Campbell? And that's what Keir's going to take to Washington on Thursday.
55:15 Rory Stewart? Well, let's, let's make that, I think, the opening theme of tomorrow's podcast. Let's begin with that and get into some of the defence stuff, get into some of the European stuff, and maybe talk about where Europe could find new allies as, as the US falls away. Anyway, thank you very much. That was a really good, good episode.
55:33 Alastair Campbell? See you soon. Bye.
55:39 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.
55:42 Speaker 05 On October 2nd.
55:43 Speaker 02 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
55:48 Speaker 05 Tom Cruise is.
55:49 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us out.
55:53 Speaker 05 From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
55:55 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped going? You starved, you freeze in there, that's what.
55:59 Speaker 05 With great power comes great deniability.
56:03 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
56:04 Speaker 05 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.
Previous 374. Question Time: Why The US Needs A Leader Of The Opposition Next 376. Aid vs Defence: A Livestream Special Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
