German president warns of ‘authoritarian fascination’

Germany’s new president Frank-Walter Steinmeier has warned that European democracy, under pressure from without and within, is moving into “uncharted territory”.

In his inaugural address in Berlin, Mr Steinmeier warned that Europe needed “new courage” for fresh democratic debate to challenge the increasingly populist “flight into the past because of a fear of the future”.

“A new fascination with the authoritarian has penetrated deep into Europe,” he said in the Reichstag building. “We cannot just talk about democracy, we have to learn again to fight for it.”

Mr Steinmeier, Germany’s pragmatic former Social Democratic (SPD) foreign minister, was elected last month as post-war Germany’s 12th head of state by his own party and, in an usual cross-party move, by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

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The new president, son of a western German carpenter, was former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s chief of staff from 1998 and, in two terms as foreign minister from 2005, an experienced pair of hands on the international stage and a long-distance traveller who clocked up around 400,000km on the road and in the air.

As head of state, with a largely ceremonial role, 61-year-old Mr Steinmeier vowed to act above the political fray as demanded by the German constitution.

Consistently one of Germany’s most popular politicians, despite grappling with the trickiest diplomatic crises from Ukraine to Syria, Mr Steinmeier said he refused to be a neutral head of state, given the long list of world crises.

With an eye on US president Donald Trump, whom he called a “hate preacher” last year, Mr Steinmeier stressed the importance of maintaining the distinction between fact and fiction in political debate.

“Whoever gives that up impinges on democracy’s basic scaffolding,” warned Mr Steinmeier, who is likely to meet Mr Trump during July’s G20 meeting in Hamburg.

Row with Turkey

Ahead of next month’s Turkish constitutional referendum, amid a bad-tempered bilateral row with Ankara, Mr Steinmeier attacked Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for “unspeakable” claims. Mr Erdogan has accused Berlin of employing “Nazi practices” to hinder political rallies in Germany involving his ministers.

In his address Mr Steinmeier urged Mr Erdogan “not to cut the tie” to Germany and Europe, to respect freedom of the media and to release the jailed German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel.

Berlin politicians have welcomed signals from Ankara that no further rallies involving Turkish politicians are planned in Germany ahead of the constitutional referendum in Turkey on April 16th, which would give Mr Erdogan greater powers.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said she had “no interest in an escalation” with Ankara and that she viewed the three million people in Germany with Turkish roots – of which 1.3 million have a vote in next month’s referendum – as belonging to Germany “just as much as our people, who contribute to our prosperity”.

She declined to comment directly on the Turkish referendum, noting only that the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission viewed the proposed reforms as “a step away from democracy”.

“I always seek out dialogue but sometimes it takes a while to reach a solution,” she said in a radio interview.