Good morning, dear readers,
According to Donald Trump’s defense, a so-called grand jury in Manhattan voted to criminally indict the former US President. Never before in US history has an ex-president been criminally charged. The panel has been investigating alleged hush money payments by Trump to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playmate Karen McDougal for months. According to their own statements, both had sexual encounters with Trump – which he denies. In case you’re wondering what’s supposed to be banned about it, Trump may have violated campaign finance laws with the hush money.
What’s next? How could an arrest go? And what does the indictment mean for Trump’s candidacy in the next presidential election? Our US correspondent Annett Meiritz has answered these and other important questions.
In parts of the world, giving instructions to others from a moral high horse is considered a favorite hobby of Germans. A prejudice that is not always wrong. German politicians in Brussels are currently trying to prevent hydrogen produced with nuclear power from being classified as sustainable, a heartfelt wish of the nuclear-loving French. Can you see it like this or something? However, the border to self-righteousness has been crossed when Germany shuts down its last three nuclear power plants at the same time – and instead increasingly relies on imported French nuclear power in the future.
Nuclear power plant: On April 15, Germany finally says goodbye to nuclear power.
The German phase-out of nuclear power, to which we devote our Friday cover story this week, includes a whole series of such unpleasant truths:
- Should the French nuclear power plants not help us out to the extent hoped for next winter, there is no immediate threat of a major blackout in Germany. But so-called load shedding, short-term power cuts at major customers, then move into the realm of the possible.
- If the phase-out of coal is to succeed by 2030 despite the nuclear phase-out, not only wind and solar energy have to be expanded at an enormous pace in Germany. At the same time, around 50 new gas-fired power plants have to be built within seven years, which supply electricity when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining – and can later be converted to hydrogen operation. Sounds illusory? According to experts, it is.
- So it almost seems like good news that the phase-out of nuclear power could, at least theoretically, be reversed in the coming months. Leonhard Birnbaum, head of the energy group Eon, says in an interview with the Handelsblatt newspaper: “At the beginning of 2024 we will start dismantling work on the power plant, which will then no longer be so easy to reverse.”
On the other hand, the slump in production figures that Germany as a car location has had to accept in recent years seems irreversible. Vehicle production in Germany has fallen by more than a third within ten years. In 2012 car companies in Germany still produced around 5.6 million cars and vans, in 2022 there were only 3.6 million. This is shown by figures from the “Marklines” information service, which are available exclusively to the Handelsblatt.
In the same period, the foreign production of Volkswagen, BMW, Opel and Mercedes-Benz increased from 8.6 to more than ten million vehicles. The German car manufacturers build plenty of cars, just less and less in Germany.
In previous years, the sharp decline in domestic production was mainly due to the pandemic and supply bottlenecks. Now the disadvantages in terms of costs are increasingly coming to the fore. According to the experts at the CAR Center Automotive Research in Duisburg, an hour’s work in the automotive industry, including ancillary wage costs, costs around 59 euros in Germany. In the USA it is the equivalent of around 43 euros, in Spain 28 euros.
Small cars in particular can obviously hardly be produced at reasonable costs in Germany. For example, VW will not build the ID.2all, the group’s first electric vehicle for less than 25,000 euros, in Emden, as planned, but in Spain.
Conclusion: If it is no longer worth screwing together small cars in a high-wage location like Germany, that is no reason for doomsday scenarios. However, we should ask ourselves the question self-critically: Where are the new jobs actually being created in the Federal Republic that offer a similarly high wage level as the car industry?
At least not in aviation. Because every few years, Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr reaches into the same bag of tricks and conjures up a new subsidiary with which the high labor costs of the core brand can be circumvented. With “City Airlines” it could be that time again soon, the last domestic flights of Lufthansa are at stake. So far, the new company has only been Spohr’s threat to force the Vereinigung Cockpit pilots’ union to make concessions. But a very realistic one – the new airline already has a website.
Some politicians shine brighter abroad than at home. During Angela Merkel’s late chancellorship, it was almost tiring to hear on trips abroad that Germany had “such a cool Prime Minister”. Especially since you don’t always want to react immediately with a short lecture about the ups and downs of the Merkel era.
Finland seems to have a similar situation with its Prime Minister Sanna Marin. Admired abroad as a role model, the social democrat has to fear for her majority in the parliamentary elections on Sunday in her home country. According to our Scandinavia correspondent Helmut Steuer, this is due to the weakness of her party and the growing national debt – but also to the Prime Minister’s many social media activities, which particularly annoy older voters.
Does it help Marin’s electoral chances that Turkey, as the last NATO member, agreed to Finland’s admission to the defense alliance last night? A large majority in the Turkish parliament voted for it. Probably not, because Marin’s foreign policy of taking a clear stance towards Moscow is hardly controversial in Finland anyway.
And what is our new favorite king up to today? Charles III takes the ICE to Hamburg and lays a wreath in the ruins of the St. Nikolai Church. Sounds like a routine commemoration, but it is actually significant: St. Nikolai was destroyed in the British and American bombing raids of 1943. Throughout her life, Queen Elizabeth II had avoided commemorating the German victims of the British bombing war too explicitly. Understandable, after all, she herself had to witness how the Nazi Luftwaffe bombed English cities in 1940 and 1941.
I wish you an end to the week with nothing but good memories.
Best regards
Your Christian Rickens
Editor-in-Chief Handelsblatt
