The Putin error of Klaus Mangold

well-paid strategists in parties and companies believe that happiness has a name. When things don’t go that way, when misfortune threatens or is already sneaking through the back entrance, you just want a different name.

This explains why Emmanuel Macron’s “En Marche!” party, which was only founded six years ago, is now actually called “Renaissance” – like “rebirth” after death.

So much Florentine spirit of innovation also seems to have come through Wolfsburg, where he is following in the footsteps of Elon Musk CEO Herbert Diess has the idea of ​​replacing the “Volkswagen” umbrella brand. After all, scandal-plagued Facebook has meanwhile renamed itself “Meta” in a very renaissance-like manner.

And that Italian-French-American-German car brand collection is known to be bright as a thousand stars “Stellantis”. Whether the “CDU” can continue to be “CDU” under these circumstances, for example, remains to be seen.

Mistakes in previous Russia policy have so far been acknowledged primarily by politicians. You didn’t hear anything from the economy, you were reminded of the silence between Greifswald and Peenemünde, where Lubmin is located.

Now, however, the first representative from the corporate world admits many mistakes, and here is a heavyweight: Klaus Mangold, once the head of Quelle and a board member at Daimler, but above all a long-time orchestrator of the German Economic Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations. “I was wrong about Putin,” proclaims the 78-year-old.

Klaus Mangold: The manager is one of the most experienced experts on Russia in the German economy.

(Photo: dpa, picture alliance/vladimir barabanov)

In detail, Mangold says about…

  • …the location in Russia: “Putin accepts the economic isolation of his country. Entrepreneurs feel completely cut off – and they know it will be for years, if not decades.”
  • …his late resignation as Honorary Consul of Russia on March 15: “It was late, yes. I don’t know if it was too late. There were initially pragmatic reasons for this. There has been a huge wave of Baden-Württemberg companies. They wanted to know how to behave now. I thought I could do this clarification better from the position of my office.”
  • …one Commission of Inquiry on Russia Policy: “If it should come to that, the economy cannot and should not escape it. This also includes the question of the extent to which the economy has forced false dependencies with its decisions in the field of energy. Everything we did was based on the premise of political stability. That was the axiom that was not fulfilled. We all bear responsibility for this misjudgment: business and politics alike.”

We quote Fyodor Dostoyevsky: “Man controls self-deception even better than lies.”

It is no delusion that the old world order has ended up in the scrap yard and the global economy is crumbling into blocks. The only question is whether it will be two or three blocks. We dedicate our weekend report to this phenomenon from the department “Zeitenwende”.. It’s about the courting of the West and Russia for India, a country that has been said for years to be an awakening Goliath.

For Germany, the formation of blocs is a real danger: the Prognos Institute calculates that an impressive 80 percent of gross value added is made possible by foreign business. 8.4 million jobs depend on foreign trade. Everything is rearranged, supply chains are becoming supply networks in a friendly environment. Trade agreements may become the new job guarantee.

Anyone who travels has a lot to tell – but you have to get started first. For German government politicians, this was difficult at times when it came to Ukraine because they seemed trapped in a mixture of vanity, stubbornness and image cultivation.

There were bulletins about the “offended liver sausage”. Now the liver sausage is back in the fridge and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is going to Kyivwhere many have already been, including CDU leader Friedrich Merz.

The educational trip was made possible by a lengthy telephone conversation between the Federal President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had been uninvited, and the President of the Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Here silence was tin and speech was gold.

The American stock exchanges are as capricious as a beau whose springtime flirtation goes unrequited. While they initially celebrated the Fed’s interest rate hike on Thursday as true leadership, the mood later plummeted. The US leading index Dow lost 3.2 percent, more than 1000 points. The S&P 500 fell 3.6 percent, the Nasdaq tech exchange even 5.1 percent.

The Dax also continued to lose value after the market closed – and fell to a level of 13,903 points. The simultaneity of the crises turns the trading floor into a hyper-nervous zone. As soon as a quarterly report appears without gold leaf, the price plummets. That’s how it was with the Berlin online fashion retailer Zalando – the share went down by 10.6 percent.

War in Ukraine, economic crash and the China trap: On May 9, the Handelsblatt editorial team will take a look at the international situation. What is Vladimir Putin’s current strategy? What is the economic impact of this war on the blocs of Russia, the EU and the USA? And what do future scenarios look like? Nicole Bastian, Head of the International Department, talks about this with our correspondents in New York, Stockholm, Brussels and Warsaw. You can be there live via zoom from 5 p.m. and join the discussion in breakout sessions. Here you can register and submit questions in advance.

My cultural tip for the weekend: “Navalny” by Daniel Roher, a documentary thriller about the struggle of the Russian opposition figure Alexej Navalny for what the Ukraine, from which his family comes, also longs: freedom and self-determination.

We experience filmed participant observation – poison gas attack, Omsk hospital, rescue to Berlin, convalescence in the Black Forest, return journey and arrest in Moscow. Encouraging that even a Novichok tyranny can be tricked with the help of a Bulgarian data researcher and the investigative platform Bellingcat. Putin’s murderous aides are betraying themselves.

And then there’s Friday, which has shaped the entertainment world for decades as “TGIF” – “Thank God It’s Friday”.. Customs have gotten very loose over the years, partly due to the “casual Friday” theorem, where employees suddenly wear flip-flops and employees let their shirts hang out.

The Walldorf-based software company SAP completes the transformation of the last working day of the week into a phase of joy. He surprised by announcing that no more conferences would be held on Fridays in the future.

The personnel manager Cawa Younosi announced internally that meetings, telephone and video switching should be avoided as far as possible. Motto: take a deep breath at noon, nothing with zoom. At SAP, they invented “Focus Friday” for this purpose. The term “Fridays for Future”, which was also considered, had already been assigned under trademark law.

I wish you a fun weekend that could start with a non-conference Friday.

Her

Hans Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor

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