lThe warning has a certain air of déjà vu. A few days before an American presidential election that Europe was waiting for, paralyzed like a deer in the headlights, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called on the Old Continent to recover. it’s time “so that Europe finally grows and believes in its own strengthwrote on the social network Whatever the result [de l’élection aux Etats-Unis]the era of geopolitical outsourcing is over ».
Seven years ago, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel reached a similar conclusion during a particularly painful first summit with the new president Donald Trump. “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands.”he said darkly on May 28, 2017. We must fight for our future, for our destiny, alone, as Europeans. » And then? And then nothing. Germany’s military spending increased from 1.15% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2016 to… 1.33% in 2021, while NATO had recommended a minimum of 2% in 2014.
Seven years have passed, the war rages in Ukraine, 10,000 North Korean soldiers have arrived in Russia to be deployed to the front, Trump threatens to return to power and Europe is still not prepared. A sign of the times: today it is a Pole who raises the alarm: the successor of M.me Merkel, Olaf Scholz, is in very bad shape, busy trying to save a government coalition that continues to die.
Why a Pole? Because, if Ukraine collapses, your country, on the front line, does not want to relive the traumas of previous centuries. At the cost of a notable budgetary effort, Warsaw will dedicate, in 2024, 4.1% of its GDP to defense spending, half of which will go to the acquisition of weapons. But does the country get its supplies from Europe? No. Orders for tanks and aircraft are mainly placed with the United States and South Korea. Even for Poland, which is so proactive, ending the “outsourcing era” goes without saying.
war prize
Solidarity will certainly not come from its Central European neighbors. On October 31, Peter Szijjarto, head of Hungarian diplomacy, was in Minsk to participate in a conference organized by the most terrible regime in Europe, that of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. No European official has visited Minsk since the 2020 repression, but this cannot deter the Hungarian, who took the opportunity to criticize the Twenty-Seven sanctions against Belarus and Russia. He also met in Minsk with his Russian colleague, Sergei Lavrov, with whom he maintains regular contacts, as regular as those of his head of Government, Viktor Orban, with Vladimir Putin. On October 28 and 29, Orban, in an apparent snub to his European counterparts, made an official visit to Georgia to support a regime in full democratic decline, the day after elections marked by irregularities.
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