565. Zelenskyy’s Corruption Problem and Is History Repeating Itself in Germany?

Andy Burnham's first foreign trip as Prime Minister wasn't to Washington, wasn't to Paris, wasn't to Brussels, it was to Kiev on Ukraine's Independence Day. But as the war grinds into its fifth year, President Zelensky is facing serious difficulties at home, including an open challenge to his leadership from a former ally and continuing questions about corruption. So is the tide at home turning against President Zelensky and what does this mean for Ukraine's war efforts? And with America cutting off almost all direct financial support for Ukraine, the position of European leaders is ever more crucial. Not least in Germany, which is where I am right now, which alongside the UK is among the biggest financial supporters of Ukraine. Right here, right now, the hard right and the hard left party appear to be uniting in a pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine stance. This comes ahead of an election in Saxony and Helm next month, which the extreme right, AFD, are poised to win. And it leaves many of us wondering and worrying, has Germany forgotten the lessons of its own history? And what does this all mean for Ukraine and for European unity? This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Changing your energy supplier should be fairly straightforward. Yet many of us still put it off, even when we might be paying more than we need to. It becomes one of those jobs we know we should do, but never quite get around to. Switching energy suppliers always manages. Somehow get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list. And it's probably because we think the process is going to be really, really complicated. But with Fuse, switching takes you just three minutes. So roughly about as long as it takes you to make a cup of coffee. And with 24-7 support to guide you through the switch, it's easy to break away from your old supplier, leave that expensive tariff, get a fresh start. Right now, Fuse Energy's tariffs are up to £100 below the off-chem price cap. 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I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef, and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN, and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks. Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this, or should I say Fiona managed to do this? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a technical. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com slash restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description. Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And we are going to talk about Andy Burnham's trip to Ukraine. We're going to talk about the state of the war between Ukraine and Russia. And then in the second half, we're going to talk about where I am, Germany, and not least the impact that the rise of the far right and a potential deal that they're doing with the hard left party might actually have on the future of the war in Ukraine. But Rory, let's start with Andy Burnham's first foreign trip. Interesting that it was not to Washington. It was not to Paris. It was not to Brussels. It was to Kiev, very deliberately, I suspect. As you say, he's somebody who. Who people maybe have characterized as more of a domestic prime minister. Starmer having got criticism a bit like maybe Mark Carney, that he wasn't around enough. And we can get onto that later because that's partly, I guess, a story about how the world's changing and how world leaders feel they need to be on the road much more. And maybe we should say here as well, Rory, that because Mark Carney, Donald Trump bust up has been one of the biggest stories in the world this week, we are going to be leading question time on that tomorrow. Absolutely. So I think that's the first thing, which is that it's beginning to flesh out what his foreign policy might be. And I think there's a lot of interesting things actually with Burnham there. People looking at him in Manchester said, you know, he didn't talk much about foreign policy. He wasn't very interested in AI. And he certainly rebuked me on AI by bringing in an AI minister sitting in the cabinet and appointing chief scientific advisor to do a big commission on AI. And now he sends foreign policy trip to Ukraine. And he's also done something quite interesting in Ukraine, which is to take another step, which is to allow Ukraine. To manufacture things that require British licenses in Ukraine with the French. And British intelligence. And British intelligence and brought the anger of Russia more against Britain, which is part of a general pattern of every time Ukraine's allies have done something over the last four years, the Russians have signaled this is the limit and we will retaliate in some unspecified way. Yeah, I'm really, really glad that he went. It was Ukraine Freedom Independence Day. It was the place where he chaired with Macron, his first coalition of the will. I thought it was really interesting that he very directly linked Britain's role in defending Europe against the Nazis with Ukraine now doing the leadership role in terms of defending Europe against Russia and against Putin's Russia. So I thought he spoke well. I think this was it wasn't just a kind of straightforward political support visit, because as you say, this was a big deal. This is something that the Ukrainians have been asking for for some time. I listened to an interview yesterday while I was driving through Germany. I don't know who this person was, but somebody worthy of being on the radio who said that if this had happened a few years ago, it would have been a massive game changer. As it stands now, it's very, very, very helpful. And I spoke last night with somebody who works with Zelensky as part of his inner circle, who said that the meeting went well. It was warm. They appreciated, he said, both the words and the actions in relation to the British storm shadow. But the other thing I think is worth just reflecting on. Is things are very tough for the Ukrainians right now. And they're very tough for the Russians. The Ukrainians, to some extent, are they are slowly winning back a bit of ground, but it's costing a lot of money and life. And also what's happening, I think that one of the worst things of the Americans seeming to pull out of really being as engaged as they were, is that the sort of targeting of civilian life and civilian infrastructure is becoming normalized. And Ukraine are now kind of hitting back in kind. So when you look. At the figures, for example, of oil refining in in Russia, it's really, really being damaged. So I think we're in a pretty difficult period right now, which is why I'm sure that the Ukrainians at least appreciate the political support they're getting. Yeah, one story that is very uncomfortable and we need to get into is this question of corruption in Ukraine and elections in Ukraine. And this has been brought to light because as we covered in the show a few weeks ago, Zelensky, the president fired feather off the defense. And Fedorov is this kind of youthful tech savvy guy who'd come out of having done some pretty remarkable things in other government roles on technology, came in, took over the defense ministry and then found himself being fired. Fedorov has now put out a extraordinary video in which he's effectively called for elections in Ukraine and said that corruption is an existential threat. To Ukraine's ability to fight the war against Russia. And these are two pretty powerful body blows against Zelensky because he's effectively implying that Zelensky needs to have elections, maybe illegitimate, and that Zelensky's government is corrupt. And that's really dangerous because the conventional wisdom in Ukraine for the last four years has been Ukraine can't have elections. It's just not realistic. And it's against their constitution. And it's against the constitution. And most. Most people still feel that. And the normal arguments that listeners will have heard is that millions of people have been displaced. Millions of them are not even in millions of Ukrainian voters, not even in Ukraine at the moment. There's an active war going on. Russia would interfere through amazing covert operations if you tried to do it. You'd probably end up with a very contested close election. And it's the last thing you need to be doing in the middle of a war. But Fedorov has raised that. And I think many Ukrainians would like an election. They'd like it after. Many of them would also like a change of leadership, but they'd also like it after the war. The corruption stuff, though, I've just been talking. to someone who just left ukraine a day ago who knows all these figures very well who gave me a really interesting insight into what's going on in corruption on the ground and the ways in which it's corrupt how corruption works and and what it means anyway over to you i've been talking to some people in the french and german governments and the commission i get the feeling that the mood music on european european accession is not good at the moment and it's partly because of this ukraine is meant to be pushing a big reform program forward and there was one analysis that said that gave them a mark of 15 out of 100 as to where they were going the two big things were corruption rule of law now zielinski would say you know we're at war that's where i'm focused we're trying our best etc etc etc and on the election he is still ahead in the if there were i mean it's kind of absurd to have polls most of the time but particularly when there can't actually constitutionally be an election but in any polling he is still the most popular leader in the country i think that fedorov's kind of you know in third position at the moment and he clearly sees himself in that in that field so that european bit is is a problem the other thing maybe worth talking about is poland it's really interesting how the polls we look at tusk we look at sikorsky the foreign minister who we interviewed on leading not long ago absolutely you know up for the fight but actually with the new president now poland is becoming a bit of a backslider in terms of in terms of support and really i'll tell you the other thing that i think is really really worth thinking about germany's in the uk now are providing roughly two-thirds of western european military aid okay there are some countries i think there are six nato countries that have yet to contribute to the new system that's being put in place to help them with their protective defenses and that's france italy turkey czech republic hungary and slovakia this is the new purchasing system that was set up in at the last nato summit and then get this once you go to the last nato summit you're going to get this is the new purchasing system that's being put in place to help them with their protective defenses and that's france once you go to gdp what share of gdp are each country's spending in support of ukraine number one is denmark number two is estonia then lithuania latvia sweden finland norway so you get the sense that's is northern europe there's two most then the netherlands then poland slovakia belgium germany then the uk then the us then canada then france then italy greece then spain and then below 0.01% of the population is in support of ukraine so that's the new purchasing system you've got hungary cyprus austria malta japan south korea switzerland so denmark is contributing nine times the share of america as a share of economic output this is the big story isn't it if you're putin strategically looking at ukraine's vulnerabilities you would say one vulnerability is that they've lost their patriot missiles there's their interceptors to protect them from ballistic missiles thanks to trump spending them like a drunken sailor in the gulf but the second perhaps more important thing is that america has cut almost all of its direct financial support and america was generating 50 billion dollars a year so that the whole weight of it now rests on europe and when the weight of it rests on europe an enormous amount of that weight rests on germany because although as you say it's a percentage of gdp it's the nordic and baltic countries that are putting in the most in absolute terms germany remains the giant economy of europe which is why if you're putin if you can convince germany to begin pulling out of ukraine having already got the u.s to pull out ukraine is in very very significant trouble just on the corruption thing though our friend gerald canals who we have interviewed on the program lived in ukraine in the early 90s i remember visiting actually kiev in 1991 and he was reminding me just how unbelievably different it is and how much better it is i mean just how corrupt the country was in the 90s how much progress was made in the various revolutions orange revolutions and other revolutions and other revolutions and other revolutions revolutions my dance square etc but it's still an issue and and so i spent a half an hour yesterday trying to talk to someone who's right in the middle of that system trying to understand how corruption works and why corruption is still happening because it seems you know from the outside completely mad i mean you're fighting a war what the hell are you doing stealing money the theory i got and i'd be interested in what you made of this is that it's a it's a combination of i guess three things it's a combination of the fact that there was so much corruption in the past that almost everybody in the system is often carrying taint from previous corrupt administrations with them and loyalties and connections and businesses so you might now be the deputy chief of staff but you might have been caught up in corruption when you were a prosecutor back in the day or when you were doing whatever second thing is the amazing ways in which the ukrainian state has had to break rules in order to fund and fight so there was the three-year period where the ukrainian military actually didn't receive any salaries at all so quite a lot of the people who are brigade commanders remember an era where they had to fund their own salaries this is back in the 90s literally by chopping down forests and selling the wood in order to buy the bullets for their guns or expropriating factories and trying to get the income from the factories to keep going then the final thing is the emergency bit which is where i thought maybe for a uk or european audience the analogy is covid in order to get things off the ground it's very difficult to get things off the ground really quickly in an emergency they basically threw all the procurement rules out the window and they allowed almost every brigade commander to do his own procurement so you're running i don't know let's say three thousand men three and a half thousand men and you're trying to work out how you're going to get uh your stuff together in thinking about that you'll be doing deals with businessmen you'll be writing your own checks for drones you'll be getting your own uniform up to the front line somebody will be finding a chinese company that may or may not be able to produce camouflage kit for you you're trying to get cars to move people around you're trying to get wood in order to deal with your trenches and that gives you as it did with boris johnson and his covid contracts an extraordinary window from things which you could say yeah we broke some rules but actually the businessman was being honest and we were doing it for the right reasons because we needed to get the protective equipment right the way through to real chances and criminals coming in doing everything from doing everything from doing everything from doing everything from everything from taking commissions which the brigade commander might justify as i need to build up a fund or a pot in order to pay for my unit next year right the way through to genuinely i'm moving the money to foreign bank accounts i think the parallel with covid is interesting because of course you're basically saying we are in a real emergency when we are in a real emergency we have to be a little bit less bureaucratic than we normally have we have to be faster we have to be more innovative and more inventive and of course you know just look at the the billions that were spent on sort of useless ppe and all that sort of stuff so i'm sure you've got situations where military commanders are getting onto their mates that they know can do things quickly and then maybe those mates aren't really quite up to the job the other thing i think is important on the corruption point and i've seen a bit of this in albania because of course albania is trying to get closer and closer and closer to entry into the european union and part of their historical problem has been has been corruption so they've sort of embraced these anti-corruption bodies that have been set up by outsiders america european union etc but i think both in albania and possibly in ukraine they've almost become now a law unto themselves i think i've told you before my friend the mayor of tirana is currently in jail he's been there for almost two years without being charged as a result of the investigation of one of these anti-corruption bodies these anti-corruption bodies in ukraine which if you remember zelensky got into real trouble when he tried to fold them into his own his own corruption bodies and so i think that's what's happening in the corruption system they have now become unbelievably powerful and by the way i'm not defending corruption on any level i'm simply saying that i think it's possible to understand why zelensky does occasionally scream you know for god's sake you guys i'm trying to fight a war which you keep telling me as andy burnham did yesterday is important to you as well so a year ago as you say he tried to take more control of these bodies there was huge protest he was under international pressure he backed off and they're pretty weird these bodies which and there are two particular bodies uh and they're pretty weird and they're pretty weird and they're there's nabu and sapo are not only very independent when they went in with the latest series of attacks against people very close to him and and it's it's getting pretty bad you know his chief of staff his deputy chief of staff his big business partner has now fled to israel and when they do it they do it with a massive social media campaign so it's not quite like what would happen with the metropolitan police where there might be you know traditionally i suppose there might be a leak to the sun to turn up in this case they literally release a very slick 90 second video with music behind it called operation forest gump and we're going in and i guess in a in a normal system you'd say this is outrageous because the prosecutor are not showing prosecutorial independence this might compromise the case they're making it clear from the beginning that they think these guys are bad guys i'm gonna get but to defend the anti-corruption agencies they would say it's their only chance that they're gonna be able to get away with it but it's not going to be that easy to defend the anti-corruption agencies because they're going to get away with it they're not going to be able to defend the anti-corruption agencies but they're going to be able to defend the anti-corruption agencies because they're not going to be able to defend the anti-corruption agencies I did pick up, I think I said, told you at the time, I did pick up a lot of angst about just the extent to which the center would just be telling people they had to go to the front line, knowing that many of them were not terribly well trained and also, you know, frankly, a lot of them are going to die. So, look, I think we're in a very, very tricky part of this right now. It is interesting how America has just sort of, just seems to have vacated the field in relation to this. You know, when was the last time you heard Trump talking about Ukraine? It's just sort of not really on their radar in the way that it was. I don't know whether anyone else has done this. And I think we're taking a bit of a risk doing this corruption thing, because normally, you say the word corruption, and obviously, everybody is completely horrified. The sense that I'm getting in, Ukraine is that there is very, very significant corruption, but it is not an existential threat to the war effort. In fact, the reason why, in fact, what Ukraine has shown is it's not a failed state. Its ability to survive over the last four years shows that it's incredibly effective. And 20 years ago, it would have been almost a Belarus style failed state. The oligarchs from the East and others would have basically made it almost impossible to respond. So I think there is much less corruption, things are getting more and more corrupt. And then we have to hold in our head the second thing, which is a little bit like Albania, many places in Latin America. Corruption has been so pervasive in the system for so long. Firstly, I think if you're the president, it's very difficult to find anyone in the system who isn't tainted. And secondly, the number one way of attacking your political opponents is with corruption allegations, which you can always make because everybody's tainted. Yeah. I thought about COVID. Here's a couple of others. There was the decision of famously of the serious fraud office to be called off investigating BAE systems and the Al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia on Saudi weapons. And that was interesting because that was effectively the British government saying our relationships with Saudi Arabia are so important that we're going to stop this investigation. And you can see an echo of that same sort of reasoning happening in somewhere like Ukraine, where it's like, I'm fighting a war here. Yeah. I have big strategic things here. This corruption investigation is not a priority. So I'm going to try to shut it down. And of course, what happens? The second thing I thought of is, imagine you are Zelensky. You are in a much more extreme case of what would happen if you were a British prime minister. Let's say you're a British prime minister. You took over and suddenly your whips told you that quite a lot of your senior figures were under allegations for harassment, or they'd been taking brown envelopes, or they'd been accepting tickets to Wimbledon, or one of your major political parties. You're sort of stuck with the bench you've got. And the problem that Zelensky's perpetually having to decide is, am I prepared to say, this guy is effective, but perhaps a bit of a crook, but he's going to get stuff done. And I'll let him run because I'm trying to fight a war. And how much of a priority? I mean, these are impossible questions, but how much of a priority is it for the Minister of Defense? And how much of a priority is it for the Minister of Defense? Yeah. The head of the military to focus on procurement, anti-corruption systems, which Fedorov was doing. You know, he was trying to have a full digital pattern from the beginning to the end. One of the reasons Fedorov almost certainly was got rid of is because he was trying to clamp down on corruption. And the very powerful figures who wanted him gone said he can't work with the chief of the army staff, and therefore, you know, we need to get rid of him. Almost certainly they were getting rid of him because he was trying to stop corruption. Mm-hmm. You could also argue that actually the anti-corruption staff. Yeah. And the result has meant that we've lost the leadership again in the defense ministry. And Ukraine has missed a golden opportunity this summer to capitalize on its advances against the US because of all this uncertainty at the top. Now, Zelensky's got a new guy in, an amazing sort of special forces hero, the kind of Al Khans of the Ukrainian system who's come in as their defense minister with many of the strengths and weaknesses that appointing a figure like Al Khans would have, right? The guy is a genuine war hero. Mm-hmm. But he's not somebody who's operated at a big ministerial level before. But he's also somebody who's unimpeachable, a hero, and is almost unsackable. So now Zelensky has some situation where he's got this guy in place, and we've got to see what will happen. Yeah. Well, listen, before we go to the break and then Deutschland, I must tell you a story, Roy. So I was in Split taking part in this youth sport games of which I've been an ambassador for about more than 10 years now. This is an initiative which brings together children. Children from a part of the world that is used to their parents and grandparents fighting each other. And they now come together and play sport. And it's been going on for 30 years now. It's a brilliant, brilliant thing. Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Bosnia, and Slovenia. This year, they had special guests, children from Ukraine. And it was absolutely extraordinary. So we had this ridiculous football match. When I say it's ridiculous, what was ridiculous is that I was the captain of a team which included Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Claude McAlealy, William Gallas, Pavel Nedved. I could go on and on. It was ridiculous. I also ended up playing more minutes than any other player because what I discovered about old retired players is they don't want to play football much because they're worried about getting injured. Anyway, at the end of the game, we drew four all. Zlatan got a great goal. We drew four all. At the end of the game, the crowd sort of invaded the pitch to get selfies with all these amazing, famous footballers. I was mobbed by the youth. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, William Gallas, Pavel Nedved. I also ended up playing more minutes than any other player because we drew four all. I said to them, I said, I'm not a footballer. They said, we know you're not a footballer. We know who you are. You came to Ukraine. You talk, you and Rory Stewart, you talk about Ukraine all the time. And we're very, very, very, very grateful. And these were kids. And I thought, you know, they were 14. So they've now lived nearly five of their 14 years in war. They all knew people who died. They all had family members who were involved in the front line. And it was just wonderful to see them just enjoying a sporting event like, you know, normal kids living a normal childhood do. So never, ever say, Rory, that sport isn't a force for good. And of course, while they're again talking of Russia. Very interesting. As you know, we did an interview with Alexander Seferin, the president of UEFA. Yeah. And which, incidentally, is an extraordinary interview and a real scoop. It's Alice's with his journalistic nose managed to get this very unique interview, which has gone all the way around the world. Anyway, back over to you. Tell us a bit more about the Seferin interview. What was interesting to talk about, and obviously mainly we were talking about FIFA and Trump and Infantino and all that. But we had a very interesting discussion about boycotts in sport. So when Russia launched the full-on invasion of UEFA. He said they felt real political pressure to ban Russia from UEFA tournaments, added to which he thinks it was the right thing anyway, but very little public pressure. Okay. Whereas he says in regard to Israel, they feel intense public pressure, but very little political pressure. Now that may be changing a little bit, but there aren't that many countries whose governments are saying we should kick out Israel in the way that so many governments say we should kick out Russia. And thank you for what you said. I found it absolutely fascinating talking. I know him reasonably well. He doesn't do many interviews. He's not like Infantino who's obsessed with Instagram and being on the TV the whole time. He is so not like Infantino, who is just one of the most awful people in the world. And right now, and I do think actually, we need to understand, and I know you don't get this because you're just not a football person, right? But he made the point that football is so, so, so important to so many people around the world, billions of them. And you have a guy there. Infantino, who's prepared to sell the game. And that's what we have to stop. I mean, these are people who would sell their souls, let alone sell football. And so I thought it was, I do recommend, even if you're not interested in sport, I recommend listening to him because he's a very interesting guy. So if you do want to hear the whole interview, just look up the rest is politics leading wherever you're watching or listening to this now. Brilliant. Well, I don't highly recommend it. And if you also recommend split, oh, absolutely. Unbelievable. I mean, the antiquities. It's the sense of a great Roman Empress Palace. I hope you will manage to do my little phrase, Chaya Pushta Londra, no? I tried. Contra Sputograda. You didn't manage that, did you? Don't worry. Of course, I'm getting sort of old and senile. I kept having to look at it and read it. And I know I'm sort of, you keep saying I'm a great linguist, but it is a lovely place. I think they could do with a bit of help on sorting out their transport. The traffic is grim. But it's true. Narrow streets in all great ancient cities is a problem, isn't it? Beautiful, beautiful place. There are parts of it where you've got this extraordinary mix of new and old. And they've done it really, really, really well. A lot of Brits there. Hell of a lot of Brits there. I was really quite surprised by that. And then I went to Slovenia. Fiona and I went to Slovenia. Shout out to Slovenia. What a place. I'd never been before to stay. Absolutely. It's like, it's almost as nice as Scotland, Rory. It really is. Okay, well, should we take a break and then come back and talk about Germany? Absolutely. See you then. until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy, tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com slash restpolitics. Shaq here. 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Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the save. Welcome back to The Rest of the Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So, Rory, Germany. Where you are. So, I caught you in a service station yesterday just outside Munich. Yeah, yeah. On your way up. I've got to say, service stations, Rory. Austria, excellent. Slovenia, very good. Germany, not as good. Ah, okay. Well, interesting, interesting, interesting. Mine is the one that we chose, but there we go. German listeners back on that. Well, look, you couldn't be there at a more topical time because this is the big thing. Big crunch time. We've been talking for four years about the rise of the AFD, Alternative for Germany, this far-right party, and they now look like they're absolutely nailed on to get far more votes than any other party in the election in Saxony-Anhalt and potentially take control of the lander, which would give them huge power over policing and many other things. So, over to you on that. Yeah, and it'd be the first, if this guy, Uri Siegmund, the candidate in Saxony-Anhalt does become the minister, it will be the first time that they've got into that level of power. And I wonder whether it's just worth, for those who are listening, this might be quite difficult to explain, but I want to introduce the theory of the horseshoe theory of politics, which is kind of pretty well known. So, if you imagine, there's the horseshoe, okay? Like that. And at the top, you've got the center. Alistair is currently making a circle, yeah. No, not a circle. I'm doing a horseshoe. A horseshoe, pretty good. With a gap at the bottom. A gap at the bottom, right. So, the top, if you put it, at the top of the horseshoe, you say that's the center of politics. And we often think of politics as a line. You go from left to right, okay? And you're a bit right of center, I'm a bit left of center, and that's how we think of politics. In the horseshoe theory, the center's at the top, then you and I are on the outer edge of the horseshoe, me on the left, you on the right. And then, as it comes down into the horseshoe, the gap narrows, and the hard right and the hard left are a lot closer than we think. And there've been examples of that in history. And that's what's happening, right now, with, I think, potentially catastrophic consequences for European unity and, to go back to part one, for Ukraine. Because what's happened is that you've got this election coming up, as you say, in Saxony-Anhalt. Currently, the minister-president is a Christian Democrat, same party as the government, as Merz. But depending which polls you look at, the AFD are about 20 points ahead. They're absolutely running away with it. And the smaller parties have to get 5% to get seats in the parliament, okay? And some of them will, and some of them won't. Which probably means that to make, to form a majority, the AFD will have to have a partner. Now, we've talked a lot about the firewall, the famous firewall that says we will never operate with the AFD. But this hard left party, well, it's not even hard left, it's a very curious mix, but the Zara-Wagenknecht party, this is somebody who used to be a big figure in East German politics as a communist. She then was a leading figure in Die Linke, the kind of official hard left, she broke away to form this party in her own name. It did quite well for a while. It didn't get into the Bundestag in the recent elections. But she has now basically said she would effectively help the AFD become the minister-president if their numbers work out in this election. They're now so blatantly open, both of them, about their support for Russia, about their belief that there should be no further spending for Ukraine. And also, the other party, the other really interesting thing that I hadn't picked up until this trip is just how much they're pushing this sense of nostalgia about the old DDR, the old East Germany. I actually saw one of them saying, we may have been more restricted, but we had much more freedom. And so, and then, I mean, that's what I find slightly terrifying about this. So they're running these kind of, they're very effective communicators, some of them. Björn Höcker, who we talked about before, really, really fast. He's the guy that you can call a Nazi without, you know, having to worry too much, or you can call him a right-wing extremist without having to worry about. You can call him a fascist without. You can call him a fascist without being. Not considered libelous by the courts, yeah. Correct, correct. He has now thrown out an invitation to Zara Wagenknecht that she might become the minister-president of his state, Thuringia. So this is bonkers stuff. Well, some very, very fine-eared listeners may pick up on the fact that there's a bit of background noise here. I'd like to pay tribute again very kindly to the Cree Pleasure Centre, but it also includes the school. So above me is a young person doing, Alastair, exactly what she'd want, which is practising music. This particular case, not playing pipes, but it's a drum set with cymbals. So if you occasionally. Excellent, excellent. And it seems to me whenever you make a good point, he hits the cymbals. So that's maybe a good thing. Listen, let's just maybe take back a little bit of a. Not quite an explainer, because I think people have got their heads around this, but the AFD is a very, very significant threat. We talk a lot about far-right parties, and it's quite difficult pinning down what that means, partly because a lot of things get normalised. In the age of Trump, in the age of Farage, these things get a bit muddled, and everyone's like, well, they're not quite Hitler, they're not quite the Nazis, there are no concentration camps, so what have we got to worry about? Exactly what they used to say about the Nazis before they became what they became. Absolutely. So in the case of the AFD, Björn Hocke is a man with piercing blue eyes, a schoolteacher with a strange past. His grandparents were thrown out of East Prussia, and he laments that a lot. His father appears to have been a major subscriber to an anti-Semitic magazine. He openly has appeared at these Pegida anti-Islam rallies, etc. He wrote articles, which the German intelligence service now says that it seems vanishingly unlikely he didn't write them, but he wrote them anonymously saying the Second World War was just started by the jealousies of other powers and that the Nazis need credit for their economic policy. And he has this very sinister style where he makes these speeches which have sort of elements of politeness in them. So he will say, Dear young African men, there is no home or future for you in Germany or in Europe. That's one of his phrases. The most famous one is he said in relation to the Holocaust Museum in Berlin that Germany needs to take a 180 degree turn in the way that it remembers its past. Now, I don't need to illustrate like your horseshoe quite what a 180 degree turn on the way that you might remember Germany's past, how that feels. Now, over the top of him is this woman, Alice Weidel, who a little bit like the man who's running in Saxony-Anhalt often comes across as much more careful with what she says. It's quite difficult to catch her saying or doing the kinds of things that she does. But what we noticed with the Saxony-Anhalt guy is that although he's careful what he says, the people he associates with are clearly very radical indeed. He will turn up at conferences with Martin Sellner, who's the great remigration guy. To remind you, remigration is literally shipping hundreds of thousands of German citizens who happen to be Muslim out of Germany. A lot of their staff, and these are the people to really watch, are the kind of young party members who are incredibly radicalized. There's been some very interesting stuff done by the three former chairmen of the AFD who went on an extraordinary journey of originally tolerating these people and then trying to throw them out and were eventually thrown out themselves, who are perhaps the best witnesses to what's happening inside this party. The thing that maybe is the biggest threat that the AFD poses immediately isn't actually that it's going to make Germany into Nazi Germany. It's that it's going to destroy the European Union because Alice Weidel has said that she wants to put up walls, effectively, breaking Schengen. She said that she wants to bring them out of the Euro. So there is a really, and of Germany, I mean, this is what you talked about with Ukraine, of Germany, which is the cornerstone of the European Union, starts breaking European rules, leaving Schengen, leaving the Euro, putting up tariffs against Poland. That is almost the end of the European project. Rory, I'm going to recommend a book which Fiona and I have been reading. and It's extraordinary. And as you know, I normally recommend books written by Germans. This is written by a German, but it's in English. That is how good a linguist she is. She's called Katja Hoyer. She's a German-British historian. She's a research fellow at King's College, fellow of the Royal Historical Society. And it's called Weimar. And it's about Weimar, the place between the wars. And what is incredible, it relates exactly to what you've just said, how institutions which we thought were going to protect people, make people stronger after the First World War, are slowly, steadily eroded. The democratic norms, the institutions are taken over. And then before you know it, you're doing experiments in racial and physical purity. You're sterilizing anyone who has a history of mental or physical impairment. And that eventually, of course, leads to the entire expulsion and extermination of the German-Jewish population. Exactly. But what you see as you go through this, and she does it year by year, and it's people's diaries, it's people's letters to each other, it's ordinary people. And what it shows is them going from being very, very wary, then moderately enthusiastic, and then acceptance of all of these things going on, and barely seeming to worry about this. It's the rise of bodies in the crematorium, coming out of Buchenwald, which is nearby. So it's the story of the normalization of the totally abnormal. Quick shout out for what we've been doing recently. I've been getting a miniseries together, which members will be able to hear once it's all finished and recorded. But I've been looking at different types of threat. But one of the things I did was spend a long time talking to Anand Gopal, who did this micro study, not of Weimar in his case, but a place called Membage on the Syria border. So much more. And the question that we kept returning to is, how did ordinary people end up either joining Bashar al-Assad's terror camps as guards or joining ISIS? And it's the most extraordinary story. And I think the conclusion one reaches is how fragile human nature is and how much effort one has to put. Because the story of people joining the Nazi party isn't very different from the story of how. Well, Anand finds with these very careful interviews of 300 people, people end up joining ISIS. One of his examples with ISIS is the guy is a very keen footballer who feels very bitter that he didn't. He came from a poor family, never got the time off to practice his football, didn't make it into the Syrian national team. Ends up as the PE teacher in the local high school in Membage, but with a lot of anger. But he's very secular. He's the guy who drinks. He's the guy who isn't particularly observant. And then ISIS takes over. The Islamic State takes over. And he becomes an Islamic State commander and becomes increasingly radicalized and pious and engaging in all that horror. Anyway, it was just a sort of reminder of this phenomenon you're talking about, that how fragile we are as people, how easily. And you've talked about this also with businesses. How many of the German businesses got behind Hitler? And we see it, I'm afraid, with Trump. You know, how easy it is to. Yeah. How easy it is to normalize this kind of stuff. First of all, you tolerate and accept, and then eventually you think, well, everybody else is going with it. I'll go with it. And then, of course, the other thing that's happening here is, I would argue, a pretty significant change in the media landscape. And this is related to the UK as well, and to MAGA. We've talked before about this guy, Matthias Dupfner, who's the boss of the Springer Group, which is Bild Zeitung. He owns Politico. He's boss of Politico. Daily Telegraph. And the Daily Telegraph. And Daily Telegraph. Now, Rory, last week, he had the front cover piece in The Spectator. Michael Gove, whose publication, The Spectator, was right at the forefront of the humiliation, degradation, and ultimately, I would argue, the destruction of the Cambridge academic Jason Harday. He gave the front cover to Matthias Dupfner, who wrote a piece, the headline of which, The West Must Win. Now, this is a guy who parades as a kind of center-right sort of person, a bit like you, right? Let me just read you some of the stuff that he wrote. For those using the phrase global south. It's the very purpose of the narrative. Woke ideology bears the hallmark of good intentions, fight racism, protecting minorities, questioning privilege, and confronting colonial history. In reality, it is the inversion of almost every value and objective of civilization. It now gets completely insane. In the West, being successful was once better than being unsuccessful. Wealth was better than poverty. Beauty was better than ugliness. Under woke ideology. All this is reversed. It resembles a manual for Western self-abolition, born of self-hatred. I mean, this is a guy who is obviously trying to become like Musk or Murdoch. Am I wrong to think that he's a borderline insane? I don't think you're wrong at all. And he's a guy I know a little bit. I mean, he's not a friend, but he's a guy whose hand I've shaken and I've been in conversations with him. And one of the things that is happening with him, which I think is true of a lot of wealthy people, is that he is increasingly entranced by U.S. tech bros. People like Peter Thiel, that you were just hanging out with in Croatia. The Springer Group have an annual major prize for freedom of speech. Guess who this year's winner is? Who? Peter Thiel. There we are. Guess whose son was financially backed and was at one point chief of staff to Peter Thiel, Matthias Dupfner. Right. So the connection. The connection is very close. Of course, J.D. Vance is incredibly close to Peter Thiel, too. So there's that side of him. He's also. They used to have, as editorial policy, a very, very pro-Israeli line, but also a very pro-European line. They've dropped the pro-European line and kept the pro-Israeli line. So this is a very interesting. He's pro-Israel. He's pro-tech bro. He buys into the general idea that Europe is decadent. America is strong. America is strong and ascendant. There were reports in the press that Dupfner and Springer had put pressure on the CDU to make an alliance with the AFD. This is something that they absolutely deny. But it's interesting how, as Alistair, I think you've been finding how AFD-friendly they seem to be becoming in their reporting. I'm in Baden-Württemberg today, and I picked up De Veldt, okay? Which, the De Veldt norm, I would have seen. And through the years as a really good, serious, broadsheet newspaper. Centrist newspaper. It was a sort of. It was a sort of. It's sort of even more centrist than The Times, right? Yeah. So, page two and three, a two-page spread on AFD streamers who are shaping the nature of the election campaign in Saxony-Anhalt, okay? And policies more broadly. And it's got a couple of very glamorous pictures of one of the streamers and one of the leading politicians. You then go to the main opinion page, and you have a guy, I've got no idea who he is, apologies for that, Alexander Kekule. And the headline is, neither lazy, nor right-wing, nor extreme. And it basically is an analysis of saying that the people who are voting for the AFD have got lots of very good reasons so to do. You then get to page, the main fatal, two-page spread, pages 14 and 15, predicting, or a scenario, analyzing what a vital government in coalition with Jens Spahn, who's a kind of, you know, leading CDU politician, would look like in 2033. It is openly, aggressively, in my view, pushing for the AFD. So this is the guy who's got the telegraph, who at the time we were saying was much more reasonable than the other guy who was coming in. I think the guy is really, really dangerous. The fact that he's now in league with Michael Gove, that should worry us as well. But his big goal is, I think, to turn the European Union into a far-right body. And he had this, again, a telegraph, this weird piece by a friend of his called Ulf Poschard. Let me just give you this one. Tell me if this one is mad as well. The British right, both within the Tories and in reform, should consider whether it wishes to become part of a new Europe that embraces market-based thinking and is anti-centralist and anti-bureaucratic. It would be a Europe that seeks to help shape the global shift away from left-wing fantasies and ideological missteps rather than merely trailing behind it. So this is. Now it's Europe that's broken, and we need to have Britain back, a right-wing Britain back, to reshape it. Watch this guy, he's dangerous. I think many people will feel exhausted by the last four years and exhausted by the sense of things falling apart. So much so that we almost can't bear really to remember what's going on. I find people actually struggle, I think, to remember what Trump's done. Struggle to remember. You know, his threats against Greenland, his threats against Canada, which we're going to get on to, what he did with ICE, the corruption scandals. I mean, it's difficult keeping this in our eyes. And if you put together what's happened in the Middle East, what's happened with Trump, what's happened with the populist far-right in Europe, everything becomes almost normalized, doesn't it? And we have to keep reminding ourselves why it matters. Why does it matter? You know, why are we not just going to cede the ground and say, well, okay, maybe. is about rules. We created a system after all the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, which was designed to put laws and rules in place, predictable laws and rules in place that protected minorities and that found a really difficult balance between the interests of the majority and the rights of minorities. And actually, it's been amazing. The Basque country in Spain, 15 years, there's barely been any violence. The Basque language is stronger than it's ever been. The region is more prosperous than it's ever been. It's incredible, right? You can make similar statements about, I guess, the Republic of Ireland, right? We could keep going on incredible success stories, the Baltic countries. Croatia. But, but, but, but now we have these guys and what connects Trump to all of them and connects him to Netanyahu and connects him to the fight against the Holocaust. And I think that's a really, really important thing. It sounds a bit abstract. It sounds a bit legalistic. And, you know, when you tell me about that Weimar book, or when I'm talking to Anand Gopal about Membage, you realize how difficult it is to try to remind people why laws matter. And yeah, anyway, over to you. No, because what you're speaking to, Rory, is this thing that we talked about before is living in an era of impunity. I would say Infantino is the same thing. Infantino thinking that because Donald Trump phoned him, he was going to kill him. And he was going to kill him. And you can get a red card reversed. It's unbelievable. It's probably the best symbol, isn't it, of what you're talking about? Yeah. It's the most extraordinary symbol of what you're talking about. I mean, this is something, obviously, that you picked up in your incredible interview, because it's extraordinary. I mean, it's just unbelievable that anyone could even contemplate such a thing. I mean, sport should be the most simple example in the world. Exactly. You have to have rules of the game. It's called rules of the game. But maybe just to close on this with a kind of British angle on this, one of the most horrible things that's happened in recent days has been this terrible crash in which two policemen, two police officers have been killed whilst in an incident in which five youths have been, this appears to be a bit of a craze for some people, filming themselves motoring down the wrong way down a road. Okay. Now they're all now dead. With their lights off. With their lights off and with cloned plates. They're now dead, but also two police officers are dead. Now, I could be wrong, and I'm willing to apologize if I am wrong, but have you seen any condemnation, sympathy, any demand for white hot rage that the two police officers have been killed from Reform UK? Well, I haven't. Why? Because actually the police in their eyes are now bad people. Why? Because they're investigating stuff that Reform UK are up to. So unless we fight for the institutions, yes, always calling out corruption. Yes, always calling out misdemeanors when they take place. But once again, we actually say as Richard Tice, as it was Lee Anderson the other day said, I'd believe Nigel ahead of the police any day of the week. Oh, would you? Oh, would you? Well, what does that say about your support for one of the most important institutions of a country which is founded on principles of the rule of law and law and order? So I think that all of this comes together and Trump is such a big part of it, such a big part of it. But to see Germans going down that route is terrifying. It's also that as this happens, all the biggest issues are being missed. So this culture war stuff, which is what a lot of what the AFD is about, is missing the brontosaurus in the room in German politics, which is China and what's happening to the German economy. Hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs in the German car industry. And interestingly, Alice Weidel speaks good Chinese, spent six years living in China, did a doctorate on the Chinese pensions policy. I mean, anybody better equipped in theory, and yet she doesn't even talk about China. All she says is, oh, Germany needs to become more competitive. We need to get rid of the minimum wage. We need to drop regulations. We need to get rid of all this green stuff and everything will be fine. So that's another example of what's so striking. I mean, I feel this obviously with AI policy as well. And you feel this very strongly with climate policy that obviously you'd make the same point, I think, about the AFD. You would, Anthony, about Russia, Ukraine, that these populist movements are cruel, unpleasant, frequently racist, throwing rules out, but they're also not grasping the big issues, which actually are going to define the future of their country. They're actually wasting time, wasting resources, and they're not making the strategic calls. Yeah. And a lot of them are on the take literally from Russia, including a Brit, Nathan Gill, who's in jail paying the price for that. And the other thing I had is vital. These populist right-wing parties, they do a big thing, Richard Tyson, this housing nonsense that they were talking about yesterday. And honestly, I will, why do the BBC platform every single policy announcement for reform in a way that they never do for the Lib Dems or the Greens or the SNP? Why do they do that? This policy, I actually read, I listened to Richard Tyson, Anderson, a decent journalist could have taken that apart in 25 seconds. It's back of a fact packet populist bullshit. Okay. But the big thing at the heart of it was this thing about, you know, normal families. We're going to give the house to British families. Would a married family be better than a single parent family, et cetera? Yes, yes, yes. Says the unmarried to Isabel Oakeshott, Richard Tice. Okay. Alice Vidal is a lesbian. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Married to a Sri Lankan. Nothing wrong with that. Who lives in Switzerland? Now, imagine if a British political, leader, and Farage probably would get away with it because of the pathetic way that our media cover him while they whinge about being under attack the whole time. But imagine if Andy Burtham was gay, married to an Indian and living in Ireland. I mean, it is utterly absurd that they're projecting this person as the reasonable, moderate face of AFDism. It's also amazing because as you said that Alice Vidal, is out there campaigning against what she calls mad gender ideology. She's in favor of the traditional family. She's against sexualization in school. She's against gay marriage. And she's very, very, very weird. And she gets very offended if anyone tries to ask her how many nights she actually spends in her constituency and how much time she's in Switzerland. Well, just presumably as Farage does on the Clacton stuff. Okay. Well, in question time, we're going to have a little bit of a break. We're going to have a little bit of a break. We'll be right back. the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now, Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices, 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. And that's just pregame. He knows teamwork and BJ's knows savings. This is your home, Coach. Home of the Save. Open soon. BJ's, home of the save.