samgadjones.bsky.social
Financial Times journalist in DACH 🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨đź‡
Security & foreign policy. Dirty money. CEE history.
Working on an investigative podcast out 2025.
Formerly FT investigations, UCLSSEES, FT defence & security editor & way back the LSE
Also 🎿🚴‍♂️📚🏔️
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Counterpoint: that’s too coloured by relief, and this programme is actually a bit of a grab bag of hopes and promises that will evaporate on contact with political reality and/or just don’t have enough cohesion to impress voters. A “a Proporz smorgasbord” (tm @marcus-how.bsky.social)
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It’s not me consigning you or other Americans to anything! Your government is doing it.
I hope there’s a way out!
From the perspective of a European seeing a tidal wave of nastiness coming from your government our way, there isn’t much emotional energy left to pity non-Trump America right now.
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Indeed, and that’s a good thing. I would have had a pretty challenging time as an adult gay man in 1980s Britain, let alone under the Danelaw.
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One last point: I often sense in UK reporting of elections in Europe a breathlessness about the far right, and parties like AfD. It wouldn’t happen here!
This is as bad as anything out of the AfD. Worse than RN. Even the FPÖ haven’t said this out loud.
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For example, there is a legit argument to make about preserving a cultural sense of national identity through various societal norms that rapid or mass immigration can challenge.
But this is not what she is saying. She is literally saying those norms come from the soil you are born on.
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I’m not defending the debt brake at all. Just questioning the likelihood of negotiating a deal on the whole of it that gets through before the next Bundestag sits. (Whereas an agreement on the *really really* important thing which is currently on the table is, I dare say it, oven ready)
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The stakes are so high that I don’t think the Greens and SPD should risk putting themselves in the uncomfortable position of opposing extra defence spending because they did not get broader concessions out of the CDU on the debt brake, even if it is a fiscal nonsense.
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Counterpoint: in the next Bundestag there isn’t a necessary majority to reform the debt brake or to exempt defence spending from it.
In this one there is at least a potential majority for the latter.
Merz is being ruthless and opportunistic but the money is also existentially vital.
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He does and that’s my poor cyrillic keyboard skills to blame not him
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This not being just national myth making: I would argue the UK has more academic expertise in Nazism and the USSR - which ofc seeps into the public realm - than almost any other European country save Germany (where things are ideologically muddied by the division of the country until 1990 etc)
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I think the collective memory of appeasement and degree to which WW2/lonely initial resistance to Hitler is such a strong part of the national psyche plays a big role.
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Well to continue the metaphor… the prenup was watertight and we’ve been the manic dickhead no mutual former friends really want to talk to anymore. Or anyone else because of such a weird, insecure try-hard we’ve become, now dressing to recapture our prime (C19th)
AND our kids won’t speak to us.
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The more freedom you have, very likely the less influence. Another myth the 20th century bestowed on humanity: that freedom is power. It isn’t.
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The flexibility of having fewer friends and responsibilities, and more opportunities… for failure. Freedom in foreign policy is weakness.
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Insecure
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Indeed but that’s probably the nature of all senior ambassadorial appointments.
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Fantastic read. Well worth your time - and free, no FT sub needed.