End of an era: Germany’s Merkel bows out after 16 years

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Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 07 December 2021

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By GEIR MOULSON

BERLIN - Angela Merkel was assured of a place in the history books as soon as she became Germany’s first female chancellor on Nov. 22, 2005.

Over the next 16 years, she was credited with raising Germany’s profile and influence, working to hold a fractious European Union together, managing a string of crises and being a role model for women.

Now that near-record tenure is ending with her leaving office at age 67 to praise from abroad and enduring popularity at home. Her designated successor, Olaf Scholz, is expected to take office Wednesday.

Merkel, a former scientist who grew up in communist East Germany, is bowing out about a week short of the record for longevity held by her one-time mentor, Helmut Kohl, who reunited Germany during his 1982-1998 tenure.
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While Merkel perhaps lacks a spectacular signature achievement, the center-right Christian Democrat came to be viewed as an indispensable crisis manager and defender of Western values in turbulent times.

She served alongside four U.S. presidents, four French presidents, five British prime ministers and eight Italian premiers. Her chancellorship was marked by four major challenges: the global financial crisis, Europe’s debt crisis, the 2015-16 influx of refugees to Europe and the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s undeniable that she’s given Germany a lot of soft power,” said Sudha David-Wilp, the deputy director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Berlin office. “Undoubtedly she’s elevated Germany’s image in the world.”

“When she first came onto the scene in 2005, a lot of people underestimated her, but she grew in stature along with Germany’s role in the world,” David-Wilp added. Others in Europe and beyond “want more of an active Germany to play a role in the world — that may not have been the case before she was in office, necessarily.”

In a video message at Merkel’s final EU summit in October, former U.S. President Barack Obama thanked her for “taking the high ground for so many years.”

“Thanks to you, the center has held through many storms,” he said.

Merkel was a driving force behind EU sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Crimea and backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine, and also spearheaded so-far-unfinished efforts to bring about a diplomatic solution there. She was regarded as being “able to have a dialogue with (Russian President Vladimir) Putin on behalf of the West,” David-Wilp said.

She was steadfast in pursuing multilateral solutions to the world’s problems, a principle she set out at a military parade in her honor last week.

The global financial crisis and the migrant influx “made clear how much we depend on cooperation beyond national borders and how indispensable international institutions and multilateral instruments are to be able to cope with the big challenges of our time,” Merkel said, identifying those as climate change, digitization and migration.

That stance was a strong counterpoint to former U.S. President Donald Trump, with whom she had a difficult relationship. At their first meeting in the White House in March 2017, when photographers shouted for them to shake hands, she quietly asked Trump “do you want to have a handshake?” but there was no response from the president, who looked ahead.

Merkel dismissed being labeled as “leader of the free world” during that period, saying leadership is never up to one person or country.

Still, she was viewed as a crucial leader in the unwieldy 27-nation EU, famed for her stamina in coaxing agreements in marathon negotiating sessions.

“Ms. Merkel was a compromise machine,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said recently. When negotiations were blocked, she “mostly found something that unites us to move things along.”

That was on display in July 2020, when EU leaders clinched a deal on an unprecedented 1.8 trillion-euro ($2 trillion) budget and coronavirus recovery fund after a quarrelsome four-day summit.

At her 107th and last EU summit, European Council President Charles Michel told Merkel: “You are a monument.” A summit without her would be like “Rome without the Vatican or Paris without the Eiffel Tower,” he added.

The appreciation from her counterparts was genuine, although there was plenty of friction over the years. Merkel always sought to keep the EU as tightly knit as possible but strongly defended Germany’s interests, clashing with Greece during the debt crisis and disagreeing with Hungary, Poland and others over their refusal — unlike Germany — to host migrants arriving in Europe.

Merkel said she was bowing out of the EU “in a situation that definitely gives me cause for concern as well.”

“We have been able to overcome many crises in a spirit of respect, in an effort always to find common solutions” she said. “But we also have a series of unresolved problems, and there are big unfinished tasks for my successor.”

That’s also true at home, where her record — dominated by the crises she addressed and including a pandemic that is flaring anew as she steps down — is a mixed bag. She leaves Germany with lower unemployment and healthier finances, but also with well-documented shortcomings in digitization — many health offices resorted to fax machines to transmit data in the pandemic — and what critics say was a lack of investment in infrastructure.

She made progress in promoting renewable energy, but also drew criticism for moving too slowly on climate change. After announcing in 2018 that she wouldn’t seek a fifth term, she failed to secure a smooth transition of power in her own party, which slumped to defeat in Germany’s September election.

The incoming governing coalition under Scholz says it wants to “venture more progress” for Germany after years of stagnation.

But Germans’ overall verdict appears to remain favorable. During the election campaign, from which she largely was absent, Merkel’s popularity ratings outstripped those of her three would-be successors. Unlike her seven predecessors in postwar Germany, she is leaving office at a time of her choosing.

Merkel’s body language and facial expressions sometimes offered a glimpse of her reactions that went beyond words. She once lamented that she couldn’t put on a poker face: “I’ve given up. I can’t do it.”

She wasn’t intimidated by Putin’s style. The Russian president once brought his Labrador to a 2007 meeting with Merkel, who later said she had a “certain concern” about dogs after having once been bitten by one.

She was never the most glamorous of political operators, but that was part of her appeal – the chancellor continued to take unglamorous walking holidays, was occasionally seen shopping at the supermarket and lived in the same Berlin apartment as she did before taking the top job.

Named “The World’s Most Powerful Woman” by Forbes magazine for the past 10 years in a row, Merkel steps down with a legacy of breaking through the glass ceiling of male dominance in politics — although she also has faced criticism for not pushing harder for more gender equality.

Obama said that “so many people, girls and boys, men and women, have had a role model who they could look up to through challenging times.”

Former President George W. Bush, whose relationship with Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, soured over the latter’s opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, said that “Angela came in and changed that completely.”

“Angela Merkel brought class and dignity to a very important position and made very hard decisions ... and did so based upon principle,” Bush told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle in July. He described her as “a compassionate leader, a woman who was not afraid to lead.”

Video shows French patrol car watching migrants cross Channel

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Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 25 November 2021

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LONDON - Footage of French police watching a dinghy of migrants leave for the UK on the day of the Channel crossing tragedy has received widespread condemnation.

The French regional maritime authority said 27 people died after a migrant boat capsized on Wednesday, prompting Boris Johnson to hold an emergency Cobra meeting to discuss the issue of Channel crossings.

A clip showing French police standing and watching as people got in a boat and started their journey across the Channel was criticised as “disgraceful”.

The footage, captured by journalists from Reuters, shows a group of more than 40 migrants attempting a crossing in Wimereux, around 30 km from Calais.

The group, which included six children, are seen hauling a rubber dinghy into the water at daybreak on Wednesday. A French police vehicle flashes its lights at them to stop, before later leaving the area to continue its patrol further along the beach.

Dover MP Natalie Elphicke told BBC Breakfast: “Yesterday we saw footage of French police standing by while people got the boat ready, picked up the engine and took to the water on the French side.

“They did absolutely nothing. That’s unacceptable and that’s got to change.”

Elphicke said the British “are standing by willing to put people to help” and described the issue of Channel crossings as “a humanitarian crisis on the shores of France”.

She added: “These people smugglers must not be allowed to continue to ply their trade and put people’s lives at risk in these wintry seas

“It is vital that action’s taken and the only way to do that is to stop people on the beaches of France from getting into the boats and turning them around quickly in French waters.”

Zoe Gardner, from the Joint Council of Welfare for Immigrants, criticised French police – but unlike Elphicke, she did not call on the crossings to be stopped altogether.

Instead, Gardner said police in the video should not have allowed migrants to make the crossing on “unsafe vessels”, and called for authorities to “offer people alternatives” to the smuggling boats.

She said: “The French are patrolling their own borders insufficiently, it’s absolutely horrendous, those images of the French police standing by while children got onto one of those unsafe vessels are shocking to me.”

Gardner said the tragedy was “completely predictable” and “completely preventable”.

She added: “This has to be a time for our government to mark a turning point, this tragedy must not be allowed to continue and that means changing our approach, not more of the same failed policies.

“We need to offer people alternatives to the smuggling boats.”

Boris Johnson on Wednesday called on France to agree to joint police patrols along the French Channel coast – but French politicians pointed the finger at UK authorities for failing to tackle the issue.

Pierre-Henri Dumont, the MP for Calais, rejected the prime minister’s proposal as a “crazy solution” that “will not change anything” along the vast shoreline.

Mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart said it is the British who are to blame for the tragedy and called on Johnson to “face up to his responsibilities”.

Franck Dhersin, vice president of transport for the northern Hauts-de-France region, said the “mafia chiefs” at the top of the trafficking networks live in the UK and must be arrested.

“And the mafia chiefs live in London… They live in London peacefully, in beautiful villas, they earn hundreds of millions of euros every year, and they reinvest that money in the City,” he told French TV station BFMTV.

But Bruno Bonnell, an MP representing president Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! party in France, said he would not be opposed to the UK helping to police the French border – as long as it wasn’t politicised by the UK.

Asked whether Macron would allow British police officers on to French soil to help tackle the flow of migrant crossings, Bonnell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “As long as it is really a common operation and not a way to twist information once more, pretending that the French people are turning their eyes off those long boat departures.

“I think that is something that could probably help the situation, and I would support that.”

What Facebook whistleblower reveals about social media and conflict

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Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 19 November 2021

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By Jane Esberg, Senior Analyst, Social Media & Conflict, International Crisis Group, 18 November 2021

BRUSSELS - Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen’s recent testimony before the U.S. Senate reasserted the platform’s role in propagating misinformation that feeds conflict offline. Facebook should do more to reduce the spread of harmful content by revamping its moderation capacities and modifying its algorithm.

The U.S. Senate recently heard testimony from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who left the company’s civic integrity team with a trove of documents that she delivered to the Wall Street Journal. The leaked documents and her testimony support what many, including Crisis Group, have reported – that Facebook has exacerbated conflict in a number of places, and too often does not do enough to manage the fallout.

Haugen’s central criticisms in her testimony focus on Facebook’s algorithm, the particular set of rules that determine the content that users see, including where a post appears in the “news feed”. Facebook’s algorithm is designed to give users what the company believes is the best possible experience, to keep them coming back to the platform. Though few specifics are known, among other metrics the algorithm heavily weights user engagement, which includes actions like “liking”, sharing or commenting on a post. Problems arise because polarising content tends to perform well on such metrics, and thus get rewarded with a higher position on users’ feeds. This affects the substance of the content itself: in leaked Facebook research, some European political parties reported posting more negative content in response to a 2018 change to the algorithm that more heavily weighed user engagement. Facebook tries to mitigate this risk through what it calls “integrity demotions”, which push potentially harmful content lower on the news feed, and by boosting original reporting. For Haugen and other critics, these measures are not enough.

The debate over Facebook’s news feed algorithm has direct implications for conflict. Crisis Group’s work on Cameroon highlighted that by promoting polarising content, the algorithm may contribute to ethno-political tensions. Hate speech and other polarising content often spread on social media in Ethiopia, and Haugen has suggested that the algorithm may contribute to its reach. In an internal Facebook report leaked to the Wall Street Journal, a test set up to explore how the news feed operated in India found a “near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and violence”.

Conflict zones present particular challenges to Facebook in reducing harmful content: understanding what constitutes misinformation is more difficult in regions with less media freedom; hate speech is often highly contextual; and the plethora of languages and dialects spoken by users make content moderation across the globe an enormous technical challenge.

But even with these challenges, Facebook can do better. Start with its moderation system. Harmful material is removed through a mix of human moderators, who review flagged posts, and artificial intelligence, including a hate speech algorithm. Though 90 per cent of Facebook’s users live outside the U.S. and Canada, the moderation system heavily favours the U.S. According to leaked Facebook research, only 13 per cent of the 3.2 million hours spent labelling and removing misinformation in 2020 focused on non-U.S. contexts.

Facebook also has significant gaps in its language capacities. Haugen reported that 87 per cent of the platform’s spending to counter misinformation is devoted to English speakers, despite representing just 9 per cent of users. Most of the platform’s Arabic-speaking content reviewers know Moroccan Arabic, for example, and so cannot always identify hate speech, violence and abuse in other regional dialects, according to a leaked Facebook document. As Crisis Group has noted, in Cameroon, moderators with an understanding of local dialects are important to correctly identifying inflammatory content. Many conflict-affected countries, particularly those with multiple languages and dialects, are left under-resourced.

The same language capacity issues arise in Facebook’s automated flagging of content. Facebook’s response to harmful language relies heavily on its hate speech algorithm, which it touts as identifying 97 per cent of this content ultimately removed from the platform. But this algorithm does not work in all dialects, according to leaked research. It covers only two of the six languages spoken in Ethiopia, for example. In Afghanistan, the platform took action on an estimated .23 per cent of hate speech, according to Facebook research, due to gaps in its language capabilities. In India, Facebook’s largest market, leaked research highlighted a lack of relevant language classifiers to flag content. (Importantly, this may not be the only reason such content was allowed to remain: the Wall Street Journal previously reported that political considerations affected decisions about whether or not to remove Hindu nationalist pages and content.) One leaked study estimated that Facebook took action globally on as little as 3 to 5 per cent of hate speech and less than 1 per cent of violence incitement.

Facebook has taken some steps to address these imbalances. Partnerships with NGOs give the platform greater insight into conflict contexts. (Crisis Group is a partner of Facebook and in that capacity has occasionally been in contact with Facebook regarding misinformation on the platform that could provoke deadly violence.) Facebook has also provided digital literacy training to aid in reducing the spread of harmful content. Facebook’s spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal: “In countries at risk for conflict and violence, we have a comprehensive strategy, including relying on global teams with native speakers covering over 50 languages, educational resources, and partnerships with local experts and third-party fact checkers to keep people safe”. Such efforts are useful, and should be expanded.

Improving the platform’s ability to reduce harmful content across languages and local contexts is a central component of reducing the potential for violence offline. This includes channelling more funding toward expanding moderation teams and addressing language gaps, which can help limit the flow of hate speech, misinformation and incitement to violence. For example, Facebook increased the resources dedicated to Myanmar after it publicly acknowledged its role in the Rohingya atrocities. Crisis Group research shows that in part because of this past experience, the platform moved quickly and aggressively to remove pages linked to the military junta after the February 2021 coup.

But content moderation alone will not be enough. Haugen’s testimony lays bare how Facebook’s algorithm is in some cases misaligned with reducing conflict. Making the algorithm less engagement-driven would not directly address the presence of harmful content, but it could make it less visible. Nor does this have to mean shifting to a chronological news feed, as Haugen recommended: Facebook made changes to the algorithm in relation to health and civic content in the spring of 2020, and in certain conflict-affected countries including Myanmar and Ethiopia. Changes could also target the “explore” feature, which prompts users to look at new pages or accounts they may be interested in – one way that Facebook is inadvertently still advertising pages linked to Myanmar’s military junta. Fully understanding the consequences of any algorithmic changes, particularly in developing contexts, would be greatly facilitated by Facebook disclosing its own research and sharing more data with outside experts.

In the midst of all the criticism, it is easy to lose sight of the many positive benefits of social media for conflict-affected countries. Facebook has helped in the organisation of mass protest movements. It has allowed users to share information about human rights abuses in conflict zones. It offers an alternative source of news in countries where the media is heavily regulated by the state. But the downsides have been substantial. With more resources, research and reform, Facebook could reduce them.