There is an air of déjà vu in Brussels. In the capital of the EU, the attitude of Germany reminds some of the behavior of European countries at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, assures Handelsblatt. In 2020, Member States “were fighting over protective equipment, masks and respirators” and played the card of “national selfishness”. Today, diplomats fear that Berlin will fall “in energy nationalism” par “fear of lack” linked to the war in Ukraine and the decrease in Russian gas supplies. To the detriment of the European plan for the search for common alternatives called REPowerEU.
“At the origin of this wave of criticism, the visits of the Minister of Economy, Robert Habeck, to Qatar, Norway and the United States to discuss additional gas deliveries”, noted in March the economic daily of Düsseldorf. Since then, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has visited Senegal, Niger and South Africa in May with similar objectives. He only waited five months before making such visits. Angela Merkel, she had let two years pass before making her first official trip to the African continent.
Strategic visits
For the German wave, this eagerness is not trivial. “Olaf Scholz had calculated his travel stages well”, asserts the chain. Senegal currently heads the African Union and is home to a major gas field; Niger (where Annalena Baerbock, the German Foreign Minister, also visited) is a staunch ally of Germany and a “Buffer state in the face of the difficult situation in Mali”; and South Africa is a dynamic economic power, which is part of the G20.
Above all, emphasizes the daily newspaper, Dakar and Pretoria all bet d