The sudden departure of a good man as Germany's president is profoundly destabilising for Europe. Horst Köhler has resigned following a hate-filled press campaign against him fuelled by headline-pandering German politicians who fail to see that 21st-century Germany is no longer the post-1945 dwarf orphan of world politics.
Köhler expressed the self-evident truth that German military power was now an expression of German national interests. His remarks would be commonplace in Britain, where the new foreign secretary, William Hague, told the Commons last week that Britain would seek to be a force in world affairs. If Köhler was president of France, it would be axiomatic that France sees its commitment to a high level of defence spending and first-class army, navy and airforce as an element in its role and standing in the world.
But Germany is different. Köhler made the point that German military capability was relevant to German interests, including German economic interests. As the world's second biggest exporter after China, Germany has a self-evident interest in keeping the world as open as possible for the free flow of trade and commerce, and to help defeat the growing scourge of piracy. This is so worrying Nato policymakers that an entire session at the Nato parliamentary assembly's spring session this weekend in Riga was devoted to the question of how to ensure peace and free traffic on the high seas.
His remarks were grotesquely and cynically misinterpreted by the German press, which is now febrile, excited and seems to resemble more the newspaper operations of Citizen Kane than the once sturdy, balanced, objective reporting we used to associate with German papers. There is no political centre in Germany any more. The social democrats are gouged on their left by Die Linke, much as French and Italian socialists came under constant fire from communists between 1950 and 1980. German industry is under constant attack from Green politicians whose moralising is reminiscent of 19th-century new religions that held out the promise of salvation on earth if only science and modernity were repudiated. The liberal Free Democrats are in the coalition government with Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union but cannot deliver on their deceitful promises in last year's election of massive tax cuts.
All have found voice to criticise Köhler's remarks. As they beat their chest with fake indignation, they add to the decline in respect and authority of all elected politicians who seek to escape the trap of being single-issue crowdpleasers and instead try to discuss complex and nuanced matters. Merkel has faced a non-stop barrage of xenophobic hate against Greece in many of Germany's newspapers. She has to deal with Nicolas Sarkozy, who has no interest in common European policy unless it explicitly promotes his increasingly dubious re-election hopes for 2012.
The EU institutions are paralysed. The European parliament is in open war with the commission and is using its powers under the Lisbon treaty to block sensible policies. Brussels has three chiefs – the commission president, José Manuel Barroso, the council president, Herman van Rompey, and the foreign minister, Cathy Ashton – who cannot agree who takes the lead on any policy. In an article in Die Zeit last week, Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing dismissed the new British government as an irrelevance and said Hague was "a committed anti-European".
In the past, Germany has always provided the passive sheet-anchor stability that allowed Europe to work. Occasionally a Schmidt or a Kohl would find partners and a surge of European integration would take place. But now Germany has no idea of what to do next. It will not admit that its economic weltanschauung, based on relentless exports and damped-down internal demand, is now part of the European and world crisis of capitalism.
Köhler has resigned with honour and dignity. But those whose loud voices called for his head are now part of the problem and will never contribute to the solution. The anti-politics and anti-politician mood now unleashed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe is ugly and is doing damage to representative democracy.