Irish Examiner view: History will judge US interventions harshly
While conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz is expected to be elected chancellor in Germany, psephologists will be studying how many votes Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) secures. Picture: Michael Probst/AP
Most of the attention in the German federal elections tomorrow will be on the performance of the rightist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has been consistently polling in second place.
While the conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz is expected to be elected chancellor ahead of his rival incumbent, the SDP’s Olaf Scholz, in a coalition government, it is how many votes can be garnered by the new force in Europe’s biggest economy that will have analysts, psephologists, and commentators working overtime.
But there’s another party, which would seem at this moment to be a minority taste, which has a policy which may increasingly be in harmony with these times, mining a popular dislike for wealthy foreigners attempting to influence national elections.
Both Elon Musk, in his Lord of Chaos role, and US vice-president JD Vance have been throwing shapes in support of the far-right AfD. Mr Vance pointedly chose to meet its leader, Alice Weidel, during his visit to Munich.
Step forward the far-left Linke party, descended from the East German communists who built the Berlin Wall and created the Stasi, the ubiquitous secret police. It has seen a surge of support for its policies of affordable housing, income equality, climate protection, and pacifism, and its call to tax billionaires out of existence.
For the precariat — and there are many in even advanced capitalist societies who fulfill that definition — there is an enhanced sense of chafing as they experience stagnating or declining real wages while simultaneously witnessing a relentlessly growing gap between the very rich and the poor.
Nowhere is this more visibly personified than in stunningly affluent Americans — Musk is perceived as American despite being South African-born and Canadian by citizenship — hectoring the natives on their political choices.
The US is a country where wealth is much admired. But it is a nation where the share of economic growth going to average workers, which rose for generations after the Second World War, has fallen sharply.
Exactly the opposite has happened to that country’s super-wealthy, among whose number we can include Donald Trump, the supporters who lined up with him on the inauguration stage at the Capitol Rotunda 34 days ago and, of course, Musk.
In US history, the number of millionaires increased from six to 100 between 1800 and 1850.
By the mid 1980s, there were 66,000 “super-rich” households worth $10m or more. By 2019 it had reached 693,000.
Becoming wealthy is the American dream. But when more people are left behind than flourish, this leads to popular discontent and instability. It is key to Trump’s domestic success that he has been able to articulate this resentment in his political favour despite his wealthy trappings.
But Europe and, in particular Germany, is going to be different.
That country has long contained a radical left-wing streak. MP Heidi Reichinnek, 36, is one of Linke’s most commanding speakers.
Like Angela Merkel she was raised in East Germany. Unlike the former chancellor, she has a tattoo on her forearm celebrating Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist revolutionary murdered by the Freikorps in Berlin following the First World War.
In a video she declares an old slogan of the left: “Resist fascism in this country. To the barricades.”
It has been watched more than 30m times during its first week online.
The American intervention in Germany’s election was not a good idea in the first instance. And it will be ill-judged as history comes to mark the changes of this decade.
Our writer Richard Fitzpatrick was quick out of the starting blocks to laud the 30th anniversary of what may have been the greatest Irish sitcom of all time.
has its supporters. Modern viewers will champion and . Those with a taste for unconstructed retro will shout out for the late '60s reign of .
There are people who will go to the stake for . There are even those who claim as Irish because of the centrality to the plot of Andrew Scott’s “hot priest”.
But it is difficult to see beyond the claims of , with its other main characters Ted, Dougal, Jack, and Mrs Doyle, who first brought us their tales from Craggy Island in April 1995.
The creators of the series, which ran for 25 episodes, were Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, who met while working on magazine. They said the basic premise was to answer the question: “What do priests do during the week when they’re not in church?”
Finding out has produced some of the most brilliant and imaginative writing in the comedy canon, which sadly ended when the show’s star, Dermot Morgan, died after suffering a heart attack, aged 45, the day after filming wrapped for the third and final series.
Sorely missed, but not forgotten. We wonder what Ted would make of the modern world of 2025? Down with this sort of thing, to be sure.
Consumers who like to post waspish comments online about services and goods with which they are dissatisfied have good reason to think twice after a ruling in Ireland’s High Court this week.
A judge ordered a man to pay €40,000 damages after he submitted defamatory comments about a plumbing firm to the Trustpilot platform which says it provides “real reviews by real people”.
Trustpilot is popular. Its 2024 ‘Transparency Report’ notes that 53m reviews were published in 2023, a 17% increase year-on-year.
At the same time, 3.3m “fake” reviews were withdrawn, an extraction rate of 6%.
Just over eight out of 10 of those decisions were made by automated technology with the others requiring “specialist” intervention, by which we suppose they mean human beings.
In this case it was four comments posted in February 2022 which led to the Four Courts. An aggrieved customer described a company as “con men”, “gangsters”, “rogue traders”, and “cowboys.”
Such accusations might be expected to catch the attention of even the most junior of paralegals. Two were removed after 24 hours and two were removed after four days.
Venting his opinion cost this customer €40,000 (before costs), thus illustrating common misconceptions about the place of free speech in our society.
The judge, contemplating the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court, said he considered it to be in the “moderate” category of seriousness of defamation.
The Trustpilot case was far from being the only eye-catching libel encounter this week.
In a claim which might have come straight from the pages of the author AP Herbert, lawyers swapped arguments in what could be known as The Case of the Christian Louboutin Shoes.
A mother and daughter lost their defamation application for €75,000 after failing in an attempt to return footwear worth €675 without a receipt to the Brown Thomas shop on Grafton St.
The case turned on whether a Louboutin employee said the goods appeared to be “mock”, or not authentic, in the hearing of other shoppers, causing embarrassment to the two women.
The judge decided that the words were not uttered and threw out the cases with an order for costs against the mother and daughter.
These two disparate examples of the perils of reputational conflict before judges come after the appointment of barrister and Fianna Fáil TD Jim O’Callaghan as minister with the tough and reforming brief for justice, home affairs, and migration in the new Government.
Previously, as a backbencher, Mr O’Callaghan had criticised the proposal in the Defamation Bill to abolish juries for libel actions.
That bill failed to pass into legislation because of the election campaign but is now said to be “a priority”. Mr O’Callaghan affirms it will be passed without significant amendments.
That is all to the good. Juries usually like to disproportionately punish traditional publishers on the false assumption that they have deep pockets and wide reach, a belief 30 years out of date.
Its overall consequence is to chill the very freedom that so many citizens say they value.
