Joe Biden has a lesson in democracy for Angela Merkel

Joe Biden’s call last week for the US and Europe to re-energise their alliance against the global forces of authoritarianism made no mention of the steady march of illiberalism in Hungary and Poland. The US president is a polite man. As he spoke virtually, at the Munich Security Conference, I can only presume that he was sparing the blushes of German chancellor Angela Merkel.

When Biden talks about reinvigorating democracy he sounds as if he means it. Perhaps it’s a generational thing. The rhetoric is infused with a certain passion. Flanked by Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron, Biden’s warning that the west is at an inflection point in the contest of values with an assertive China and a defiant Russia carried conviction: “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it. Strengthen it. Renew it.”

Biden has offered more than warm words in the wake of the wanton trashing of America’s international leadership by Donald Trump. The US has returned to the Paris climate change accord and the World Health Organization, backed extending the last remaining nuclear arms pact with Moscow and signalled it wants to rejoin the nuclear agreement with Iran. By itself, US re-engagement solves nothing. But it does open up the possibility of solutions. 

The president is putting the likes of Merkel on the spot. Europe yields to no one in its stated devotion to a liberal multilateral order. Biden, though, is probing the gap between words and deeds. Trump’s ugly nationalism was a cause for finger-wagging but an excuse also for inaction. Biden threatens to expose Merkel’s business-first approach to those cherished European values.

Of course, Merkel agreed at the conference, the west must stand by its principles in the face of a rising China and revisionist Russia. But these were complex relationships. The US and Europe, she noted, sometimes had different perspectives. Implicit here was a warning that western criticism of the repression of China’s Uighur and Beijing’s suppression of democracy in Hong Kong must not get in the way of Germany’s exports. Sanctions on Vladimir Putin’s regime in response to Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory were all very well as long as they did not halt the construction of a new Baltic Sea pipeline to deliver Russian gas directly to Germany.

Berlin is as firm as any in its public declarations that adherence to the rule of law by would-be autocrats in Hungary and Poland is non-negotiable — that is, as long as the insistence on such values does not collide with Germany’s commercial interests in those nations.

The slide to authoritarianism in Budapest and Warsaw last year prompted an attempt by Brussels to link future EU funding to the basic principles of democracy. This was a belated admission that Prime Minister Viktor Orban, leader of Hungary’s far-right Fidesz party and an admirer of Trump and Putin, and his Law and Justice Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki have presided over blatant assaults on judicial independence.

With the two men holding up the EU budget, Merkel orchestrated a compromise that drew the immediate sting from the new rules. Germany’s big automobile companies, which are heavily invested in Hungarian production plants, breathed a sigh of relief. In Hungary, the politically appointed media regulator tightened Orban’s grip on the country by closing an influential liberal radio station.

Orban acts with impunity because, well, Merkel allows him to. One sanction that would hurt him would be the expulsion of Fidesz from the European People’s party — the club of mainstream national centre-right groups in the European parliament. Fidesz is at present suspended from the grouping, but efforts to expel Orban have been repeatedly undermined by Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union.

None of the above is to say that Biden will not face his own awkward compromises between democratic values and realpolitik. The US has more than its fair share of disreputable allies. It’s obvious, too, that the west has to find ways to work with China and Russia even as it pushes back against their efforts to subvert democratic systems.

The EU, however, styles itself as a “normative” power. It is nothing without its ironclad commitment to the open, liberal and democratic order it holds up as a model for the rest of the world. Germany’s postwar legitimacy was built on the same values. Now it is the bloc’s most powerful nation.

Realism in global affairs often demands unsavoury compromises. Cynicism refuses to admit these trade-offs. If there was a cynic, virtually speaking, in Munich, it was not Biden.

philip.stephens@ft.com