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“All politics is local,” Tip O’Neill, the patron saint of American politics, famously repeated throughout his very long political career. By that, the former House Speaker meant that positions taken at all levels answer to local demands.
The adage is key to understanding much of the jockeying in Europe over the joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran. O’Neill’s hostility to President Reagan’s Central American policies was instilled in him not by geopolitical considerations but by nuns from the liberal Maryknoll Order who lived in O’Neill’s Boston. The same holds true today in Iran.
The two Irish politicians, Tip and the Gipper, were famous for trying to resolve their differences over a tipple of Jameson at the White House after the workday was done, swapping stories and ribbing each other. But funding for different warring bands in Nicaragua and El Salvador was no joke.
Nor is Iran today.
In Spain, there is the preening Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. He’s become the darling of leftists such as Alexander Soros and the President of Iran himself by adopting the most extreme position against the attempt to liberate Iran.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has adroitly positioned himself as President Donald Trump’s biggest supporter among serving European leaders. This has surprised many who have heard Merz’s anti-MAGA positions.
But no less surprising has been criticism by the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland. On the day missiles started raining down on Tehran, it issued a statement calling for “International law and humanitarian international law” to be “observed without restriction.”
That has become fodder for those here in the U.S. who want to keep Vice President JD Vance’s political aspirations in check.
To be sure, Germany and Spain are not the only two countries where local concerns may be dictating international policy. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s pusillanimous response to the U.S.-Israeli attacks, which he refuses to help, comes as his Labour Party struggles.
Just one day before the start of hostilities, Labour suffered an embarrassing loss to the Greens in a byelection for a seat in Westminster in the Greater Manchester area. Clearly, Starmer is concerned with eroding support to Labour’s Left, with the two parties polling around 16%, while on the Right, Reform tops all parties at 25%.
All these positions may be uncynically held by those who espouse them. But even if that is true, they respond to perceived realities in their home countries. The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is unpopular everywhere in Europe, but a look under the hood provides much clarity to the different positions.
Sanchez is beset by corruption scandals more than any other Spanish politician of the modern era. Even his own wife and brother are being investigated.
Under normal circumstances, his government would fall, especially since his Socialist Workers Party leads a minority government with only one other partner, a Marxist alliance called Sumar.
The government, however, would likely survive a no-confidence motion in parliament — Las Cortes — because none of the minor parties supporting his government from outside the government have an incentive to see the government fall.
These include separatists who want Catalonia and the Basque Country to break away from Spain, political supporters of the terrorist Basque group ETA, and Republican communists who would not mind if some ill befell the Royal Family. None of them would fare as well under a government run by the Right.
But with corruption investigations consuming headlines every day and monopolizing nightly news, the margin for error became much tighter.
The “Koldo case” is the one most talked about. It involves allegations of bribes engineered by Koldo Garcia, an adviser to the departed Minister of Transportation Jose Luis Abalos, who is also implicated in the kickbacks.
Then there is Santos Cerdan, a former intimate adviser to Sanchez, also implicated in Koldo’s contract rigging. He was released from prison three months ago after spending five months behind bars and is still under investigation.
Sanchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, is also being investigated for influence-peddling, as is his brother David Sanchez, under an inquiry for the same charges.
Lastly, there is the secret landing at Madrid airport just after midnight on Jan. 20, 2020, of a private Falcon jet carrying the then Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, whom Trump has installed as President of Venezuela since capturing the drug-trafficking former dictator Nicolas Maduro on Jan. 3.
Rodriguez’s landing violated EU rules that banned her arrival on EU territory because of her involvement in the Maduro cartel. But not only did she and her 40 suitcases spend the night at the VIP lounge, but she also met Abalos. The businessman Victor de Aldama, who organized her meetings, has testified that Rodriguez tried to sell him 104 sanctioned gold bars at a discount price.
Not surprisingly, the PSOE is at an all-time low. According to Politico, the socialist party was at 26% on Feb. 19, about a week before the attack on Iran, while the two conservative parties, the center-right Partido Popular and the insurgent Right party Vox, are at 32% and 19%, respectively.
Well, guess what the media is no longer talking about? Corruption and low polling have disappeared from the front pages now that Sanchez has not only come out completely against the attack but barred the U.S. from using American bases in Spain to conduct the fighting. “The position of the government of Spain can be summarized in four words: NO to the war,” Sanchez posted on X on March 4.
Trump threatened to cut off all trade with Spain, and there are reports that two ships and a dozen planes have left the NATO bases in Spain bound for Iran.
And it is not even clear that Sanchez’s gamble paid off. The newspaper El Mundo reported last Thursday that 46.8% supported Sanchez’s decision to openly defy a NATO ally, while 47% opposed. One thing is for sure, however: Sanchez has consolidated a Left that was disheartened.
A similar sifting of inside politics would explain Merz’s comparatively strong support for the war.
On March 1, one day after the start of the campaign, and while Sanchez was offering bravado and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was burying the “special relationship” by distancing himself from the operation, Merz offered a candid assessment.
“Now isn’t the moment to lecture our partners and allies. Despite all doubts, we share many of their objectives, even if we ourselves aren’t capable of actually achieving them,” Merz posted on X. He hopped on a plane, went to the White House, and showed his support. Merz has also boldly stated, “We stand with Israel.”
With Operation Epic Fury garnering the backing of only 15% of Germans, why would the chancellor do this?
We can’t discount the fact that AfD’s fatuous and self-defeating statement was issued a day earlier. Again, according to Politico’s tracker, Merz’s Christian-Democratic Union and AfD are locked in mortal combat over the right side of the political spectrum. On Feb. 27, one day before the attack and the AfD statement, they were both at 25% support. Two days later, the CDU had opened a two-point lead.
Just as opposition to the war is concentrated on the Left in Spain, Germany, and throughout Europe, support for Uncle Sam weighs much more heavily on the Right — the electorate where the CDU and AfD are mud-wrestling.
Merz, a canny former BlackRock executive, and the CDU, one of Europe’s oldest parties, have outflanked AfD, which has scored an own goal.
I have talked to or texted at least three AfD politicians, and all three were livid with their party’s leadership and their clumsy statement. They told me that elected leaders had taken to Signal Chat groups and were deciding what to do. A majority of AfD’s elected leaders support what Trump is trying to do, they told me.
The vitriol was focused not on Alice Weidel, the better-known of the party’s two co-chairs, but on the other, Tino Chrupalla, who’s responsible for the statement. The 51-year-old hails from Saxony, which used to be in East Germany. The East Germans are still different from their Western cousins, less pro-West, more pro-Moscow. Local politics, again.
This no longer represents the entire views of a party that may soon be the largest in all of Germany, and which is trying to modernize. It is described in the media as “far-right” and “pro-Nazi,” and it does still have members who are beyond the pale.
Maximilian Krah is one. An MEP, Krah said in 2024 that one shouldn’t condemn all SS members as automatically criminals, pointing out that at the end of the war, there were so many people who had joined Hitler’s paramilitary organization, infamous for war crimes, that even the writer “Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS.”
At the same time, many AfD elected officials are just conservatives concerned about mass immigration, the erasure of German culture, and the Left’s cultural gains. They want to recapture the cultural ground lost to the Left in recent years, whereas center-right parties such as the CDU seem happy to relinquish the lost ground, on race, gender, etc. These AfD politicians are now seething with Chrupalla and murmuring about throwing him out of leadership.
These distinctions do not seem to matter to those who want to criticize Vance. The Vice President last year rightly warned in a speech in Munich that attempts underway in Europe to suppress the freedom of speech of parties such as AfD, or even a drive to ban them, would violate Western norms and put the alliance in danger.
At either end of the spectrum, both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal used the AfD statement to go after Vance for saying the right thing and meeting Weidel last year.
The local news angle helps us understand what is taking place. It was wrong for Tip O’Neill to cut off funds to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, and it is wrong to play politics with Epic Fury.
