We noted that FAZ has had an interview with a German computer scientist, who told readers that under no circumstances should they ever use ChatGPT for web searches. People have asked us often how this country of engineers has turned itself into a tech Luddite. Articles like this are one of the reasons. If a professor of computer science tells you not to use AI, then for sure, this must be right?

There are things that large-language models are good at, and things they are not. To know it, you have to get your hands dirty. This is why articles such as these are so damaging. They stop people from finding out for themselves.

It takes skills and knowledge to get the most out of a classic search engine, just as it does with modern LLMs. We ourselves run manual checks on any results by consulting original sources. The system can be told to display information that is based on two independent sources, making sure that one is not quoting from the other. We note that the quality of searches has massively improved over the last year alone. It is vastly superior to what you get from web search. And besides, Google is using AI is in its search engine too.

We heard the story that the ageing owner of an SME, which shall remain unnamed, recently told a supplier that the internet was just a phase, and would go away. We would not assume that this person would be in the vanguard of AI adoption either.

Consultants and politicians who want to peddle optimism about the German economy often tell us that there is a lot of value hidden in German SMEs in the form of unused data. We are not sure this is true. The German-inspired general data protection regulation forced companies to destroy a lot of valuable data, especially about their customers. Digital processes are used in mechanical engineering, but many companies did not curate large databases of tech data in the hope that one day this information becomes valuable.

It is a cultural thing – the same force that make Germans prefer cash over cards in their shopping. One of the most successful books in the last decade was a series of anti-tech diatribes by a psychologist, Manfred Spitzer. He published numerous bestsellers with titles such as Cybersick, Digital Dementia, and the Smartphone Epidemic. This was not a campaign to stop children to take their smartphones to school, but to stop them from learning programming. Such books may exist elsewhere too but would not top the charts.

That professor, by the way, is not an expert in computer science, but in Socioinformatics, the branch of computer science that warns of the dangers of computer science.

The Federation of German Industry (BDI) was once the single most important non-state institution in the country. The BDI president Peter Leibinger yesterday gave the bleakest assessment yet we have heard coming out of Germany. Germany's industrial economy was in economic free-fall, he said. Whereas in the rest of the EU, the cyclical crisis for industry is over, the situation in Germany is dire. There is no end in sight. Leibinger said it was the biggest crisis since the beginning of the Federal Republic.

Leibinger spoke after the publication of the latest BDI report and forecast. What makes the report so gloomy are the exceedingly low levels of capacity utilisation, especially in the chemical industry, but also in mechanical engineering and steel. These are the backbones of the German economy. The situation in construction is stabilising, whereas the car industry is increasing production - whilst simultaneously still shedding jobs. 

As ever, we see cyclical and structural effects superimposed. German industry is in structural decline - because it has lost the ability to extract oligopoly rents. China is a serious competitor in most segments, including high-quality products. The global trade environment is becoming harder, and supply chains are becoming less reliable. Leibinger called for structural reforms. While useful, we struggle to see how this would arrest the decline of the car and chemicals industries. What we see in Germany is over-reliance on two few mid-tech sectors, and a lack of diversification. Structural reforms could address these issues, for example by cutting subsidies or opening up the financial sector, but we fear that these are not the structural reforms Leibinger had in mind.

The Mediterranean region is not only rich in history, culture and natural beauty. It has been the stage for conflicts since ancient times. And it has large reserves of gas, with disputed claims of who has the right to explore them.

Those exploration rights depend crucially on maritime borders in the Mediterranean sea that neighbouring states need to agree on. They define their territorial waters, their continental shelf and what constitutes their economic rights. The legal basis for this is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This treaty does not in itself set the borders. It grants coastal states certain rights but also gives them some leeway to negotiate with their neighbouring countries on the exact delineation of their exclusive economic zone, or EEZ, an area of coastal water or territory within a certain area of a country’s coast, where it has exclusive rights for fishing, drilling and other economic activities.

Of the 22 Mediterranean countries, Turkey, Israel and Syria do not accept UNCLOS as legally binding. This leads to tensions in the region, and is also one of the reasons why energy cooperation in the region has been difficult.

Last week the governments of Cyprus and Lebanon agreed a delineation of their maritime borders that followed the median line principle of the UNCLOS convention. For Cyprus, it is the third such deal, after agreements concluded with Egypt in 2003 and Israel in 2011 to formalise their maritime borders. For Lebanon, this deal was possible after they signed a deal in 2022 with Israel. The EEZ delineation is not completely defined yet. There is no deal with Syria, while Turkey continues to reject Cyprus’ border claims, arguing that the Turkish Cypriots were sidelined. Border disputes remain, even if the zone concerned by the deal with Lebanon did not affect the Turkish continental shelf.

And it may have wider ripple effects. Turkey’s defence minister Yasar Guler warned against unilateral actions in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, including the Greece-Cyprus electricity interconnection and similar energy cooperations between Cyprus and Lebanon. No project in the Aegean or Eastern Mediterranean that ignores Turkey or intends to usurp its rights will be able to take place. There are also irritations and stalling negotiations between Turkey and Greece, as Macropolis reports. Greece proposed a five-party forum with Egypt, Turkey, Cyprus and Libya to facilitate delimitation agreements in the Eastern Mediterranean but got no response.

Turkey has a unique role to play, as a major actor in Syria and the only country to acknowledge and defend the rights of Northern Cyprus as distinct from the Republic of Cyprus. Turkey also does not see itself bound by the UNclos convention, even if it is internationally considered as customary international law. In 2018 Turkey concluded a deal with Libya, which created maritime borders that cut right into the EEZ from Greece and Cyprus. This nearly led to a hot incident when Turkey started to send exploration ships into this disputed zone and blocked a drilling ship from the Italian energy company Eni in the same year, as well as other exploration attempts.

The continued dispute complicates the plans for large scale energy projects in the region, such as the EastMed pipeline, which cannot move forward without Turkey’s involvement and cooperation.

China is an ancient culture that embraced our European cultures, took what they liked best, and did their own version of it. They turbocharged engineering to unthinkable levels, overtaking the Germans in key sectors, be it in renewable energy or electric cars. They also conquered French culture in their own way, be it in fashion or food. Shein or Temu offers fast fashion to the French quite successfully at much cheaper prices. And now it is even excelling in winemaking!

Michel Bettane, France’s most widely respected wine critic, came to the conclusion after his tasting tour in China that Chinese wines are now outshining the French. Here too, what matters is technology and the freedom to innovate.

In September 2025 a group of international experts led by Bettane tasted around 300 premium wines from China. Bettane noted that Chinese wines have reached a level of maturity unthinkable 15 years ago. What impressed him most was the technical precision. The winemaking standards were found to be superior to what Bettane often finds in annual French tastings. China’s vast geography offers limitless possibilities for wine growers and the Chinese got better over the years at finding the right grapes for the right land. They are also unburdened by hierarchical institutions and regulatory structures in Europe and can thus boldly experiment. Bettane sees China as the most dynamic frontiers in global winemaking.

So here we are, after China already won the World Bread Competition in France pushing the French into second place, now they are also conquering the wine world. Nothing is sacred when it comes to good French food. What will it be next? Cheese perhaps? Is this how technological progress reaches old-fashioned trades with its bonds to history and culture? Will this in turn help us in Europe to get out of our innovation paralysis?

It is also interesting to look at this process from the other side. Would we in Europe embrace Chinese culture in a similar way? Only to a certain extent. We have Chinese restaurants, silk, porcelain, tea and TikTok. Would we ever dream of adopting their cultural identities in the same rigorousness as they do? Would we inspire to learn their language and imitate their styles?

It is ironic that in the current setup we look like the museum and they look like a fresh breeze of air. Even if historically, it was the other way around.

Serhij K., a Ukrainian man suspected to have acted as the ring leader for the group behind the explosion of the Nord Stream pipelines, was extradited from Italy to Germany yesterday. He will be formally charged today. Most likely, the case will be heard at the Hanseatic High Court in Hamburg.

His Italian lawyer, who fought the extradition in front of the Italian supreme court, used some interesting arguments to stop the extradition. At the time of the explosions Serhij K. said he was a member of the Ukrainian military and therefore enjoys military immunity. Under international law, soldiers who do not carry out obvious criminal acts, should not be legally liable for their actions. It is interesting to hear that the detonation of physical infrastructure, co-owned by a Nato country, would fall under the category of not-obviously criminal. We heard similar arguments from Poland, where the courts in the end refused the extradition of a suspect.

Serhij K. links to the military and the Ukrainian secret service appears to contradict the original claim, by the Ukrainian government, that this was a privately funded operation. The sheer mass of detonators used for the explosion would also suggest that this is an act only a well-stock military is capable of.

We have been asked to explain why the German government did not stop the investigation on grounds of national security, which is clearly what would have happened in other countries. This is legally possible in Germany too. What happened here is that the investigation began when the German government suspected Russia to be behind the attack. They did not suspect that the investigation would take such a turn. At that time, the prosecutor started to leak information to journalists – which in itself is quite unusual – and raises questions of whether the government may have considered to block the investigation. Once the information was out, it was no longer politically possible to suppress the information.

It will take some time for this case to start, but the proceedings will be public. We expect that the case will have a profound impact on public opinion. The main political beneficiary is most likely the AfD, a party that opposes Germany’s support for Ukraine and whose leaders has just doubled down with the promise to reopen the pipeline.

While all media is focussed on Ukraine’s peace deal at the moment, what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon is a cautionary tale of how a peace deal or a ceasefire deal work in practice. The 20 point peace deal for Gaza did achieve a return of the hostages and reduction in military operations. Yet there is still no real ceasefire in Gaza nor in Lebanon. And a real prospect of peace is still elusive: the situation is in limbo, with no prospect of reaching the next stage of the deal.

Donald Trump’s peace deal is breaking into pieces. The number of trucks entering Gaza certainly has increased, but numbers vary depending on which side you are asking. Quietly too, Israel took charge of the next phase of Trump’s peace plan, which was not spelled out explicitly, dividing Gaza into red and green zones with a yellow line to distinguish where Israeli forces are in charge and where Palestinians are. This is not unlike the plans to divide the West Bank in the Oslo Accords. Given the fate of that accord, we are sceptical that this road will lead to peace.

In Lebanon, a ceasefire has officially been in place for more than a year, but this is not how it looks on the ground. The Lebanese people are even preparing for an escalation of Israeli attacks. Egypt sent its intelligence chief and foreign minister this week amid a worsening security situation. Their visit comes days after an Israeli strike killed Hezbollah’s military chief in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

One of the contested points is disarmament of radical factions for the next stage to begin. The US gave Lebanon a deadline until the end of this year for Hezbollah to disarm. Israel insists disarming has to come first before they decide to retreat or relinquish control over Lebanese territories they still hold. But IDF’s attacks in Southern Lebanon provoking local communities and thus is inflaming the conflict. A vicious cycle which serves both sides, the IDF and Hezbollah, to claim that they cannot possibly be the first to retreat.

What would happen if Hezbollah were to disarm? Would they not claim more political weight given the size of the Shia community in Lebanon? Does it not suit politicians in Lebanon and Israel that Hezbollah is split with a political representation weakened by its radical arm, a target that can easily be blamed? Without a strong determination to break the cycle, the status quo of low-level aggression is likely to go on with no real prospect of peace.

What Trump’s peace plan did achieve, however, is a shift in narrative. No one talks about Israel’s genocide in the press anymore. Israel‘s government no longer treats every Palestinian as a terrorist, but as potential workers to help constructing Trump’s vision of Gaza. There is still a long way towards even getting to the pathway towards self-determination.

It is interesting to note that everyone outside the conflict like to tell the Palestinian and the Lebanese authorities what they need to do to develop a state that can co-exist next to Israel. No such lecturing is directed towards the Israeli government.

Amongst the Europeans, France spearheaded the move to recognise Palestine as a state, without having to fulfil all the conditions others imposed. They even set up working groups with Palestinians to work out a constitution. But the reality is still written on the ground of that land, with the international community acting more as a by-stander and an alibi for Israel that it no longer acts alone.

The EU summit with the African Union in Angola was overshadowed by Ukraine, as everything else is in European politics these days. In the long-run, Europe’s relationship with Africa is the more important issue. The European leaders arrived at the seventh EU-Africa summit since the process started 25 years ago with ambitious plans to secure diversified access to critical minerals and to present themselves as reliable partners. But its extractive past cast a shadow over diplomacy, and African leaders remain wary of promises that echo colonial patterns.

Africa’s copper, cobalt and rare earths have become essential to Europe’s decarbonisation and digital transition, especially as the EU tries to diversify supply chains away from China. The EU framed the two-day summit as a chance to reset partnerships and accelerate Global Gateway projects, highlighting the Lobito corridor as its flagship example: a €116m investment to modernise a railway originally built by Belgian and Portuguese colonial authorities to extract rubber, ivory and minerals for Europe. The corridor now aims to transport cobalt and copper from the DRC and Zambia to Angola’s Atlantic coast.

EU leaders emphasised that this new era of raw materials diplomacy is meant to avoid repeating extractive colonial practices. But an element of distrust remains that the scheme prioritises western industrial needs over African development. The AU has insisted that any minerals strategy align with its own 2024 mining vision, centred on high environmental and social standards and increased value addition on the continent. China is already adapting to those standards and retains a lead built over two decades of infrastructure for mining access, while operating without the historical baggage that continues to shape African perceptions of Europe. 

Emmanuel Macron arrived in Angola as part of a wider African tour aimed at turning the page on French failures in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, where juntas forced French troops to withdraw in 2022 and 2023. After repeated attempts to address historical injustices in recent years, French influence has sharply declined. This anti-French sentiment can be seen as a proxy for broader frustrations with Europe’s paternalistic posture. France instead has been focusing on relations with English- and Portuguese-speaking African countries where it has no colonial history.

Some of the summit’s other concrete outcomes included a pledge by the European Investment Bank of more than €2bn for renewable projects across Africa over the next two years. A joint AU-EU declaration also reaffirmed commitments to Agenda 2063, the Global Gateway, and cooperation on an AU-led peace architecture. Europe’s ability to move past its extractive legacy will hinge on whether these commitments translate into visible results.

The Europeans invented the art of strategic diplomacy, but appear to have forgotten most of it. The Russians still have some of it. We read a long interview in Komsomolskaya Pravda with one Russian strategic thinker - Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs. What interested us more than his predictably biased take on the Ukraine war was a sharp observation about the EU. He said the current geopolitical situation favours countries with top-down decision-making political systems, like those of the US, China and Russia. Political structures like the EU struggle to take strategic decisions in such environments.

We see this is a fundamental problem because there exists no remedy that is within our reach. The only hypothetical cure would be to turn the EU into a political union. It would be an understatement to say that there exists no majority for this. The bigger problem is that there hardly exists any advocacy for this any more.

That already became apparent during the euro area’s sovereign debt crisis. After Mario Draghi used the ECB’s balance sheet as a generalised backstop, we noted that interest in a fiscal union ended abruptly. Economists were drawing up their own technical proposals. The EU discovered a legal mechanism to raise joint debt, which they used for the Covid recovery fund. But this was only a one-off funding instrument that created a flow of debt, but not a stock. Even if these instruments are rolled over and were to become officially classified as sovereign, the EU will not have sovereign tax raising and debt issuing powers. Even if they were considered sovereign, it would only be so because it is ultimately national.

The current state of play in the discussions about the future of Europe’s defence is heading in a similar direction as the discussion did after 2012. At a recent conference in which various European experts discussed Europe’s future defence architecture, the consensus was that joint procurement would be unrealistic. They have already given up the fight. In virtually all categories of defence procurement, Russia not only spends more, but spends more efficiently. Russia also innovates more. We find it ironic that Europeans invoke realism in defence of policies that have absolutely no chance in succeeding. 

Like all Russian commentators Lukyanov is biased in his commentary on current affairs. But he is spot on in his characterisation of the EU. The way the EU is constructed, it cannot pursue strategic interests. For its original creators, this was a feature, not bug. The EU, like its bonds, is sub-sovereign by design.

How this new multipolar world has changed was very visible at the COP30 negotiations in Belém. It was not only that the US was absent, depriving the EU of its natural ally. During the two weeks of this negotiation marathon, Europe also overestimated its own influence as one of the most advanced in climate action and underestimated the power of the Brics+ countries.

The EU bungled up its climate change diplomacy right from the start. EU countries were late in handing in their climate plans only days before COP30 began leaving no time for building up diplomatic leverage. Towards the end, talks nearly collapsed after a bitter stand-off between the European-led alliance of more than 80 countries against a Saudi-led opposition and its allies, including Russia and India. Only after the EU threatened to veto the final text of the deal last Friday did they get some concessions. To appease the Europeans, the Brazilian presidency of COP30 tweaked the text with a reference to a deal on transitioning away from fossil fuels, with discussions about how to achieve this planned for the coming year. The opposition of oil-producing countries achieved a proviso that this transition was voluntary commitment rather than the legally binding decision.

Divisions inside the EU also prevented them from joining initiatives for greater climate ambitions. Last Tuesday the EU was absent from a 82 country call organised by Colombia to draw up a roadmap for the transitioning away from fossil fuels. While many EU countries supported this, Italy and Poland could not agree at the time. Similarly, the EU was not amongst the 29 signatories that sent a letter to the COP30 presidency to complain that the final text draft did not contain references to roadmaps and other efforts. The majority of the EU countries were supportive, but 10 EU countries including Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Slovakia, did not.

The EU’s delegation’s efforts to speak with one voice for more ambitious climate goals was even undercut by their own leader. Ursula von der Leyen who spoke at around the same time at the G20 summit asserting that the EU is not fighting fossil fuels, but emissions from fossil fuels.

There were a couple of other misses: The roadmap on deforestation was dropped from the final deal. This was not what climate change activists and the EU had hoped to achieve. So were key provisions on the exploitation of critical minerals, often accompanied with human rights abuses in some countries, blocked by China and Russia. There also was a lack of climate finance for global South countries, which are carrying the costs of the climate crisis they have not caused. Specific texts ended up unfunded or were cut.

China also achieved a diplomatic victory for the final text to include a clause saying that:

“measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral measures, should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”

This directly aims at the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, which is due to come into effect for countries exporting to the EU in January 2026. This mechanism was to promote climate change action by encouraging manufacturers seeking to enter the European market to produce with low carbon footprints in order to align with EU standards. For China, fossil fuels is a domestic matter. What mattered to Chinese diplomats in Belém was to sell tools for decarbonisation, which thanks to their technological dominance benefits Chinese manufacturers. The Europeans naively believed that the Chinese would support them for a more bolder agreement. But China finds that selling green products from electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels is a far more effective way of decarbonisation than any UN text, even if the final text was signed by some 200 countries.

COP30 was the first taster of a new world order. Brics+ countries have been more assertive and present at COP30. China turned the conference into a trade negotiation. Oil-rich countries weakened the road map of transitioning out of fossil fuels. The EU delegates complained about the more emboldened Saudi Arabia, which constantly took the floor in meetings to derail the talks. Another lesson is that Europe can no longer can count on small island states that the EU relied upon in the past. In the end the Europeans and a handful of Latin American countries, but they are no longer calling the shots.

Getting tough on migrants is a unifying theme for far-right parties across Europe. And it seems to resonate with the electorate, with migration being one of their biggest campaign themes.

The CDU decided to make its own mark on migration policies early on even before the elections. Alexander Dobrindt, Germany’s interior minister, takes pride in his tough course that tightened border controls and suspended family reunification to deter irregular migrants from coming to Germany. In an interview with the Deutsche Welle Dobrindt, he considers the 60% drop in asylum applications as a sign that irregular migration is declining significantly.

Irregular and undocumented migrants arrive in a host country without the necessary paperwork. But the fall in numbers is not just due to stricter German border controls. Migration researcher Birgit Glorius from Chemnitz University told the Tagesschau that the decline has more to do with the end of the civil war in Syria and tighter controls on the Balkan route in Greece and Austria.

Germany together with other EU countries is also looking for partners in Africa set up so-called return hubs where rejected asylum seekers could be send to even if they do not originate from that country. So the term return here refers to the perspective of an EU country, not from the perspective of the migrant.

The Greek government signalled that they would be interested in joining such an initiative. Greece’s migration minister Thanos Plevris told Greece’s public broadcaster ERT that these return hubs outside Europe would act like a deterrent. Imagine an Egyptian who embarks for Europe ends up in Uganda, Plevris muses.

But the legality and humanity of sending migrants to third countries they have no connection with is highly dubious. It is most likely to conflict with the principle of non-refoulement under international law and exposes migrants. How will EU member states, which remain responsible for human rights violations in the third countries, monitor conditions there and enforce change? It did not work so well in Tunisia under the pact the EU concluded with them.

Other previous attempts also failed. Italy outsourcing its asylum processing to Albania had to be stopped due to legal hurdles and high costs. The UK also had to suspend its attempts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.

A lot of the debate in the media focusses on irregular migration. But there is legal migration too. Most EU countries’ population is shrinking, yet the hurdles for migrants to work there are increasing. Non-EU citizens are already making up 6% of the EU workforce in 2023 and are covering occupations with labour shortages. But there are significant obstacles such as language skills in the host country or qualification recognition.