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News ID: 87293
Publish Date : 05 February 2021 - 21:41

Leader: Germany Should Retain Nord Stream Project

BERLIN (Dispatches) -- Germany should not drop support for the planned Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia over blogger Alexei Navalny, as "feel-good moralizing” is not foreign policy, the man best placed to be the next German chancellor told Reuters.
Pointing to U.S. purchases of crude oil from Russia, Armin Laschet described himself as a political realist - or "Realpolitiker” - and said: "We have to take the world as it is in order to make it better.”
Laschet, who last month won an election to the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), said both values and interests were important in diplomacy.
"But feel-good moralizing and domestic slogans are not foreign policy,” Laschet, who is premier of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said in an interview that focused on understanding his little-known views on international affairs.
Laschet’s election to the CDU chair makes him the frontrunner to take over as chancellor from Merkel, who after 15 years in office has said she will not seek a fifth term following September elections.
Asked directly whether Germany should change course and renounce the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, Laschet replied: "For 50 years, even in the aggressive times of the Cold War, Germany has bought gas from the Soviet Union, now from Russia. The German government is following the right course.”
Germany is facing growing pressure to repudiate Nord Stream 2 over the Navalny affair: at home, from the ecologist Greens - potential coalition partners for Laschet’s CDU - and abroad from the United States, and much of Europe.
Navalny, sentenced on Tuesday to 3-1/2 years in jail after a Moscow court ruled he had violated the terms of his parole, was arrested on Jan. 17 after returning to Russia from Germany where he was treated for alleged poisoning with a military-grade nerve agent.
Moscow has accused the West of hysteria and double standards over Navalny and told it to stay out of its internal affairs.
The project, set to launch this year, has split the EU, with some members saying it will undermine traditional gas transit state Ukraine and deepen the EU’s energy reliance on Russia.