A historic vote to boost spending on defence and infrastructure shows the country is shedding its excess of caution \u2013 and its complacency<\/p>\n
Few people outside Berlin\u2019s political bubble will have heard of Lars Klingbeil<\/a>. They will soon, though, as he is about to become one of the pivotal players in the new German government. The co-leader of the Social Democratic party (SPD) captured the moment in this week\u2019s debate in the Bundestag, one of the most important in Germany\u2019s recent history.<\/p>\n \u201cA few weeks ago, many would have thought that we couldn\u2019t have come to an agreement. The differences were too great,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat differentiates this country from others is that we are ready, as parties of the democratic centre, to find solutions and not to leave the ground for populist extremism to blossom.\u201d<\/p>\n John Kampfner is the author of In Search of Berlin, Blair\u2019s Wars and Why the Germans Do It Better<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A historic vote to boost spending on defence and infrastructure shows the country is shedding its excess of caution \u2013 and its complacency Few people outside Berlin\u2019s political bubble will have heard of Lars Klingbeil. They will soon, though, as he is about to become one of the pivotal players in the new German government. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}