The Current Column

Politics of perseverance

For liberal values, planetary interests and a common future

Hornidge, Anna-Katharina
The Current Column (2025)

Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), The Current Column of 21 January 2025

Bonn, 21 January 2025. After the ‘super election year’ of 2024, during which more than half of the global population was summoned to the polls, the world is facing a challenging start to 2025. The arrival in office of Donald Trump on 20 January is representative of the rise in right-wing conservative forces in countries from all income groups and on all continents. Liberal, democratic values and an open, rules-based international order are increasingly being called into question and systematically undermined. As Donald Trump’s inaugural speech clearly shows, disruptive policy-making and national interests “first” are replacing constructive co-existence and cooperation as everyday instruments of international politics.

For the field of foreign and development policy and international cooperation, this means that targeted measures to expand partnerships are needed all the more urgently – not ‘despite everything’ but in fact now more than ever. Who with? (a) With like-minded parties in plurilateral settings, including the G7 and G20, to make decisions at multilateral level more likely, (b) with (democratic) middle and regional powers and (c) on specific topics with the heavyweights of tomorrow’s multipolar world: the United States, but also primarily China and India.

Why cooperation policy? To what aim? To drive the climate-stabilising and socially just transformation of economic and social systems and to protect and strengthen the rules-based international order. We need to ensure that tomorrow’s multipolar world, too, cooperates constructively instead of degenerating into separate, destructively competing spheres of power.

For the German Government and at EU level, this entails building cross-party majorities for cooperation and sustainability policy focused both inwards and outwards. And there needs to be policy coherence across areas such as trade, the economy, the environment, development, foreign affairs and security. It is important to recognise that Germany and Europe as a whole depend on rules-based, liberal alliances that are committed to stabilising the climate and securing prosperity at international level. Development policy – understood as structural policy for sustainable development – plays a key role in shaping and expanding these long-term, trusted and reciprocal partnerships.

There will be several opportunities for this in 2025.

In international climate policy, all the signatory states to the Paris Agreement are called on to submit their new nationally determined contributions at the beginning of February, setting targets for 2035. These targets must be more ambitious than previous ones and must include plans for financing the transformation of energy systems. Together with the Global Stocktake of greenhouse gas emissions, they will form the basis of the 30^th Conference of the Parties in Belém, Brazil, in November. Clear commitments to transformation geared towards achieving climate stabilisation in Germany and the EU are needed here – not least as a demonstrative response to the stated US intention of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and to support efforts by future climate champions such as China, India and Brazil along with companies and subnational actors.

With regard to implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda, Germany will be reporting to the UN on progress and obstacles in its third voluntary report in July 2025. A strong political signal from Germany and Europe under new leadership in support of the common agenda is important with a view to securing a common agenda for sustainable development after 2030 too. The Hamburg Sustainability Conference in June 2025 will allow solution-oriented alliances to be discussed with the private sector and subnational actors. The 4th Financing for Development Conference, scheduled to be held in Seville, Spain, at the end of June, will lend weight to implementation of the 2030 Agenda by using financing as leverage, rechannelling special drawing rights issued by the International Monetary Fund and reforming the multilateral financial architecture.

Plurilateral forums such as the G7 under the Canadian Presidency and the G20 under the South African Presidency will continue to gain importance this time too, just as they did during Donald Trump’s first term in office. They are key forums for shaping the world trade system sustainably and for confirming and refining multilateral principles in times of disruptive policymaking. For the fourth time in a row, a middle-income country in the South will be holding the G20 presidency. The Indonesian, Indian and Brazilian presidencies each shaped the G20 in their own way, but all focused on the 2030 Agenda as an environmental, economic and social agenda for a common global future. Germany and the EU should support Canada and South Africa as part of their presidencies with a view to improving the social balance of tax systems and containing the debt crisis.

At international level, the year 2025 will be marked by disruptive policymaking. This calls for Germany and the EU to assume leadership. For structural change to stabilise the climate – for peace, based on rules and committed to liberal and democratic values. To do so, Germany needs alliances on all continents and with countries from all income groups. There will be several opportunities to forge these alliances this year. Cooperative vision and pragmatic realism are the order of the day.