The 21st century will be marked by the struggle of democracies against autocracies.

This is how the editor-in-chief of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), Eric Gujer, who was awarded the Ludwig Börne Prize 2022 in Frankfurt's Paulskirche this Sunday, sees it.

"The West fell for its own fine words," he said in his acceptance speech, in which he gave his take on the war in Ukraine and the world situation.

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For thirty years, the western states had persuaded themselves that there was such a thing as a liberal world order.

"But she was never more than a chimera." Gujer warned to adapt to the new circumstances.

"The West must first relearn how to find its way in an environment in which rules and values ​​count less than the hard currency of power."

criticism of Germany

That also means that he must be prepared to defend the liberal order.

Otherwise, this would be interpreted as a weakness, and that led to the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan in 1979 and to the attack in the Ukraine six months after the withdrawal from Kabul.

If the West is not able to enforce its order, according to Gujer's thesis, it will have to set "more modest goals".

“The time of the liberal crusades is over.

Realism is the order of the day now.”

The publicist criticized Germany's "moral foreign policy".

Those who reject arms deliveries to Ukraine and at the same time hand over their gas storage facilities and oil refineries to Russia speak a different language anyway.

However, turning away from Russia should not lead to a new dependency on China: both countries are the major challengers to the West.

In the tradition of Borne

Gujer was born in Zurich in 1962.

He studied history, political science and Slavic studies in Freiburg and Cologne.

In 1986 he started as an intern and freelancer at the NZZ.

Three years later he became a correspondent in the GDR, later he went to Israel and Moscow for the newspaper before returning to Berlin in 1998 as Germany correspondent.

He headed the foreign department of the NZZ until he became editor-in-chief in March 2015.

As such, he is quarrelsome.

Gujer's critics believe that the paper has moved too much to the right under his direction.

Shortly before the award ceremony, Claus Leggewie, the political scientist and holder of the Ludwig Börne Professorship at the University of Giessen, criticized the choice of this year's prizewinner.

Under Gujer, the NZZ opened up to an audience that no longer represented a healthy conservatism, but was more to the right.

The chairman of the Ludwig Börne Foundation, Michael Gotthelf, however, places Gujer in the tradition of the namesake.

Just as Börne from Paris often wrote more astute analyzes than his "operationally blind" colleagues in Germany, Gujer also delivers a critical analysis of the German situation.

"It seems like half-distance increases visual acuity."

Women are too weak for the front

The foundation had appointed the writer Leon de Winter as a judge this year.

The Dutchman is just as controversial as Gujer because of anti-Islamic statements.

De Winter praised the NZZ as a "great institution" in a culture "in which political correctness is rewarded and freethinkers are often excluded".

Gujer is a "distinguished political publicist who courageously represents unpopular and unconventional opinions in his essays and commentaries," an advocate of freedom who makes a sacrifice with his work "to resist in an increasingly hysterical world."

De Winter polarized with his eulogy, not least because of misogynistic passages, for example when he claimed that only men fought on the front in Ukraine, while women and children were evacuated, and attributed this to the weaker physiology of women who do not have serious injuries could carry weapons.

Not only the head of the Frankfurt city council, who was sitting in the first row, left the hall.

De Winter only had to read an article in the NZZ that appeared in mid-May to know that women are also fighting at the front in Ukraine.

The Börne Prize, which commemorates the Jewish writer and essayist Ludwig Börne, has been awarded annually in Frankfurt's Paulskirche since 1993.

Last year, as an exception, the ceremony took place in Bellevue Palace.

At that time, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was the judge and awarded the EUR 20,000 prize to the Austrian writer and essayist Christoph Ransmayr.