Discover Top Posts Tagged with #german pol

a story in three acts

hanau: some racist somehow got his psychotic hands on a gun LEGALLY, maybe we need stronger regulations and regular psych evals on gun holders!

seehofer and friends: more street cops?? more police presence??

#ffs #it speaks #hanau #german pol

uugghhh, I need to make a fandom bluesky account but that means finding an email provider that doesn't want my phone number *slides miserably off the chair like Howl when he went Goo*

#I really want to seperate my normal account #and fandom #because somehow it feels weird to mix #german pol #and fanart of fat clone tiddies

Rolling coverage of the international stories of interest to our readers

Alternative for Germany appears to be heading for its strongest national election result yet this month and is fielding its first candidate to lead the country. Even though it is highly unlikely to take a share of power soon, it has become a factor that other politicians cannot ignore and helped shape Germany’s debate on migration. The far-right party first entered Germany’s national parliament eight years ago on the back of discontent with the arrival of large numbers of migrants in the mid-2010s, and curbing migration remains its signature theme. But the party has proven adept at harnessing discontent with other issues: Germany’s move away from fossil fuels, restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic and support for Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion nearly three years ago.

#germany #german pol #afd #election 2025

The CDU’s Friedrich Merz has shattered the taboo that had underpinned German politics since the war. The unthinkable is now more possible sa

The CDU’s Friedrich Merz has shattered the taboo that had underpinned German politics since the war. The unthinkable is now more possible The tectonic plates are shifting in German politics. A momentous past week has plunged the country into uncertainty – and not just about the outcome of the snap general election on 23 February. The mainstream parties are at each other’s throats, while the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is jubilant. The firewall (“Brandmauer”) against the extreme right, which has held since the end of the second world war, is showing big cracks. Europe’s most powerful country may be entering a phase of democratic instability. All of this is the result of a spectacular miscalculation by the opposition leader, Friedrich Merz, leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and frontrunner to become Germany’s next chancellor. Seeking to take a firm stance on immigration, after a knife attack by an Afghan asylum seeker that killed two people, including a toddler, Merz proposed a series of measures to tighten Germany’s borders, empowering the federal police and fast-tracking deportations. Polls show high support, including among Social Democrat (SPD), Green and Liberal voters, for restricting immigration; while a series of violent assaults, the deadliest on a Christmas market in December, killing six and injuring hundreds, has rattled the country. Merz, it seemed, had found an issue that gave his campaign traction. But then – perhaps carried away by positive feedback – he decided to push two motions through the Bundestag. Merz claimed that he would not actively seek the votes of the AfD, but nor would he shy away from a majority with their support. At the same time, he added strong language against the AfD into the drafts, seemingly to make the motions unpalatable for them. Obviously, the idea was to increase pressure on the SPD and the Greens to support his proposals. The gamble did not work out.

#germany #german pol #cdu #friedrich merz #anti adf firewall #broken #anti migrant stance

It is “too early to see where things are going,” lawmakers said.

Languages: Français

Regime change in Syria is impacting refugees in Europe, as Germany's opposition questioned the protection of Syrian asylum seekers and government lawmakers warned against exploiting the issue in elections. Syria's long-serving authoritarian ruler Bashar Al-Assad fled the country on Saturday after opposition militias closed in on Damascus, opening a new chapter in the country's 13-year civil war. The situation could also affect the Syrian diaspora in Europe, particularly in Germany, which is currently the third largest host country for Syrian refugees in the world and the largest host country in Europe, according to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee organisation. Some 900,000 Syrians are currently living in Germany – up from around 30,000 in 2011, at the start of Assad’s civil war – of which nearly 40% were employed in early 2024, according to the Federal Employment Agency. It is still unclear whether Assad's fall would lead to refugees leaving or even more arriving in Germany, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry led by the Social Democrats (SPD/S&D) told Funke Mediengruppe on Sunday. But the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU/EPP), who are ahead in the polls ahead of the upcoming national elections, have already stepped up pressure on the government to crack down on the refugee population. Once there is lasting peace in Syria, many Syrians would “no longer need protection and therefore no longer have the right to stay in Germany,” Andrea Lindholz, the party's leading lawmaker on home affairs, told the Rheinische Post on Sunday.

It's an issue that should drop in importance as the election date approaches. Many Syrians all over Europe are already returning home, despite the volatile situation.

#germany #german pol #elections 2025 #assad regime collapse #syrian refugees

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has dismissed Finance Minister Christian Lindner, and Germany's first three-way coalition government is now history.

Representatives of the three parties making up Germany's center-left government — the Social Democrats (SPD), neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens — met for a crisis meeting on Wednesday evening. It lasted only two hours. The coalition partners no longer had much to say to each other. Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) proposed early elections, Chancellor Olaf Scholz refused and dismissed Lindner from office. Scholz addressed the media at 9.15 pm. This was the day on which the first three-party alliance in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany spiraled out of control and could no longer stabilize itself. The long way down The demise began on November 15, 2023, when the Federal Constitutional Court declared parts of the government's budget policy unconstitutional. It deprived the coalition of a viable financial plan, then exposed the rifts between its partners. Germany's highest court ruled against the government's plans to reallocate money earmarked but never spent from a cache of debt taken out to mitigate the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. The money was instead earmarked for the government's climate action budget. The court ruling left the budget €60 billion ($65 billion) short. Since then, the coalition partners have been trying to raise their own profile at the expense of the others, publicizing proposals before even discussing them with cabinet colleagues.

We could be about to see the effect of the Trump win on the far-right vote sooner than expected, as an election seems likely. I suspect the AfD will do well.

#germany #german pol #coalition government collapse

Reports of dissenters working for £4 a day on onion plantation owned by Saxony state parliament AfD member Jörg Dornau

Midway through Nikolai’s shift sorting onions alongside other political prisoners in a warehouse in western Belarus, a tall and bald foreigner entered the building. “He arrived in a car with German license plates. Then he came over and greeted us warmly,” Nikolai*, recalled in an interview with the Observer. The onion plantation, where Nikolai and dozens of other political detainees were working in February 2024, was owned by Jörg Dornau, a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Saxony’s state parliament. Nikolai claims that the man he saw that day, touring the farm and speaking to workers, was Dornau himself. Dornau, 54, a heavily built farmer with a bald pate, was revealed to be the owner of the onion farm located on Belarussian soil earlier this year when he was fined €20,862 for failing to declare his extra, non-parliamentary income with the Saxony parliament in which he has sat as an MP since 2019. Despite the obvious moral questions around collaborating with a dictatorship, the matter might have moved little beyond the issue of the fine, except for the new allegations that have emerged claiming that he knowingly employed political prisoners there. Reports that Dornau had struck a deal with a prison in Lida, a city in western Belarus, to employ prisoners jailed for political dissent were first reported last week by the independent Belarusian outlet Reform.news. Dornau was approached by the Observer and asked for comment about the legal and ethical concerns surrounding the allegations, but did not respond. Nikolai said there were around 30 prisoners working on the farm during his time there in February, many of whom, like him, had been jailed on political grounds. They sorted onions for roughly £4 a day on what he described as a strictly voluntary basis. A few weeks earlier, Nikolai had been detained by the Belarusian security services for “liking” an old social media post from 2021 and was sentenced to 15 days in jail as part of the regime’s brutal crackdown on all forms of dissent.