Germany

As the floods which have devastated homes and caused over 150 deaths recede in the Rhineland, three types of political implications have already emerged. People are talking about climate change – for the first time during the campaign. Armin Laschet, Merkel’s successor, failed to rise to the occasion when he was caught laughing as the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier addressed grieving families in the Rhineland. And it also emerged that flood warnings were issued, but were not passed on to the population. Germany is still in shock, especially because other parts of the country have since flooded. South-eastern Bavaria has now suffered the worst floods ever recorded, with massive destruction

There are 27 member states in the EU. Two have now declared they are not bound by EU law. Based on the law as set out in the treaty each member state signs when it joins the EU, that means both countries are in breach of international law. The first country in breach of international law was Germany. I wrote about this last year. The German court said it wasn’t bound by EU law because the EU had no power to act on the legality of the ECB’s bond-buying programme during the pandemic. The Germans said ‘you can’t answer this question, so we will’. Crucially, the EU disagreed and the

Vetoes should no longer be allowed. Smaller countries should not be able to block the will of the ‘majority’. And the biggest countries, with the largest financial contributions, should be the ones that get to dictate policy. Ever since German re-unification made the country by far the largest in the bloc, there has been a creeping German take-over of the European Union. But with the British no longer around to hold that back, it is starting to accelerate. The real trend is towards an EU that is no longer a confederation of nations, but one that is dominated by Germany We had the clearest indication of that yet with a

A spectre is haunting Germany — the spectre of the AfD. Having come to prominence on a wave of anti-migrant sentiment, most German commentators believed that the Alternative für Deutschland was now a spent force. The party had been able to attract centre-right voters following the 2015 migrant crisis, many of whom may not have agreed with its entire manifesto but sought a political outlet for their scepticism of Merkel’s handling of the crisis. But last year, its national polling dropped to just over half the level of support it enjoyed in late 2018. The pandemic has brought to the surface many of the AfD’s most extreme members and activists,

Cracks are beginning to appear in the shiny veneer of the German Green’s professionalism, a feature that was supposed to mark out the insurgent centrist party and contrast them against the spluttering greyness of the outgoing Merkel regime. If indeed the Greens are to win a quarter of votes in September’s German elections— as their most favourable polls suggest — that would mean a tripling of their vote share compared to 2017. Given the jump in the scale of the party’s ambition, one may be forgiven for expecting a corresponding increase in competence. But so far, the Greens’ campaign has been amateurish to say the least. One of the biggest

Everything about the video seemed wrong. ‘It’s likely his nose is broken because the shape of it has changed and there’s a lot of powder on it. All of the left side of his face has powder,’ said the father of Belarusian journalist Roman Protasevich. The details of the story are now known: the exiled activist’s plane was diverted while en route between two EU capitals. The Ryanair flight was grounded, the pilot having been fed false reports of a bomb threat while a Soviet-era jet stalked the plane. Protasevich and his girlfriend were then removed by Belarusian forces and the flight was sent on its way.  This shocking display

On 2 June 2019, a German politician was found lying in a pool of blood outside his home in Hesse. He had been shot in the head at close range with a .38 Rossi revolver. Walter Lübcke, the 65-year-old leader of Kassel city council, who had been a vocal supporter of Germany’s immigration policy, had been assassinated by a German member of the British neo-Nazi group Combat 18. On Tuesday, his killer was sentenced to life in prison. Lübcke’s murder is the most extreme example of Germany’s increasingly alarming relationship with immigration, anti-Semitism, and fanatical politics. Last year Armin Laschet, the chancellor candidate for Lübcke’s CDU party, dispatched a veiled

‘What is grave about this situation, Messieurs, is that it is not serious’, was how General de Gaulle addressed his cabinet following the attempted putsch des généraux in April 1961. That could equally apply to recent Franco-British ructions over fishing rights in the Channel Islands. It is mere gesture politics, for all the French retaliatory threats to cut off the electricity supply to Jersey, the British dispatch of two Royal Navy vessels and the French countering with two patrol boats. Behind the facade France and Britain are serious military and diplomatic allies bound by important and wide-ranging security treaties that go beyond just Nato. But it is the French who have