Thomas Kemmerich, a little-known liberal Free Democrat, became the first state premier elected with the support of the AfD, with whom Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats sided to the disgust of her national coalition partners.

AfD parliamentary party leader Bjoern Hoecke, right, shakes hands with Thomas Kemmerich of the Free Democrats, in Erfurt, Germany.CREDIT: AP

The CDU and all the other established parties have previously ostracised the AfD over what they say are racist views held by some of its members.

Merkel’s Social Democrat national coalition allies accused her CDU of backtracking on a pledge never to cooperate with a far-right party. The CDU rejected the accusation, saying it was not responsible for how AfD lawmakers voted. Wednesday’s ballot was secret.

“The events in Thuringia break a taboo in the history of political democracy in the Federal Republic,” SPD Finance Minister Olaf Scholz tweeted. “Very serious questions arise for us with the CDU’s federal leadership.”

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, leader of the German Christian Democrats.CREDIT: GETTY

The post Post-war ‘taboo broken’ as far right becomes German state kingmaker first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The former General-Secretary of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has advocated stripping right-wing “extremists” of their fundamental rights to free speech and free assembly.

Mr Tauber, who serves as an MP for the CDU in the German Bundestag, made his statements following the murder of pro-open borders CDU member Walter Lübcke and the arrest of a suspect thought to be linked to far-right extremism.

Writing for German newspaper Die Welt, Tauber blamed members of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) for the murder of Lübcke, saying, “the political climate of this republic has changed as well. The AfD in the German Bundestag and in the state parliaments contributes to this. With the dissolution of the language, they have paved the way for the dissemination of violence.”

Tauber also singled out several AfD members including co-chair Alice Weidel, saying they were ” complicit in the death of Walter Lübcke due to a language that is uninhibited and leads to violence.”

Germany Launches ‘How to Identify Nazi Parents’ Guide for Schools https://t.co/hvozX9qHVc

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 6, 2018

In order to combat right-wing extremism, Tauber advocates using Article 18 of the German constitution which allows the government to strip free speech, free assembly, property rights, privacy of communication, and freedom of the press from those deemed to be fighting against the “free democratic basic order”.

Tauber admitted that the rules were to prevent another rise of the Nazi party but said, “Article 18 is today an instrument not only against right-wing extremists but also against all others who are also committed to the fight against our freedom.”

Germany: Lawmakers Want Three-year Prison Terms for Burning EU Flag https://t.co/q6UjZbFpsS

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) June 22, 2019

While right-wing extremism has seen an increase over the past several years in Germany, so too has left-wing extremism, according to the German domestic intelligence agency the BfV, which released a report last year showing the number of violent left-wing extremists had increased by 27 percent from 2012 to 2017.

The number of violent incidents committed by left-wing extremists rose by a staggering 88 percent during the same period.

Tauber did not mention left-wing extremism at all in his writing, despite Antifa allegedly taking credit for nearly killing AfD politician Frank Magnitz earlier this year in Bremen.

German Intelligence: Left Wing Violence and Extremism Rising https://t.co/jDRsRoGCCF

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) June 20, 2018

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Source: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/06/22/top-merkel-party-mp-strip-right-wing-extremists-of-free-speech-free-assembly/

[Disclaimer]

The post Top Merkel Party MP: Strip right-wing ‘extremists’ of free speech, free assembly first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The sun sets over the River Main in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019. (AP Photo/Michael Probst) – Michael Probst

BERLIN — European politics just now is a story of how one decision by a pastor’s dutiful daughter has made life miserable for a vicar’s dutiful daughter.

Two of the world’s most important conservative parties are involved in an unintended tutorial on a cardinal tenet of conservatism, the law of unintended consequences, which is that the unintended consequences of decisions in complex social situations are often larger than, and contrary to, those intended.

In 2015, Angela Merkel, the Federal Republic of Germany’s first chancellor from what was East Germany, chose to welcome into Germany about 1 million people, many of them Syrians, fleeing Middle Eastern carnage. This influx stoked European anxieties about immigration threatening social cohesion, anxieties that contributed to the 52 percent-48 percent vote in Britain’s 2016 referendum directing the government to extricate the United Kingdom from the European Union.

In 2019, Theresa May, who was not yet Britain’s prime minister when the referendum occurred and who voted to remain in the EU, is leading, or trying to lead, a fractious party that cannot govern because there is no majority for any plan to effectuate what in 2016 was, but might not still be, the voters’ Brexit desire.

For many years, Merkel has been the closest approximation to an answer to the famous question attributed to Henry Kissinger: If I want to talk to “Europe,” who do I call? She also has embodied Germany’s primal desire for stability, a desire that is the great national constant since Konrad Adenauer served as the Federal Republic of Germany’s first chancellor from 1949 to 1963.

Britain is perhaps, or sort of, exiting the EU. France’s “yellow vest” protesters recently commented on President Emmanuel Macron’s policies with a Gallic vigor (burning cars, smashing shop windows) sufficient to change governance in the predictable direction (taxes decreased, entitlements increased). So, stable Germany is even more important to Europe than it was when Kissinger said that Germany is too large for Europe and too small for the world.

The two greatest leaders of post-1945 Europe, Charles de Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher, opposed the aspiration of an ever-deeper political unification of Europe. Germany precipitated the post-1945 recoil against nationalism, which has been interpreted to dictate the dilution of nationalities by submersion of them into a transnational broth. For most Germans, tiptoeing through modern memory, disputing this interpretation still seems transgressive.

No European nation was as enchanted as Germany was by Barack Obama’s studied elegance and none is more repelled by Donald Trump’s visceral vulgarity. This especially matters at this moment when events are underscoring Germany’s necessary dependence for security on the United States: Germany lives in the neighborhood with two nations, Poland and Hungary, that have illiberal populist regimes. And not far over the horizon Vladimir Putin is destabilizing and dismembering Europe’s geographically largest nation, Ukraine. Germany’s dependence was inadvertently highlighted by Macron’s delusional statement that there must be a “true European army” to “protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States.”

Germany has two of the world’s great parties, the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party, which in the 19th century invented social democracy that helped to drain the revolutionary steam from the left. Both are in flux.

The CDU is challenged from the right by Alternative for Germany (the subject of a subsequent column) and the SDP, which withered as the junior partner in Merkel’s coalition. The SDP is being eclipsed by the Green Party, whose support rivals that of the CDU, and which is the most popular party with German women.

Extremism, however, is quarantined by the civic culture that so values stability that a poll in this decade showed that more Germans fear inflation — the hyperinflation of 95 years ago was the ultimate destabilizer — than fear cancer or other serious illnesses.

Next year will be the 30th anniversary of German reunification. This will be an occasion for the world to acknowledge that, as has been truly said, today’s Germany is the best Germany the world has seen since it became Germany in 1871.

George Will is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.

Source: https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/commentary/as-europe-struggles-germany-still-a-beacon-of-stability/article_feee80ec-1059-11e9-92f2-67ef63fdf9ad.html

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel gestures at the end of her speech to members of her Christian Democratic Union party in Hamburg on Friday.CLEMENS BILAN / EPA

HAMBURG, Germany — German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s final speech as leader of her party was met with an 11-minute standing ovation on Friday.

The address marked the beginning of her gradual exit from both German politics and the world stage. Merkel has led the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2000, and been the country’s chancellor since 2005.

“It is now the time to open a new chapter, it was a great pleasure for me, it was an honor,” Merkel said as she concluded her speech. Delegates held up signs reading: “Thank You, Boss.”

Merkel, 64, later handed the baton to a successor at the party congress in Hamburg.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who was widely seen as the chancellor’s favorite and has been branded a “mini-Merkel” by some media outlets, was elected as her replacement on Friday.

Kramp-Karrenbauer — who often goes by her initials AKK — got about 52 percent of the vote in in a run-off with Friedrich Merz, a former lawmaker who left politics to work as a corporate lawyer.

German party leaders, including Merkel, have traditionally been selected through backroom deals and faced no competition during confirmation votes at party conventions.

But for the first time since 1971, CDU delegates were on Friday given the opportunity to elect their new party leader from among several candidates.

Like Merkel, Kramp-Karrenbauer represents the more moderate wing of their party. The 56-year-old is a mother of three who previously served as the governor of the small German state of Saarland.

The two other candidates who hoped to replace her for the CDU post had both openly criticized some of the chancellor’s policies in the past.

Jens Spahn, Germany’s 38-year-old health minister, repeatedly spoke out against Merkel’s open-door migration policy which resulted in the arrival of nearly a million refugees.

Merz presented himself as the candidate who could bring back voters from the far-right populist AfD.

Amid rising anti-foreigner sentiment in Germany, the anti-immigration and anti-E.U. AfD won 13 percent of the votes in the German state of Hesse in October.

“The times today are challenging for our country, for our party, with the AfD on the right and a polarization of society,” Merkel warned in her speech.

Merkel also had a message for President Donald Trump, stating that her party had to show its strengths in an age of “growing renunciation of multilateralism” and in times of “reducing international cooperation to the principles of deal-making.”

Judith Hoerning, a 23-year-old delegate, told NBC News that while Merkel had “shaped the party in a good way” she believed her decision to step down was “courageous and right because the party needs transformation now.”

Jens Eckhoff, a 52-year-old delegate from Bremen, said he was happy AKK was elected because he believed she could “help gain voters in the center and can also win against the populists with good arguments.”

Germany’s neighbors are already concerned that the departure of Europe’s longest serving leader could weaken the European Union.

“There is still huge respect for Merkel because she gave stability in Europe at a time when things were rocky,” said Judy Dempsey, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe think tank.

Andy Eckardt

Andy Eckardt is a producer based in Mainz, Germany. He started this role in 1994.

Carlo Angerer is a multimedia producer and reporter based in Mainz, Germany.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/angela-merkel-s-cdu-about-elect-her-replacement-n944726

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