BERLIN — The death threats started in 2015 when Walter Lübcke defended the refugee policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel. A regional politician for her conservative party, he would go to small towns in his district and explain that welcoming those in need was a matter of German and Christian values.

Hateful emails started pouring in. His name appeared on an online neo-Nazi hit list. His private address was published on a far-right blog. A video of him was shared hundreds of thousands of times, along with emojis of guns and gallows and sometimes explicit calls to murder him: “Shoot him now, this bastard.”

And then someone did.

On June 2, Mr. Lübcke was fatally shot in the head on his front porch, in what appears to be Germany’s first far-right political assassination since the Nazi era. The suspect — who made a detailed confession last month, only to retract it this past week under a new legal team — has a violent neo-Nazi past and police record, renewing criticism that Germany’s security apparatus, with its long track record of neglecting far-right extremism, is still failing to take the threat seriously enough.

Far-right militancy is resurgent in Germany, in ways that are new and very old, horrifying a country that prides itself on dealing honestly with its murderous past. Raw and hateful language has become increasingly common online, and politicians are increasingly under threat, with some now requiring protection.

“The murder of Walter Lübcke shocked me like it shocked a lot of people,” the country’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said on public television recently, while calling for Germans to hold weekly protests against far-right extremism.

“I asked myself — what is happening in our country?” he said. “If you look at how much hatred and harassment there is on the internet — a lot of it directed at local politicians, bureaucrats, sport and cultural clubs — then I think we need to stand up and say that this is unacceptable.”

Hate speech has surged in all corners of Europe and, with it, political violence.

In Britain, the lawmaker Jo Cox died after being shot and stabbed multiple times by a man with far-right sympathies a week before the Brexit referendum in 2016. In Poland, the liberal mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, was killed in January after being the target of a relentless and hateful campaign against him on the state-owned broadcaster.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, known as the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was set up in the wake of World War II with the explicit aim of preventing the rise of anti-democratic forces like another Nazi party. But with the arrival of more than one million migrants since 2015, many of them from Muslim countries, the agency has concentrated resources on threats of Islamist terrorism.

Today, the agency estimates that there are 24,100 known far-right extremists in Germany, 12,700 of them potentially violent. And there are nearly 500 outstanding arrest warrants for far-right extremists.

Horst Seehofer, Germany’s interior minister, who oversees the agency, denied that officials had been “blind on the right eye” but conceded that more should have been done in the Lübcke case.

Mr. Lübcke in 2012.CreditUwe Zucchi/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images

“This political murder is a moment, a kind of signal,” Mr. Seehofer said, “because it is directed against our free democratic culture.”

The suspect, 45-year-old Stephan Ernst, was well-known to the authorities. He circulated in the orbit of a neo-Nazi party and nearly stabbed an immigrant to death in 1992. He spent time in prison after an attempted bombing and owned at least five weapons, including a machine gun and the .38 caliber handgun used in killing Mr. Lübcke.

“People will die,” he predicted in an online post before the murder.

After his prison term, domestic intelligence agents had kept tabs on Mr. Ernst but he fell off the radar at a time when many of them were diverted to focus on militant Islamists. Then time limits on storing personal data kicked in.

“He should have remained on the radar continuously,” said Stephan Kramer, the head of the domestic intelligence agency in the eastern state of Thuringia. But for too long, Mr. Kramer said, “the possibility of far-right domestic terrorism was neglected at the federal level.”

Politically, Germany saw a sharp uptick in right-wing fury after the 2015 migration crisis. The far-right Alternative for Germany party shocked the establishment by winning enough votes to take seats in Parliament. During the past year, support for the party has flattened, and the liberal Greens have recently surged to the top of the polls.

But analysts say that while the Alternative for Germany has not been linked directly to political violence, the party’s noisy presence has contributed to a normalization of violent language that risks legitimizing violence itself. The party has vowed to “hunt” Ms. Merkel. Just this month, one local party official identified the Greens as the new enemy, vowing to “shoot our way through.”

For some politicians, the angry political mood has meant peril. The mayor of the northern city of Altena, Andreas Hollstein, survived a knife attack in 2017.

In 2015 the mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, was stabbed in the throat by an unemployed man who said he wanted to send a signal on the country’s refugee policy. In an interview, Ms. Reker said that death threats, rare before 2015, had become an everyday reality and that she now had private security agents posted outside her office.

“People on the front line of defending our open society have become the target,” Ms. Reker said.

Shortly after Mr. Lübcke’s murder, Ms. Reker received a chilling email from senders who declared, “Sieg Heil and Heil Hitler!”

“The phase of cleansing has started with Walter Lübcke,” the email stated. “Many more will follow him. Including you. Your life will end in 2020.”

In recent decades, far-right extremists have committed scores of murders in Germany — 169 since 1990 alone, according to one investigation conducted by two German newspapers, Die Zeit and Der Tagesspiegel. But Mr. Lübcke is the first politician to be assassinated by far-right militants in postwar Germany.

Mr. Lübcke’s home in the village of Istha near Kassel, Germany. He was shot on his front porch last month.CreditAlexander Koerner/Getty Images

Tanjev Schultz, an expert on far-right extremism, said the new threats against politicians carried echoes of the Weimar Republic, the period between the two world wars, when far-right terrorists killed a number of politicians to destabilize Germany’s young democracy, ultimately succeeding.

“Destabilizing the state has always been the strategic aim of neo-Nazis, but the German authorities have never really looked at it that way,” Mr. Schultz said. “They have tended to treat far-right violence as the result of random acts committed by lone-wolf actors.”

There has been a striking disconnect between Germany’s strong collective consciousness of its Nazi past and its far weaker collective consciousness of neo-Nazi terrorism in recent decades, he said.

“It barely featured in schoolbooks and in the public discourse,” he said, noting that this reflected the fact that “successive generations of officials simply downplayed this issue.”

Ms. Reker, the mayor of Cologne, has her own theory for this collective blindness. “Maybe our history is actually limiting our view,” she said. Germans like to think they have definitively dealt with that history, resulting in a self-deceptive attitude of “What mustn’t be cannot be.”

But some officials now describe the Lübcke murder as a wake-up call that may force the first major rethink on far-right violence in a decade. In the early 2000s, neo-Nazi terrorists killed nine immigrants over seven years, even as paid informers of the intelligence agency helped hide the group’s leaders and build up its network. The case became known as the N.S.U. scandal.

Mr. Kramer, the intelligence chief in Thuringia, was appointed as part of the overhaul after the scandal. A former secretary-general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, he said that changing official attitudes remained difficult. When his agency reported an escalation of the far-right threat to intelligence officials at the federal level, he said, “we were told that far-right terrorism doesn’t exist and accused of exaggerating.”

The post A Political Murder and Far-Right Terrorism: Germany’s New Hateful Reality first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

BERLIN — The death threats started in 2015 when Walter Lübcke defended the refugee policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel. A regional politician for her conservative party, he would go to small towns in his district and explain that welcoming those in need was a matter of German and Christian values.

Hateful emails started pouring in. His name appeared on an online neo-Nazi hit list. His private address was published on a far-right blog. A video of him was shared hundreds of thousands of times, along with emojis of guns and gallows and sometimes explicit calls to murder him: “Shoot him now, this bastard.”

And then someone did.

On June 2, Mr. Lübcke was fatally shot in the head on his front porch, in what appears to be Germany’s first far-right political assassination since the Nazi era. The suspect — who made a detailed confession last month, only to retract it this past week under a new legal team — has a violent neo-Nazi past and police record, renewing criticism that Germany’s security apparatus, with its long track record of neglecting far-right extremism, is still failing to take the threat seriously enough.

Far-right militancy is resurgent in Germany, in ways that are new and very old, horrifying a country that prides itself on dealing honestly with its murderous past. Raw and hateful language has become increasingly common online, and politicians are increasingly under threat, with some now requiring protection.

“The murder of Walter Lübcke shocked me like it shocked a lot of people,” the country’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said on public television recently, while calling for Germans to hold weekly protests against far-right extremism.

“I asked myself — what is happening in our country?” he said. “If you look at how much hatred and harassment there is on the internet — a lot of it directed at local politicians, bureaucrats, sport and cultural clubs — then I think we need to stand up and say that this is unacceptable.”

Hate speech has surged in all corners of Europe and, with it, political violence.

In Britain, the lawmaker Jo Cox died after being shot and stabbed multiple times by a man with far-right sympathies a week before the Brexit referendum in 2016. In Poland, the liberal mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, was killed in January after being the target of a relentless and hateful campaign against him on the state-owned broadcaster.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, known as the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was set up in the wake of World War II with the explicit aim of preventing the rise of anti-democratic forces like another Nazi party. But with the arrival of more than one million migrants since 2015, many of them from Muslim countries, the agency has concentrated resources on threats of Islamist terrorism.

Today, the agency estimates that there are 24,100 known far-right extremists in Germany, 12,700 of them potentially violent. And there are nearly 500 outstanding arrest warrants for far-right extremists.

Horst Seehofer, Germany’s interior minister, who oversees the agency, denied that officials had been “blind on the right eye” but conceded that more should have been done in the Lübcke case.

Mr. Lübcke in 2012.CreditUwe Zucchi/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images

“This political murder is a moment, a kind of signal,” Mr. Seehofer said, “because it is directed against our free democratic culture.”

The suspect, 45-year-old Stephan Ernst, was well-known to the authorities. He circulated in the orbit of a neo-Nazi party and nearly stabbed an immigrant to death in 1992. He spent time in prison after an attempted bombing and owned at least five weapons, including a machine gun and the .38 caliber handgun used in killing Mr. Lübcke.

“People will die,” he predicted in an online post before the murder.

After his prison term, domestic intelligence agents had kept tabs on Mr. Ernst but he fell off the radar at a time when many of them were diverted to focus on militant Islamists. Then time limits on storing personal data kicked in.

“He should have remained on the radar continuously,” said Stephan Kramer, the head of the domestic intelligence agency in the eastern state of Thuringia. But for too long, Mr. Kramer said, “the possibility of far-right domestic terrorism was neglected at the federal level.”

Politically, Germany saw a sharp uptick in right-wing fury after the 2015 migration crisis. The far-right Alternative for Germany party shocked the establishment by winning enough votes to take seats in Parliament. During the past year, support for the party has flattened, and the liberal Greens have recently surged to the top of the polls.

But analysts say that while the Alternative for Germany has not been linked directly to political violence, the party’s noisy presence has contributed to a normalization of violent language that risks legitimizing violence itself. The party has vowed to “hunt” Ms. Merkel. Just this month, one local party official identified the Greens as the new enemy, vowing to “shoot our way through.”

For some politicians, the angry political mood has meant peril. The mayor of the northern city of Altena, Andreas Hollstein, survived a knife attack in 2017.

In 2015 the mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, was stabbed in the throat by an unemployed man who said he wanted to send a signal on the country’s refugee policy. In an interview, Ms. Reker said that death threats, rare before 2015, had become an everyday reality and that she now had private security agents posted outside her office.

“People on the front line of defending our open society have become the target,” Ms. Reker said.

Shortly after Mr. Lübcke’s murder, Ms. Reker received a chilling email from senders who declared, “Sieg Heil and Heil Hitler!”

“The phase of cleansing has started with Walter Lübcke,” the email stated. “Many more will follow him. Including you. Your life will end in 2020.”

In recent decades, far-right extremists have committed scores of murders in Germany — 169 since 1990 alone, according to one investigation conducted by two German newspapers, Die Zeit and Der Tagesspiegel. But Mr. Lübcke is the first politician to be assassinated by far-right militants in postwar Germany.

Mr. Lübcke’s home in the village of Istha near Kassel, Germany. He was shot on his front porch last month.CreditAlexander Koerner/Getty Images

Tanjev Schultz, an expert on far-right extremism, said the new threats against politicians carried echoes of the Weimar Republic, the period between the two world wars, when far-right terrorists killed a number of politicians to destabilize Germany’s young democracy, ultimately succeeding.

“Destabilizing the state has always been the strategic aim of neo-Nazis, but the German authorities have never really looked at it that way,” Mr. Schultz said. “They have tended to treat far-right violence as the result of random acts committed by lone-wolf actors.”

There has been a striking disconnect between Germany’s strong collective consciousness of its Nazi past and its far weaker collective consciousness of neo-Nazi terrorism in recent decades, he said.

“It barely featured in schoolbooks and in the public discourse,” he said, noting that this reflected the fact that “successive generations of officials simply downplayed this issue.”

Ms. Reker, the mayor of Cologne, has her own theory for this collective blindness. “Maybe our history is actually limiting our view,” she said. Germans like to think they have definitively dealt with that history, resulting in a self-deceptive attitude of “What mustn’t be cannot be.”

But some officials now describe the Lübcke murder as a wake-up call that may force the first major rethink on far-right violence in a decade. In the early 2000s, neo-Nazi terrorists killed nine immigrants over seven years, even as paid informers of the intelligence agency helped hide the group’s leaders and build up its network. The case became known as the N.S.U. scandal.

Mr. Kramer, the intelligence chief in Thuringia, was appointed as part of the overhaul after the scandal. A former secretary-general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, he said that changing official attitudes remained difficult. When his agency reported an escalation of the far-right threat to intelligence officials at the federal level, he said, “we were told that far-right terrorism doesn’t exist and accused of exaggerating.”

The post A Political Murder and Far-Right Terrorism: Germany’s New Hateful Reality first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

BERLIN — The death threats started in 2015 when Walter Lübcke defended the refugee policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel. A regional politician for her conservative party, he would go to small towns in his district and explain that welcoming those in need was a matter of German and Christian values.

Hateful emails started pouring in. His name appeared on an online neo-Nazi hit list. His private address was published on a far-right blog. A video of him was shared hundreds of thousands of times, along with emojis of guns and gallows and sometimes explicit calls to murder him: “Shoot him now, this bastard.”

And then someone did.

On June 2, Mr. Lübcke was fatally shot in the head on his front porch, in what appears to be Germany’s first far-right political assassination since the Nazi era. The suspect — who made a detailed confession last month, only to retract it this past week under a new legal team — has a violent neo-Nazi past and police record, renewing criticism that Germany’s security apparatus, with its long track record of neglecting far-right extremism, is still failing to take the threat seriously enough.

Far-right militancy is resurgent in Germany, in ways that are new and very old, horrifying a country that prides itself on dealing honestly with its murderous past. Raw and hateful language has become increasingly common online, and politicians are increasingly under threat, with some now requiring protection.

“The murder of Walter Lübcke shocked me like it shocked a lot of people,” the country’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said on public television recently, while calling for Germans to hold weekly protests against far-right extremism.

“I asked myself — what is happening in our country?” he said. “If you look at how much hatred and harassment there is on the internet — a lot of it directed at local politicians, bureaucrats, sport and cultural clubs — then I think we need to stand up and say that this is unacceptable.”

Hate speech has surged in all corners of Europe and, with it, political violence.

In Britain, the lawmaker Jo Cox died after being shot and stabbed multiple times by a man with far-right sympathies a week before the Brexit referendum in 2016. In Poland, the liberal mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, was killed in January after being the target of a relentless and hateful campaign against him on the state-owned broadcaster.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, known as the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was set up in the wake of World War II with the explicit aim of preventing the rise of anti-democratic forces like another Nazi party. But with the arrival of more than one million migrants since 2015, many of them from Muslim countries, the agency has concentrated resources on threats of Islamist terrorism.

Today, the agency estimates that there are 24,100 known far-right extremists in Germany, 12,700 of them potentially violent. And there are nearly 500 outstanding arrest warrants for far-right extremists.

Horst Seehofer, Germany’s interior minister, who oversees the agency, denied that officials had been “blind on the right eye” but conceded that more should have been done in the Lübcke case.

Mr. Lübcke in 2012.CreditUwe Zucchi/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images

“This political murder is a moment, a kind of signal,” Mr. Seehofer said, “because it is directed against our free democratic culture.”

The suspect, 45-year-old Stephan Ernst, was well-known to the authorities. He circulated in the orbit of a neo-Nazi party and nearly stabbed an immigrant to death in 1992. He spent time in prison after an attempted bombing and owned at least five weapons, including a machine gun and the .38 caliber handgun used in killing Mr. Lübcke.

“People will die,” he predicted in an online post before the murder.

After his prison term, domestic intelligence agents had kept tabs on Mr. Ernst but he fell off the radar at a time when many of them were diverted to focus on militant Islamists. Then time limits on storing personal data kicked in.

“He should have remained on the radar continuously,” said Stephan Kramer, the head of the domestic intelligence agency in the eastern state of Thuringia. But for too long, Mr. Kramer said, “the possibility of far-right domestic terrorism was neglected at the federal level.”

Politically, Germany saw a sharp uptick in right-wing fury after the 2015 migration crisis. The far-right Alternative for Germany party shocked the establishment by winning enough votes to take seats in Parliament. During the past year, support for the party has flattened, and the liberal Greens have recently surged to the top of the polls.

But analysts say that while the Alternative for Germany has not been linked directly to political violence, the party’s noisy presence has contributed to a normalization of violent language that risks legitimizing violence itself. The party has vowed to “hunt” Ms. Merkel. Just this month, one local party official identified the Greens as the new enemy, vowing to “shoot our way through.”

For some politicians, the angry political mood has meant peril. The mayor of the northern city of Altena, Andreas Hollstein, survived a knife attack in 2017.

In 2015 the mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, was stabbed in the throat by an unemployed man who said he wanted to send a signal on the country’s refugee policy. In an interview, Ms. Reker said that death threats, rare before 2015, had become an everyday reality and that she now had private security agents posted outside her office.

“People on the front line of defending our open society have become the target,” Ms. Reker said.

Shortly after Mr. Lübcke’s murder, Ms. Reker received a chilling email from senders who declared, “Sieg Heil and Heil Hitler!”

“The phase of cleansing has started with Walter Lübcke,” the email stated. “Many more will follow him. Including you. Your life will end in 2020.”

In recent decades, far-right extremists have committed scores of murders in Germany — 169 since 1990 alone, according to one investigation conducted by two German newspapers, Die Zeit and Der Tagesspiegel. But Mr. Lübcke is the first politician to be assassinated by far-right militants in postwar Germany.

Mr. Lübcke’s home in the village of Istha near Kassel, Germany. He was shot on his front porch last month.CreditAlexander Koerner/Getty Images

Tanjev Schultz, an expert on far-right extremism, said the new threats against politicians carried echoes of the Weimar Republic, the period between the two world wars, when far-right terrorists killed a number of politicians to destabilize Germany’s young democracy, ultimately succeeding.

“Destabilizing the state has always been the strategic aim of neo-Nazis, but the German authorities have never really looked at it that way,” Mr. Schultz said. “They have tended to treat far-right violence as the result of random acts committed by lone-wolf actors.”

There has been a striking disconnect between Germany’s strong collective consciousness of its Nazi past and its far weaker collective consciousness of neo-Nazi terrorism in recent decades, he said.

“It barely featured in schoolbooks and in the public discourse,” he said, noting that this reflected the fact that “successive generations of officials simply downplayed this issue.”

Ms. Reker, the mayor of Cologne, has her own theory for this collective blindness. “Maybe our history is actually limiting our view,” she said. Germans like to think they have definitively dealt with that history, resulting in a self-deceptive attitude of “What mustn’t be cannot be.”

But some officials now describe the Lübcke murder as a wake-up call that may force the first major rethink on far-right violence in a decade. In the early 2000s, neo-Nazi terrorists killed nine immigrants over seven years, even as paid informers of the intelligence agency helped hide the group’s leaders and build up its network. The case became known as the N.S.U. scandal.

Mr. Kramer, the intelligence chief in Thuringia, was appointed as part of the overhaul after the scandal. A former secretary-general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, he said that changing official attitudes remained difficult. When his agency reported an escalation of the far-right threat to intelligence officials at the federal level, he said, “we were told that far-right terrorism doesn’t exist and accused of exaggerating.”

The post A Political Murder and Far-Right Terrorism: Germany’s New Hateful Reality first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

For many observers in Brussels, the twilight of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship in Berlin, which has now begun with her decision not to run again for CDU leader, comes as no surprise. After the failed EU refugee summit, political news portal Politico wrote off Angela Merkel as early as this summer. The chancellor’s assertiveness had suffered badly because of the internal quarrels in her grand coalition of CDU, CSU and SPD. “How Merkel divides the EU,” Politico wrote back then.

That was even before the state elections in Bavaria and Hesse and their severe losses for the grand coalition. But even then, it was clear that Merkel’s 2015 refugee policy course had facilitated the rise of populists in many EU countries. She was unable to enforce the solidarity she demanded on migration policies, nor a binding distribution of refugees. Only recently has she advocated closing off the EU’s external borders while setting up asylum centers in North Africa.

Read more: Opinion: Finally Angela Merkel shows leadership

Some ‘will be pleased’

Long before Italy’s current populist government was at odds with the chancellor, there were protests against her EU policies

Many in Poland, Hungary and Italy will hardly shed a tear for Merkel once she gives up the chancellorship. Many politicians in states bogged down by financial crises consider Merkel’s role in overcoming the financial and euro crisis in Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and now Italy to be wrong, calling it too rigid, too austerity-oriented.

“Of course, Europe without Angela Merkel is possible,” says Janis Emmanouilidis, head of the European Policy Center think tank. “If you have a leading role like Germany and its chancellor do, then of course there will be countries and governments who are less satisfied with what Germany does,” he told DW. As such, he explained, there will be people in Eastern and Southern Europe who will be pleased when the chancellor is gone.

Merkel underestimated the refugee issue, Matteo Salvini, Italy’s radical right-wing interior minister, told DW in an interview in September. With an eye on Sunday’s election defeat in Hesse, Salvini said the result was a “blow with a hammer” for Merkel.

Embittered after austerity gripped the country, Greek protesters didn’t pull punches on their feelings toward Merkel

Merkel’s stability ‘a great asset’

Most EU states value her, according to Emmanouilidis — not least because she is the longest-serving head of government in the bloc, and simply has the most experience in Europe. People appreciated stability in Berlin, he argues. “In times of uncertainty, stability is a great asset.”

Many politicians at the EU’s headquarters in Brussels will have to get used to the fact that “Mutti” (mommy), as Merkel is fondly called by many in her party and the coalition government, might be leaving in the foreseeable future, says Emmanouilidis. She’s been in power for 13 years, so it is difficult to imagine politics without her, but her succession will be arranged, he adds. “There will be the first day after Merkel, a time after Merkel.”

Policy expert Emmanouilidis: It’s hard to imagine Europe without Merkel, but an orderly transition will be arranged

Decisions shelved

For months now, decisions on migration, Brexit or reform of the eurozone at the EU level have been postponed — due partly to the hesitant German chancellor who was too busy with the coalition at home to make time for the EU’s urgent crises. By announcing that she will give up the party chair and not run again for chancellor in 2021, some observers see her as a lame duck.

Longtime German finance minister and current Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble, however, disputed that characterization in a DW interview, saying that “her position is constitutionally strong” and that she’s likely to stay put as chancellor for years to come.

Germany, the largest and financially strongest member state, will of course continue to shape the EU regardless. EU diplomats do not expect progress on negotiations on the EU’s common budget before the European elections in May 2019. Günther Oettinger, whom Merkel sent to Brussels as EU commissioner, is responsible for the budget.

It also remains unclear what Merkel’s retreat in installments means for Manfred Weber, a member of the CSU who hopes to be nominated as the top candidate of the European People’s Party next week, with an eye on the post of president of the EU Commission. Germany’s head of government actually has a deciding voice in the matter.

Macron and his ‘good friend’: With her departure on the horizon, the French president may seize the chance to stake out a position as ‘the new Merkel’

Macron needs a new partner

French President Emmanuel Macron is unlikely to be particularly pleased by Merkel’s possible departure from the European stage. With the help of his “good friend Angela” he planned to advance his reform agenda for the monetary union. There is bound to be a period of uncertainty, says EU expert Emmanouilidis — not what Macron was hoping for.

On the other hand, he adds, the chancellor and the government have not responded to Macron’s proposals anyway. “The question is how this will develop after Merkel’s departure,” says the think tank researcher. It could also be an opportunity for Emmanuel Macron if Merkel leaves the driver’s seat.

The chancellor today also put an end to any speculation in Brussels that she might be aiming for a position in the European Union’s top management. Observers argued she could move to Brussels next year, either as president of the EU Commission or as president of the European Council. Both posts are up for grabs again in about a year.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, CDU

Kramp-Karrenbauer, also known as AKK, was Merkel’s choice to become general secretary of the CDU in 2018. She is reputedly Merkel’s pick as a successor as party leader. AKK headed a CDU-SPD coalition as state premier in the small southwestern state of Saarland before becoming the CDU’s general secretary. She is considered a moderate who would continue Merkel’s centrist policies.

Jens Spahn, CDU

The 38-year-old is the youngest and most overtly determined Merkel usurper. He entered the Bundestag in 2002 and became Germany’s health minister in 2018. Spahn, who is openly gay, is popular in the CDU’s conservative wing. He opposes limited dual citizenship for young foreigners, criticized attempts to loosen laws on advertising abortions and called for banning the Burqa in public.

Friedrich Merz, CDU

The former leader of the CDU/CSU grouping in the Bundestag has been out of frontline politics since leaving the Bundestag in 2009. But the 62-year-old announced his intention to replace Merkel within hours of the news that she would be stepping down. Merz reportedly fell out with Merkel after she replaced him as CDU/CSU group leader in 2002. He has been a chairman at Blackrock since 2016.

Armin Laschet, CDU

Laschet became state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2017. His win marked a major defeat for Social Democrats in Germany’s 18 million-strong “coal” state. The Catholic and former journalist, 57, has been branded by his critics as “too nice for politics.” He is also one of the five deputies in the national CDU executive.

Julia Klöckner, CDU

Klöckner became agriculture minister in 2018 and has been CDU chief in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate since 2011. In 1995, before entering politics, she became Germany’s “Wine Queen.” Like Spahn, she belongs to the CDU’s conservative wing. She raised eyebrows in 2016 when she proposed an alternative plan to Merkel’s refugee policy.

Peter Altmaier, CDU

Altmeier, known as “Merkel’s bodyguard,” has supported the chancellor’s centrist policy platform on multiple fronts. Originally from Saarland, Altmaier first worked for the European Union before entering the Bundestag in 1994. The former environment minister turned economy minister is renowned for his kitchen diplomacy and being a stickler for policy detail.

Ursula von der Leyen, CDU

Von der Leyen became defense minister in 2013 after serving a stint as labor minister. Despite her reform efforts, defense spending remains stubbornly low and the military continues to suffer from widespread equipment shortages. Von der Leyen, who studied in the United States and Britain, supports a larger role for Germany abroad and improving links between national armies in the European Union.

Volker Bouffier, CDU

Volker Bouffier has been the premier of the central state of Hesse since 2010. He formerly served as the state’s interior minister and has twice “won” Big Brother awards from German data privacy advocates for propagating closer surveillance methods by police. The 66-year-old currently heads a CDU-Greens state government in Hesse and is a deputy chairperson in the national CDU executive.

Wolfgang Schäuble, CDU

Schäuble is one of the CDU’s most experienced politicians. He is well-known throughout Europe for his time as finance minister from 2009 to 2017, when he took a hard line against the Greek government. But Schäuble’s decision to give up a senior ministerial role to become president of the German parliament suggests the 75-year-old has already entered the twilight of his political career.

Markus Söder, CSU

Söder is Bavaria’s state premier and a member of the CDU’s sister party, the CSU. He is therefore ineligible to replace Merkel as CDU head. But Söder, who became premier earlier this year, could become chancellor if the CDU and CSU together nominate him as their combined candidate for the 2021 election. He has been a vocal critic of Merkel’s refugee policy and Greece’s membership of the euro.

Author: Ian P. Johnson, Alexander Pearson

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/europe-without-angela-merkel-is-possible/a-46081728

The post ‘Europe without Angela Merkel is possible’ first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Critics of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy said that her permissiveness would cripple the country, as the incomers—more than 1 million asylum seekers since 2015—couldn’t contribute to society by getting jobs. Figures released today by Germany’s federal labor agency, however, showed that 306,574 asylum seekers had found jobs as of May, a jump of more than 100,000 from the same month last year.

These people mainly come from eight crisis-torn countries, including Syria, Iraq, Somalia, and Eritrea. Some 28,000 of them had completed apprenticeships by May. “We always said that those who have entered as children and adolescents have better prospects in the labor market,” said Detlef Scheele, head of the labor office.

“Everything is going well,” he added. “These are positive numbers, particularly when you consider that we are talking about people who came here for humanitarian reasons, not necessarily to find work.”

The key to their success was learning German, the agency said. Grasping the notoriously difficult language is the gateway to getting a foothold in the job market, and the agency stressed that it is crucial for the government to keep financing language classes for refugees. As of July, nearly half a million migrants were registered as “looking for work,” a number that also includes people currently completing language courses and integration courses.

Young migrants, once trained, could be a boon for German employers, who are desperate for skilled labor. The labor office said earlier this month that there were 1.2 million unfilled vacancies in the country. The labor shortage in Europe’s largest economy is so dire that the government has floated a proposal that would make it easier for skilled workers from non-EU countries to move to Germany for work.

The latest figures on refugees finding jobs follows news earlier this week that the number of refugees unlawfully granted asylum was much lower than thought: the interior ministry said that a review of 43,000 asylum claims found that 99% of them (link in German) were correctly granted.

Source: https://qz.com/1364947/more-than-300000-refugees-have-now-found-jobs-in-germany/

The post More than 300,000 refugees have now found jobs in Germany first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

It has been more than 100 days since Germany headed to the polls — but the next handful of days might matter more than all of them combined.

Since late September — when German voters handed Chancellor Angela Merkel a fourth term, albeit without giving her party an outright majority — the country has teetered without a new formal government. Unable to win the support of another party for a governing coalition yet, Merkel is now staring down the possibility that the monthslong standoff may force a new election entirely.

Enter: the Social Democrats.

On Sunday, Merkel embarked on preliminary coalition talks with the center-left party, also known as the SDP. They were her second choice — after similar negotiations with a separate pro-business party broke down in November — but it appears circumstances have forced her hand: Party leaders, both for the SDP and the center-right alliance fronted by Merkel, have given themselves until Thursday to determine whether a framework agreement is possible.

Now, the two sides are no strangers to one another. Far from it, in fact: They are partners in the caretaker government now steering the country, and their “grand coalition” of centrists has governed for eight of the past 12 years.

Yet the friendship one might expect of such long-connected factions has faltered in recent months. Both groups saw disappointing results at the ballot box in September, losing dozens of votes to smaller minority parties — which many lawmakers took to be a sign of dissatisfaction with the previous arrangement. Martin Schulz, leader of the SDP, even vowed on election night that the party would outright reject a place in any governing coalition and instead act as opposition.

Faced with the prospect of prolonging the political uncertainty of the past three months, Schulz relented on that pledge — at least for the sake of preliminary talks — but that does little to erase the growing policy differences between the two sides.

NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson noted on Morning Edition where those wedges rest:

“One is the issue of [European Union] reforms, which is on the table today. In other words: Does the EU or the member states — do they integrate more politically and economically or less so?

“The other issue is whether Germany will actually reach its 2 percent of GDP spending on defense in NATO, which is something that’s being demanded by the Trump administration. The conservatives say yes, and the central Social Democrats say no.

“But the biggest hurdle is probably the refugee policy, because the conservatives are very worried that if they don’t tighten this, that more voters are going to go to the Alternative for Germany party, which is a far-right party that is now in parliament.”

Indeed, the AfG looms as a silent shadow over this week’s talks. The once-marginalized party, which is serving in the German Parliament for the first time, has been denounced by all the other parties as xenophobic — yet it has been gaining in popularity, particularly amid an uncertain political environment.Now the third-largest faction in Parliament, the AfG would have the opportunity to build on those gains if this week’s talks fall through and circumstances force a new election. Though, as Soraya points out, the party could stand to gain even from successful negotiations, since a coalition between Merkel’s conservatives and the SDP would make the AfG “the main opposition party, which brings with it major posts within parliamentary committees and more money.”

Should this week’s preliminary negotiations emerge with an agreement, it would be far from the final word on the matter. Party leaders would then need to bring the terms back to their own members, many of whom remain opposed to renewing a partnership with the other side. Only with those members’ OK can full-blown coalition talks proceed.Even in the swiftest possible scenario, Germans have many weeks left before they can arrive at a settled coalition at the helm.

Should this week’s preliminary negotiations emerge with an agreement, it would be far from the final word on the matter. Party leaders would then need to bring the terms back to their own members, many of whom remain opposed to renewing a partnership with the other side. Only with those members’ OK can full-blown coalition talks proceed.Even in the swiftest possible scenario, Germans have many weeks left before they can arrive at a settled coalition at the helm.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/08/576494878/still-in-search-of-a-deal-merkel-faces-a-crucial-week-of-coalition-talks

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The post Still In Search Of A Deal, Merkel Faces A Crucial Week Of Coalition Talks first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.