The post As populism replaces pragmatism, Angela Merkel exits the political stage first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party wasn’t on the ballot Sunday, but an electoral challenge looms in two weeks as it defends its 19-year-hold on the governor’s office in Hesse, a central state that includes Frankfurt, on Oct. 28.

“My lesson from yesterday is that I, as chancellor of this ‘grand coalition,’ must do more to ensure that this confidence is there and that the results of our work are visible,” Merkel said. “And I will do that emphatically.”

The Social Democrats hope to win back Hesse but polls show them trailing and support for both parties is weak.

Sunday’s outcome rekindled speculation about whether the Social Democrats will leave Merkel’s federal government before its term ends in 2021. They only reluctantly joined Merkel’s coalition in March after a national election debacle last year.

Social Democrat leader Andrea Nahles brushed aside questions Monday about her party’s pain barrier.

“I don’t think that defining red lines is appropriate at this point,” she said. “Above all, we have an election in Hesse in two weeks in which we are now investing all our power. We are not going to waste our strength and time now on internal debates.”

As for the national government, “it is obvious that the whole style of our work together must change, and that hopefully was a message from this Bavarian election,” Nahles said.

Much of the blame for the squabbling has been pinned on the CSU leader, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who has continued a three-year feud over migration with Merkel. He nearly brought down the ruling coalition in June with a demand to turn back small numbers of asylum-seekers at the German-Austrian border.

Those tactics turned off Bavarian voters on both the right and left, and polls suggested that migration was some way down on voters’ list of priorities.

Seehofer appeared to have no intention of stepping down after his party received 37.2 percent of the vote, down from 47.7 percent five years ago, for its worst showing in Bavaria since 1950.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel leads a Christian Democratic Union party’s leaders meeting at the party’s headquarters a day after the Bavarian state elections, in Berlin, Monday, Oct. 15, 2018. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber) (AP)

“I won’t hold a discussion about my position,” the 69-year-old said, insisting that his party still has “a special role in Germany’s political landscape.”

The big winners in Bavaria on Sunday were smaller parties. The environmentalist Greens came second while the far-right Alternative for Germany for the first time entered its 15th of Germany’s 16 state parliaments. A regional conservative party, the Free Voters, will likely become the CSU’s coalition partner in Bavaria.

“What’s happened in Bavaria is something that’s been the case in the rest of the country for some time: the weakening of major parties due to changes in society,” said Juergen Falter, a political science professor at the University of Mainz.

Bavaria has become more secular, weakening the CSU, while workers no longer automatically choose the Social Democrats, he said.

The CSU is likely to become “a bit tamer” in the national government because it has seen that constant infighting doesn’t help, Falter said. However, he expects the Social Democrats to try and make more of a mark — and possibly use a planned midterm evaluation next year to leave the federal government.

If that happens, Merkel, 64, could try to revive efforts aborted last year to form a government with the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats, or Germany could head toward a new early election.

Merkel, Germany’s chancellor since 2005 and the leader of the CDU since 2000, has seen her authority weakened over recent months, but has indicated that she plans to seek another two-year term as party leader at a gathering in December.

A bad performance in Hesse could complicate those plans, but there’s no sign yet of a credible challenger.

“Merkel has no serious rivals,” Falter said. “None of those who might pose a risk to her have come out of cover.”

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Source: http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2018/10/15/merkel-regional-ally-vows-work-stability-berlin/

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The post Merkel vows to restore Germans’ confidence in government first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the chairman of the CSU party, addresses a news conference in Berlin on September 19, 2018.FABRIZIO BENSCH / REUTERS

Judith Bogner, a first-time Green Party candidate in Bavaria, told me that immigration is one of the reasons the Green Party has attracted more support. Unlike the CSU, the Green Party has maintained a pro-immigration stance, campaigning on a platform of open borders and better integration for refugees. “There is disappointment among conservative voters over the lack of compassion their leadership is showing in regards to refugees who are here for good reason and the populist language that has been adopted,” she said, adding: “They thought by shifting all the way to the right that they could recapture those votes. What happened actually is that they lost a lot of the middle ground.”

But it’s not just immigration. Bogner said the Greens are also focusing on other important issues that mainstream parties have ignored, such as health care and infrastructure. “Conservatives, who for half of their lifetime voted for the CSU, are wondering why no one is talking about the lack of affordable housing [and] why no one is talking about the lack of digitalization,” she said. “Refugees are not the only problem.”

Read more: Fighting the far-right and neo-Nazi resurgence in Germany

Though the outcome of Sunday’s vote will have as much of an impact on Berlin as it will on Munich, it would be wrong to view the CSU’s performance as a referendum on Merkel’s government, despite that party’s close cooperation with hers. “The two people who would have to take the rap for a bad performance by the CSU would be Seehofer himself and the minister president of Bavaria, Markus Söder,” Quentin Peel, an associate fellow with the Europe Program at Chatham House and the former chief correspondent for the Financial Times in Berlin, told me. He noted that by criticizing Merkel on her immigration policies, the CSU leaders effectively made the vote a referendum on themselves. “If it’s bad for the CSU and they’re very critical of Merkel, it may not be so bad for Angela Merkel.”

The result may even be indicative of what’s to come in Germany. With the Social Democrats still mired in crisis, the Greens could see this as an opening to make gains themselves on the national stage. A recent poll shows the gap between the two parties has narrowed markedly: The Social Democrats, which trails the AfD by one point, would win just 17 percent of the vote if a general election were held today. The Greens would be just two points behind, with 15 percent. Merkel might even like this result, Peel said. “She’s always been quite tempted to form a government if she could with the Greens,” he said. “She’s always felt quite comfortable with them.”

If the vote on Sunday goes as polls predict, the likely scenario is that the CSU will have to enter into a coalition with the Greens—a move that would mirror the government in the neighboring state of Baden-Württemberg, where both parties have ruled in coalition since 2016 (there, the Greens are the largest party). It’s a responsibility Bogner said the Greens are ready to take on. “The only conversation we would exclude about a potential coalition partner is the AfD, absolutely not,” she said. “Other than that, we are willing to talk with everyone who can come to the table.”

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

YASMEEN SERHAN is a London-based assistant editor at The Atlantic.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/10/unexpected-rise-germanys-green-party-bavaria/572473/

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The post The Far Right Isn’t the Only Rising Force in Germany first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The crisis blew up when Hans-Georg Maassen, chief of the BfV intelligence agency, said he was not convinced far-right extremists had attacked migrants in the eastern city of Chemnitz last month and a video said to show the violence may be fake.

That put Maassen at odds with Merkel, who said the pictures “very clearly revealed hate” which could not be tolerated.

“For a more decisive chancellor, this would have been enough to fire him,” said Carsten Nickel at political consultancy Teneo Intelligence, adding that support for Maassen from Merkel’s conservative Bavarian allies was staying her hand.

Now, Merkel is caught between her Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which backs Maassen, and her other coalition partner, the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD), who say he has lost credibility and must go.

The upshot is that the chancellor looks weak, her coalition is in crisis and she is less able to deal with pressing issues such as Brexit, European Union reform and trade problems with the United States.

“The migration issue will certainly continue to haunt Merkel until the end of her term,” said Nickel.

The Maassen row has its roots in Merkel’s 2015 decision to open Germany’s borders to refugees fleeing war in the Middle East. More than one million came in total.

“Maassen is not an isolated case. Maassen is part of the security community,” said Robin Alexander, author of ‘Die Getriebenen, or ‘Those Driven by Events’, an account of how Merkel and her lieutenants handled the refugee crisis.

“For this security community, autumn 2015 was a disaster – not just for Maassen, but for all of them,” he added. “There is a deep alienation of the whole security community from the chancellor, and that was not the case in Germany previously.”

FRUSTRATED SPIES

The rift opened up in October 2015, when Merkel put her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, in charge of Germany’s response to the refugee crisis, with Emily Haber – a diplomat – acting as point person in the Interior Ministry.

That chain of command effectively shut out the security services, which couldn’t get face time with Merkel.

“That totally frustrated these people … they were horrified,” said Alexander.

In private, Maassen complained about the difficulty of keeping tabs on the refugees and assessing whether they posed a security risk.

His cause got a boost with the 2017 election, when the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged into parliament for the first time and Merkel had to reshuffle her government.

CSU leader Horst Seehofer, who had called Merkel’s handling of the refugee crisis a “reign of injustice”, was made interior minister. He gave Maassen political cover to push his security agenda, which he duly did.

In an interview with Reuters in January, Maassen, 55, called for a review of laws restricting the surveillance of minors to guard against the children of Islamist fighters returning to Germany as “sleeper agents” who could carry out attacks.

Maassen also clashed with other more circumspect government officials when he said Russia was the likely culprit behind cyber attacks on Germany.

SPOKE TOO SOON

Then came Chemnitz. This time, Maassen publicly questioned the authenticity of the video before his agency had finished its work on the incident.

“The bottom line is that he spoke before the agency finished its assessment,” said one source familiar with the issue.

In a Sept. 10 letter to the Interior Ministry, seen by Reuters, in which he explained his comments on Chemnitz, Maassen said he wanted to shed light on events after the state premier of Saxony, where the city is located, denied migrants had been hounded.

But the letter failed to draw a line under a scandal that has also revived questions about Maassen’s ties to the far-right AfD.

A former leader of the AfD’s youth wing, Franziska Schreiber, wrote in a book she published this year – “Inside AfD: The report of a drop-out” – that Maassen had advised ex-AfD leader Frauke Petry on how the party could avoid being put under surveillance by his agency. He has denied giving such counsel.

Fresh allegations arose on Thursday, when the BfV was forced to deny a report by public broadcaster ARD that Maassen had told an AfD lawmaker about parts of a report from his agency before it was published.

But Maassen has the backing of Seehofer, who said the intelligence chief “gave a convincing explanation of his actions” to a committee of lawmakers on Wednesday.

The SPD nonetheless called a crisis meeting of governing party leaders on Thursday.

Coalition sources said the decision by the leaders of the three ruling parties to adjourn the Thursday meeting until next Tuesday could mean they hope Maassen will voluntarily step down.

However, the situation could be complicated by a meeting of the CSU on Saturday. If it supports Seehofer’s decision to back Maassen and he does not quit, coalition leaders will be under pressure to take a decision on Tuesday.

The post German spy scandal exposes deep divisions in Merkel government first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The post Germany Has a Nazi Problem. And a Refugee Problem. first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The post Germany Has a Nazi Problem. And a Refugee Problem. first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Thousands of people in the Bavarian capital, Munich, gathered on Sunday to demonstrate against right-wing populism, in a rally that was a direct rebuke of the ruling Bavarian party Christian Social Union (CSU) for its immigration policies and stance.

Under the official slogans “An end to the incitement of hate” and “Together against the politics of fear,” a large crowd assembled at the Königplatz square, an iconic cultural center of the city. A diverse group of organizations came together for the rally, including NGOs, political parties and church groups.

The demonstration follows a large protest in the Bavarian capital on May 5, where at least 30,000 people filled Odeonplatz square to express their rejection of a controversial legislative package put forth by the CSU that sought to widen police powers.

Demonstrators hold a sign spelling out CSU with the words “unchristian, asocial, inhumane.”

Read more: Trouble in Bavarian paradise: Will the CSU’s hard-line asylum strategy pay off?

Officials put the attendance of Sunday’s anti-CSU rally at 15,000, with organizers saying that 18,000 showed up, despite the unrelenting rain in Munich. Protesters singled out CSU leaders Horst Seehofer and Markus Söder as instigators of an “irresponsible politics of division” at the national and regional levels respectively. Demonstrators also spoke out against CSU parliamentary party leader Alexander Dobrindt.

Organizers of the rally wanted to emphasize that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was not the only political organization that in their eyes promotes a politics of “exclusion and hate.” Protesters were called on by organizers to put the spotlight on “a massive societal shift to the right, the surveillance state, [and] the restriction of freedoms and attacks on human rights” that they see as inherent to CSU policies.

A woman holds the sign with the event’s slogan: “together against the politics of fear.”

Read more: The challenges of parodying CSU politician Horst Seehofer

CSU reacts

Shortly before the demonstrations began, the CSU defended itself and spoke out against Sunday’s event.

In an official tweet, the CSU said “Bavaria will not be filled with hatred,” turning the accusation of inciting hate against the organizers of the event. The Bavarian ruling party said that it rejected “political agitation” and made calls for political decency. “The people in Bavaria know what they have with the CSU,” the tweet added.

CSU @CSU

The post Germany: Thousands gather in Munich to protest Bavarian ruling party CSU first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

German chancellor Angela Merkel has led by example on how to approach the refugee crisis in Europe. But her two-year struggle to get other European Union countries to follow suit, by overhauling the bloc’s asylum rules, won’t be over any time soon.

Despite the looming June deadline, Merkel said in a statement today (June 26) that there would be no agreement reached at this week’s EU summit.

At the center of the impasse is a disagreement about who should bear the ultimate responsibility for handling an asylum seeker’s claim. Currently, migrants are processed in the state in which they arrive—something that has recently placed a lopsided burden on countries like Italy, where the migrant crisis has not abated as much as it has elsewhere.

Even then, Germany is still home to the majority of Europe’s refugees.

The post Merkel is struggling to get EU countries to follow Germany’s lead on migration first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

BERLIN, June 24 (Xinhua) — The ongoing dispute over the refugee policy within Germany’s ruling coalition undermines its majority, according to a latest poll released Sunday.

In the weekly survey of the pollster Emnid for the “Bild am Sonntag,” the Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Union Party loses two percentage points and only reaches 31 percent of support rate.

As the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) remains unchanged at 18 percent, the Union-SPD ruling coalition formed in March has only 49 percent of support rate in aggregate.

The coalition won 53.4 percent of votes in the federal elections in September, suffering a great loss compared to that of 2013 due to the rise of right-wing populism triggered by over 1 million refugees inflows.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is now in a unprecedented dispute with its Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union (CSU), as Horst Seehofer, German Interior Minister and chairman of CSU, threatened to bypass Merkel and implement a tougher policy to asylum seekers and for border control.

The two parties avoided a showdown last week as Seehofer agreed to give Merkel two weeks to find a European solution on June 28-29 EU summit.

By contrast, the Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) gained one percentage point to 16 percent, the highest figure that the far-right anti-immigration party has ever achieved in the Emnid Sunday trend.

Germany, France, Italy and several other EU members states will hold a mini-summit on Sunday to discuss a European solution for refugee and migration issue ahead of the EU summit.

Editor: Shi Yinglun

Source: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-06/24/c_137277622.htm

The post Asylum dispute costs Germany’s ruling majority: poll first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

LAST week a dispute over immigration policy took Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), their conservative Bavarian partners, to the brink of divorce. “I can’t work with this woman any more!” a furious Horst Seehofer, the CSU interior minister, fumed of the chancellor for blocking his proposal to turn migrants registered in other EU countries back at German borders. Open hostilities flew between CDU and CSU MPs, who sit in a single parliamentary group, in the halls of the Bundestag as the Bavarians refused to back  down, pouring scorn on the chancellor’s request for two weeks to find a “European solution”.

But the weekend cooled heads and now détente has broken out. A meeting of the CSU leadership in Munich yesterday gave Mr Seehofer its blessing to impose the new border regime against Mrs Merkel’s will (whether or not the wording of the German constitution gives him the right to do so is debatable), but agreed that he would not act on this for two weeks, waiting to see the outcome of the chancellor’s European negotiations. For her part she conceded her interior minister permission to turn back refugees banned from Germany; albeit that measure is already mostly in effect.

The dispute is now stable, but not yet resolved. The CSU remains sceptical about the chancellor’s ability, at the EU summit on June 28th and 29th, to forge a long-elusive deal fixing the Dublin system regulating immigration to the EU, which grants responsibility for registering and processing immigrants to the member state where they first arrive. The Bavarians, whose state borders Austria and thus is the main entry point for those travelling north from Greece or Italy, accuse southern European states of waving through “asylum tourists” to Germany.

Mr Seehofer considers the long-term solution “anchor centres”, centralised immigration camps currently in operation in Bavaria, where applicants can be monitored and promptly deported if denied the right to stay. Until they are rolled out across the country, he reckons the only answer is to refuse entry to Germany to those registered elsewhere in the EU. How practical this would be is doubtful. The logistics of comprehensively manning, say, the 815km-long German-Austrian border, with its roughly 70 road crossings, are daunting. Whether Austria would readmit those refused entry by Germany is uncertain. Vienna might simply close its southern borders, prompting what Mrs Merkel described yesterday as a “domino effect”: a disastrous wave of unilateral border policies bringing down Europe’s free-movement regime. But the CSU’s goals are more than just practical: the party is also looking nervously at the state election in Bavaria in October, where the far-right Alternative for Germany threatens the party’s traditional hegemony.

What now? Mrs Merkel’s “European solution” will involve seeking bilateral deals with southern European states like Italy, Greece and Bulgaria to secure the prompt and automatic repatriation of immigrants from Germany to the states where they were first registered. These will not come easily: such countries feel they already bear an unfair share of the immigration burden. Indeed Italy’s new populist government, and particularly Matteo Salvini, its hard-right interior minister, is determined to reduce this burden at almost any cost. The chancellor will surely need to bring out her cheque-book. In her press conference yesterday she suggested she sees her existing cash-for-repatriations deal with Turkey, which has helped reduce flows of immigrants to Germany, as a template.

Following the EU summit late next week Mrs Merkel is due to present her achievements back in Berlin on July 1st. Then it will be up to the CSU to decide whether to accept them as substitutes for the threatened border policy, or whether Mr Seehofer should act unilaterally. The interior minister’s tough talk over the past days has left him little room to back down; he is in any case under pressure from Markus Söder, his long-time rival and the current prime minister of Bavaria, and Alexander Dobrindt, the CSU’s leader in the Bundestag, to keep up the pressure on the chancellor. Most likely is that Mrs Merkel will achieve enough in her European talks over the coming days for some compromise (perhaps involving step-by-step increases in border patrols and checks) to be reached with the CSU. But it is far from certain.

But if not? Mrs Merkel has made it clear that unilateral action by Mr Seehofer would be an act of war, yesterday stressing that the absence of a European solution should not automatically lead to the new controls and asserting that such matters were her responsibility as chancellor. All of which would make it hard for her to smooth over relations with any semblance of authority in the event of a unilateral move by her interior minister in early July.

In that event Mrs Merkel may therefore have no practical alternative but to fire him, which would probably eject the CSU from her coalition, leaving its remaining components (her CDU and the Social Democrats) just short of a majority. The Greens or the pro-business Free Democrats might be persuaded to make up the numbers, perhaps supporting the government in crucial votes without formally joining it. But Mrs Merkel’s authority would be greatly, perhaps terminally, diminished. She might stand down in favour of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the CDU general secretary and her preferred heir. A more disorderly departure might favour the chances of more Merkel-critical figures in the CDU, like Jens Spahn, the health minister and an ally of Mr Dobrindt.

Yet for now, as last week, a health-warning applies: do not write off Mrs Merkel just yet. The chancellor remains the most popular politician in Germany. She retains the support of most of her party; including that of a number of MPs not currently speaking up, to avoid further inflaming relations with the CSU, but who would stand behind her should her leadership come under dire threat. None of her possible replacements looks quite ready to step into her shoes yet (were this drama playing out in a couple of years’ time the picture might be different). The CSU’s tactics seem to be backfiring: polls show support for both the CDU/CSU nationally and the CSU in Bavaria falling. Many in the CDU, and some quietly sceptical moderates in the CSU, are losing patience with Mr Seehofer’s theatrics. It is one of the central rules of German politics that voters prize stability above most things. For as long as Mrs Merkel looks a better guarantor of that stability than her rivals, she remains a force to be reckoned with.

Source: https://www.economist.com/kaffeeklatsch/2018/06/19/angela-merkel-has-two-weeks-to-keep-germanys-centre-right-together

The post Angela Merkel has two weeks to keep Germany’s centre-right together first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.