Even by Angela Merkel’s own tastes, the last act of Germany’s opera-loving chancellor is bursting with high drama. After nearly 16 years astride the political stage, mastering financial and political crises with her left hand while governing Europe’s largest country with her right, the unflappable physicist of power has met her match in an invisible virus.

When she isn’t haggling over vaccines with the EU’s 26 other leaders, Merkel has to contend with the political priorities and egos of Germany’s 16 state leaders. They – not Berlin’s chancellor – carry front-line competence for pandemic priorities like health and education. Given that, Merkel has done a remarkable job using her political gravitas as leverage in talks.

But she has little direct control over Germany’s chaotic vaccination strategy. Even without shortages in vaccines, each federal state has insisted on its own rollout strategy, creating 16 potential ways to get it wrong.

Things are no less chaotic in Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Three years after she stood down as leader, half a dozen members of the center-right parliamentary party thought a global pandemic, triggering a global run on protective equipment, was the right time to monetize their political connections.

Party leaders acted quickly to dismiss them, and prosecutors are investigating, but it has left voters wondering if these were isolated episodes of political brain fog. Until last month’s revelations, the CDU blocked repeated opposition efforts to beef up Germany’s lax lobby and donation rules.

With a whiff of sleaze in the air, new CDU leader Armin Laschet is spending the Easter break reflecting on his diminishing political options. When he was elected in January, he thought he had first refusal on leading his party, and their Bavarian allies, the CSU, to election day on September 26th. But the graft revelations and perceived pandemic dithering have hit his credibility hard, and his party even harder. After tipping 40 percent in polls during the first pandemic wave, the CDU has slipped six points in a month to just 27 percent in a public television poll.

Speculation is growing that, barring an Easter miracle, Laschet will stand aside and allow Bavaria’s CSU leader Markus Söder front the election campaign.

With six months to polling day, Germany’s alternative coalition options are looking more realistic by the day, with the Greens and Social Democratic Party (SPD) looking remarkably healthy and alert.

But there is little room for Schadenfreude among Germany’s neighbours: the struggles of this country, and its largest party, to adjust to the post-Merkel era are coming soon to the pandemic-hit European Union.

Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/merkel-meets-her-match-1.4528291

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The post The long goodbye: Who can replace Angela Merkel? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Perhaps no other phrase uttered during Angela Merkel’s long chancellorship has made such an impact. The words “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do it”) were meant to express confidence in the face of a huge, self-imposed task. In a matter of a few weeks, 10,000 people had come to Germany, mostly via what became known as the Balkan route. Many of them, initially stuck in Hungary. The majority came from Syria, but others from North Africa, Iraq or Afghanistan.

Merkel let them enter Germany even though other EU member states were officially responsible for them under the Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that asylum-seekers must be registered in the first safe EU country they enter. Instead, Germany allowed people to cross the border first and have their asylum claims checked later.

Nearly half a million people applied for asylum in Germany in 2015, and another 750,000 the following year. The interior minister at the time, Thomas de Maiziere, admitted to public broadcaster ARD in mid-August this year that there had been “moments when control was lost.” His successor, Horst Seehofer, then premier of Bavaria, once called the situation in 2015 a “reign of injustice.”

Merkel’s political opposition voiced very different opinions about her actions, at least in retrospect. The Greens’ Irene Mihalic said, “It was right for the chancellor not to close the borders back then. The alternative would have been chaotic conditions in the heart of Europe with an incalculable potential for conflict.”

Refugees were made to wait for days to register with German authorities

Although Lars Castellucci, a parliamentarian for the Social Democratic Party (SPD), largely agreed with this view, he tempered it with some criticism: Germany should have consulted European partners more. “That causes us enormous difficulties even today,” he said.

Gottfried Curio of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is of course more vehement in his objections. “The realistic and responsible thing to do would have been to adhere to the law … If the people had been turned away from the outset, fewer of them would have set out on the journey and fewer would have drowned in the Mediterranean.”

Read more: Are Germany and the EU prepared for a new influx of refugees?

Approval and skepticism

Merkel’s memorable phrase put a lot of people on her side. Outside Germany, there was much approval for Merkel’s decision. The New York Times wrote on September 5, 2015, that Germany had “held out an open hand” to refugees. The broadcaster Al-Jazeera reported that “Germany has opened its doors and borders to all those searching for refuge and a safe haven.”

But some skeptics believed from the start that Germany was taking on more than it could handle. Others asked what exactly had to be done and whether the country should feel responsible for so many people from different cultures. Merkel’s decision divided the nation.

Castellucci, whose SPD party, as junior coalition partner, shared responsibility for implementing Merkel’s policy, would have liked the chancellor to have presented a more detailed plan: “She definitely should have said how we can do it and who has to do it. And then there should have been discussions about it in society,” he told DW. “That might have avoided the way supporters and opponents of our policy were so irreconcilably at odds with one another, to the benefit of populists.”

Germany’s “welcome culture” lasted several months after Merkel’s statement

The initial “welcome culture” that Merkel advocated dissipated on New Year’s Eve 2015/16, when women were assaulted by migrants in Cologne’s main railway station. Even before this, there were numerous xenophobic attacks on refugee shelters, showing how the mood in parts of the country was tipping.

The AfD profited from the discontent, seeing large increases in voter support in several state elections before becoming the Bundestag’s biggest opposition party in federal elections in 2017.

Merkel has always stood by her decision of 2015, but told a conference of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in December 2016 that a situation like the one in late summer 2015 “can, should and must not be repeated.” The German government introduced a more restrictive asylum policy, and from 2016, the number of asylum-seekers dropped mainly because countries along the Balkan route made it increasingly difficult for people to cross their borders.

Read more: Migrants stuck on EU doorstep: What is Germany doing?

Progress on integration

How well have those new arrivals been integrated in Germany? Migrants are still much less likely to have a job than the average German. Only around half the people who have come to Germany since 2013 have paid employment, according to a 2020 study by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The generally upward trend is also now being canceled out by the coronavirus pandemic as many of those who fled their home countries for Germany are being laid off, the study found.

The difficulties on the job market also have an effect on criminality. Immigrants are disproportionately involved in violent crime including murder, manslaughter, assault and rape. But this is partly because many of the immigrants are young men who tend to be more frequently guilty of such offenses.

Bavarian State Premier Horst Seehofer remained critical of Merkel’s position, but stayed in government, and was eventually elevated to Federal Interior Minister

CDU domestic policy spokesperson Patrick Sensburg said a distinction must be made between asylum-seekers and those who want to come to Germany to work.

“For me, protection for refugees is primarily temporary protection,” he said. “Anyone wanting to come here to live and work on a permanent basis has other means of doing so if he or she has the necessary qualifications and accepts our values.”

German society remains divided over immigration policy. Around 60% of Germans believe that the country can cope well with the refugees while 40% believe the opposite. Political scientist Herfried Münkler said 2015 had “exposed a rift in German society” and radicalized politics. “The tendency towards the political center that we saw before came to an end,” he said.

Five years after Merkel’s famous statement, has German society really shown that it could cope with the challenge? Former Interior Minister de Maiziere said he feels that it has at least made significant progress. His party colleague Sensburg said Germany has “mastered the 2015 refugee crisis well, all in all.”

Irene Mihalic from the Green Party said she sees the task as still unfinished: “Integration doesn’t happen overnight, and we will keep having to work on it at all levels. But I am convinced that immigration is a great opportunity for Germany, particularly with regard to the labor market and demographic developments,” she says.

Studies by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) came to similar conclusions. They found Germany is on the way to success, while also pointing out that considerably more effort must still be made by both those who have sought refuge in Germany  and those who have offered it to them.

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-five-years-after-the-refugee-crisis-whats-been-achieved/a-54660166

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German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said Sunday (23 August) that the European Union’s recovery package financed by joint borrowing was a long-term measure rather than a short-term coronavirus crisis fix, contradicting Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“The Recovery Fund is a real step forward for Germany and for Europe, one we won’t go back on,” Scholz, who is also the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) candidate to succeed Merkel in 2021 elections, told the Funke newspaper group.

Steps taken under the plan, including EU nations agreeing to jointly issue debt “represent fundamental changes, perhaps the biggest changes since the introduction of the euro” single currency around the turn of the millennium, Scholz said.

“These steps forward will inevitably lead to a debate about joint resources for the EU, something that’s a condition for an improved European Union that works better,” he added.

Long and intense debates were needed before the 27 EU countries reached agreement in July on their historic €750 billion recovery scheme, more than half of which will be paid out as direct grants.

For the first time, leaders gave their green light to joint debt – an idea Germany had long rejected until the COVID-19 pandemic hobbled many European economies that had already spent a decade struggling to recover from the last financial crisis.

Scholz added that the way voting works at EU level should be reformed to make reaching decisions easier.

“The EU must be able to act collectively,” he said. “For that we need to have qualified majority voting in foreign and budgetary policy, rather than enforced unanimity.”

In European Council votes, a “qualified majority” is reached with 55% of countries, which must include member states representing 65% of the bloc’s 450-million-strong population.

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Source: https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/germanys-scholz-sees-no-way-back-from-eu-joint-debt/

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Chancellor Angela Merkel sat down on Wednesday as she welcomed Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda in Berlin to the tune of military bands playing national anthems outside the chancellery.

This was the third time she has chosen to sit for such a state reception following the three trembling episodes that occurred during public appearances in June and July. The instances, which made international headlines, raised rumors about the state of her health. She addressed those concerns directly on Tuesday during her first post-holiday appearance at a reader forum hosted by the Ostsee-Zeitung newspaper in the northeastern coastal town of Stralsund.

While answering questions from the roughly 200 audience members, German magazine Der Spiegel quoted her as saying, “I do understand that people have these questions and that some of them worry. That’s why I have a duty to assess whether I can fulfill my tasks well, or whether something is affecting me so much that I perhaps can’t.”

Merkel has already said she would not contest another general election, and there were signs this week that the notoriously reserved chancellor was beginning to open up emotionally in the final leg of her tenure. “I have always managed to find a space where I can be sad without having to tell the entire public about it,” she said. Without such spaces, she added, it would be “very difficult to always be happy in public.”

Breaking up the coalition?

There are plenty of signs that the tail end of the Merkel era could be among the most challenging. While the next general election is scheduled for 2021, political circumstances could yet bring it about earlier.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), junior partners in her coalition government, is still struggling in the latest opinion polls, scoring between 12% and 14%. It is also in the process of choosing a new leader after the resignation of Andrea Nahles in June, following the party’s abysmal result in the European elections.

The choice could prove fateful, since a more left-leaning SPD chief could theoretically drag the party out of the coalition in order to fight a new election, possibly betting on a future alliance with the increasingly popular Greens and the socialist Left party.

Merkel was a little prickly when this possibility was brought up at Tuesday’s reader forum, saying that she hadn’t heard any suggestion of an impending breakup from the SPD ministers in her cabinet, the SPD Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, or the Social Democrats’ three interim party leaders.

There were, she added, more important things to discuss anyway: “Every day we discuss the question: What would happen if? We have to discuss the question: What should we do now?”

But Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) could have its own problems looming. Many in the CDU’s ranks seem to have cold feet about her successor as party leader, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who, as things stand, would be the CDU’s candidate for chancellor.

Those worries were likely not assuaged by a June Emnid survey of some 1,000 German voters from different parties that showed Kramp-Karrenbauer’s rival, Friedrich Merz, who narrowly lost the run-off election to become CDU party leader, garnering nearly twice as much support as her as a potential candidate for chancellor.

Upcoming problems: Climate crisis and the ‘black zero’

As far as immediate concerns go, Merkel has also been confronted by the Green party’s growing popularity and the topic of climate change topping the political agenda.

In response to Green party leader Robert Habeck’s suggestion earlier this week that the state should consider taking on some new debt to pay for major investments in climate-protection projects, Merkel (through her spokesman Steffen Seibert) insisted that the government could achieve all the necessary climate goals within its current budget. “That too is sustainability,” Seibert said in Monday’s regular press conference.

Read more: Germany’s Green leader sorry for linking Angela Merkel’s shaking to climate crisis

Balancing the state budget has become something of a fetish for the Finance Ministry under Merkel, regardless of which party has occupied the minister’s seat. She and her current finance minister, Scholz, have been on the same page when it comes to maintaining Germany’s precious fiscal “black zero.”

“We can manage the necessary tasks without taking on more debt,” he said on Monday.

But debt could conceivably become a point of contention if a future coalition were to involve the Greens and Merkel’s CDU under either Kramp-Karrenbauer or Merz.

Nevertheless, Merkel’s financial caution did not stop her from underlining to the Stralsrund audience that she had been “touched” by Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future climate campaign.

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/worries-on-the-horizon-for-angela-merkel/a-50025036

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Germany is working to loosen its arms export control rules to make it easier to continue with joint weapons projects with France, according to an internal strategy paper obtained by Der Spiegel magazine.

The four-point paper, entitled “German-French industry cooperation in the defense area – common understanding and principles about sales,” said that “both states will develop a common approach to arms exports with joint projects.” It also said, “The parties will not stand against a transfer or an export to third countries.”

Der Spiegel described the paper as a “secret” adjunct to the Aachen friendship treaty, signed in January, which pledged cooperation on a host of future projects.

The apparently innocuous point contained a potential political collision, since France is one of the main suppliers of arms to Saudi Arabia, while Germany has officially stopped all exports to Riyadh in reaction to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The French company Naval Group and Saudi Arabia’s state-owned arms company SAMI, which is headed by a German, also signed a joint statement of intent on Sunday, agreeing to build frigates and submarines together.

France and Germany last year embarked on three major joint military projects, including a complex Future Air Combat System (FACS) involving both manned and unmanned aircraft, and there are also plans for common tank projects.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron has also already suggested that Europe also have a common army.

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen joined her French counterpart Florence Parly to inspect new technology.

Read more: France, Germany present new military aircraft plans in Berlin

Compromises

Chancellor Angela Merkel indicated that Germany ought to be willing to compromise on the issue during her speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, when she said that a common European defense policy would necessarily mean a common arms export policy.

In the ensuing Q+A, a question from a French politician drew a suggestion that Merkel actually finds Germany arms export controls a hindrance. “What worries me a lot at the moment is the question of our arms export policy,” she said.

“We have because of our history very good reasons to have very strict arms export guidelines, but we have just as good reasons in our defense community to stand together in a joint defense policy. And if we want … to develop joint fighter planes, joint tanks, then there’s no other way but to move step-by-step towards common export controls guidelines.”

That statement would have delighted Tom Enders,  head of manufacturer Airbus, who condemned Germany’s ban on arms exports to Saudi Arabia on Sunday as “a kind of moral high ground attitude.”

But Merkel’s tone may lead to conflict with her coalition partners, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), who still oppose exports into conflict zones.

Not a secret

At a regular government press conference on Monday, Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert rejected Der Spiegel‘s characterization of the internal paper as a “secret deal,” though he admitted that common defense projects with France would “require compromises from us too.”

Instead, he said, the document represented no more than “an initial political agreement” about common procedures on arms exports. He said that further details would be hashed out in upcoming talks, “with the aim of turning it into a formal agreement.”

The Green party’s defense policy spokeswoman, Agnieszka Brugger, warned that closer cooperation with France should not be carried out “at the expense of security and human rights.”

“It is not in the security interests of either state to deliver weapons to brutal parties at war and human rights abusers,” she told DW. She also pointed out that the European Union already had a joint arms export policy that “includes clever criteria.” “Germany and France should return to this European agreement, which protects human rights and security,” she said.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are leading a military coalition in the four-year conflict in Yemen, which the United Nations says is causing the worst humanitarian catastrophe since the Second World War.

Tobias Pflüger, arms policy spokesman for the socialist Left party, which opposes all arms exports, described the agreement as “scandalous,” because it means that “all the agreements that already exist would be circumvented.” “Even the minimal agreements made to limit exports to Saudi Arabia – we even don’t know how long they will last, by the way – even they would be obsolete,” he said.

As Pflüger pointed out, joint military projects cannot be planned without making plans for the sale of weapons in the future – indeed, many would probably never be financed unless their sales can be safely predicted.

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-angela-merkel-makes-arms-export-pact-with-france/a-47568557

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The German Cabinet on Wednesday approved a compromised amendment to the law which currently bans medical professionals and clinics from even mentioning that they offer abortions.

The compromise proposal would continue to ban the “advertising” of abortions — also the word used to describe the current restrictions — but would in future allow practitioners to at least say whether they provide abortions or not.

To receive any further information about the procedure itself, women will still have to talk to authorities, counselling centers and medical associations. These are currently the only places they can receive legal advice.

Parliament still needs to agree to the change before it is fully approved.

Read more: Online abortion ads: Doctors defend right to inform patients

That controversial section of German law — paragraph 219a — remains in place, but is supplemented by new information options under the compromise.

The Social Democratic Party and opposition parties had wanted to remove the paragraph from the penal code altogether, but Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian allies in the Christian Social Union (CSU) refused.

The changes to the law state that doctors and hospitals may say on their website that they perform abortions under the legal requirements.

The German Medical Association is also to draw up a list of doctors and hospitals that carry out abortions. That list should also include the different options and methods available and should be constantly updated.

Many German hospitals are run or supported by Catholic organizations and do not offer abortions, a practice that remains technically illegal in Germany, but became possible under certain conditions in West Germany as of 1976.

A further compromise is that in the future, contraceptive pills will be paid by health insurance until a woman’s 22nd birthday rather than until her 20th birthday, as before.

SPD and CDU, CSU clash over law.

Justice Minister Katarina Barley said the changes to the law were a “good compromise.”

“We are making sure that doctors, hospitals and other institutions have the opportunity to publicly inform that they are carrying out abortions,” Barley said.

Doctors and women’s groups have criticized the law for continuing to prevent pregnant women from obtaining comprehensive information on abortions from their doctor.

Social Democrats MP Maria Noichl, who heads a women’s group within the SPD, said the reform was still guilty of “patronizing women and doctors.”

“Ultimately, this is a question of conscience that every woman and every man must decide for themselves,” Noichl said.

SPD MP Hilde Mattheis has called for an on-the-record vote in the Bundestag, saying MPs might not be bold enough to reject the reforms by name.

“Politics becomes transparent in named votes,” Mattheis told the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper. “I have always clearly positioned myself on this question: Politics should be based on the majority. And the majority are women.”

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/german-cabinet-approves-revised-abortion-law/a-47382601

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‘If Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer gets a chance, she would be a vocal leader of Germany and Europe – and less prone to silent procrastination than Merkel.’ Photograph: Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images

So Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer – AKK, as her fans call her – is the new leader of the CDU. After her narrow victory over her rival Friedrich Merz, the tabloid Bild ran the headline: “Kramp-Karren-Power!” However, the woman who demonstrated her enduring power at the CDU party congress on Friday was not AKK, but Angela Merkel. AKK was Merkel’s choice. For the first time in postwar German history, a national leader has managed her own succession.

Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt were forced out by cabals. The interim figures Ludwig Erhard and Kurt Georg Kiesinger never had a chance to make their mark. Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder went down to defeat in elections before being disgraced – Kohl by a party-financing scandal, Schröder by taking a job with Gazprom.

Merkel declared that she would not seek another term when her chancellorship expires in 2021, and then took a gamble by stepping down as party leader and indicating that Kramp-Karrenbauer, whom she had installed as secretary general, would be her preferred successor. If the party wanted to break with Merkel’s legacy of modernization, of making the CDU electable for urban elites, modern women and minorities, even at the expense of alienating more conservative voters, now was the time to do it.

Some disgruntled grandees decided to grab the opportunity. Ex-finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who had once been touted as Kohl’s successor, but who had been blindsided by Merkel, persuaded Merz to run. Merz had been ousted as leader of the party’s parliamentary faction by Merkel in the early 2000s and had spent the intervening years amassing business experience and oodles of money with the asset-management firm Black Rock. He was supported by another male victim of Merkel’s manoeuvres, Günther Oettinger. Every bit as ambitious as Schäuble and Merz, Oettinger had been shunted off to a commissioner’s post in Brussels for his pains.

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Merz, then, embodied the hope – or the threat – of a return to the CDU of the Kohl era: a shift to the right in the hope of reclaiming voters who had abandoned the CDU for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). He immediately became the darling of the right-of-centre media and the pro-business groups in the CDU. AKK, on the other hand, was the candidate of the party’s women’s and youth organisations. Women and youth versus business, the sympathetic media and the patriarchs: this would have been a no-brainer before Merkel.

Had Merz won, the pundits would now be asking how long he would need to topple Merkel. Now they are asking how long AKK will be able to keep Merkel in power. The weak point in Merkel’s coalition is the Social Democratic party (SPD), in freefall at the polls and gazing enviously at Jeremy Corbyn’s resurgent, back-to-the-70s Labour party and anxiously at the once-powerful, now marginalised French Socialist party. The SPD might jump ship at any time, and AKK might be the one to push them, in spite of herself. She told the party before her election that the days when “we executed the policies of the government” were over and that the CDU would expect the government to follow the party line.

So what could one expect from AKK as leader of Germany? Though loyal to Merkel, she’s no Merkel clone. Merkel is a Protestant from the East. AKK is a Catholic from the Saarland, wedged between France and Germany. Merkel is devoid of convictions, AKK a conservative and European. Merkel came in at the top as a token East German woman after unification; AKK slogged her way up through the ranks in the CDU’s youth and women’s organisations, fought successful elections and led governments at local and state levels – and understands what makes the party tick. Nobody doubts her capabilities. If she gets a chance, she would be a decisive – and vocal – leader of Germany and Europe and less prone to silent procrastination than Merkel.

AKK’s European options are, of course, limited by the state of the Union. Having (almost certainly) lost Britain to Brexit, Germany now seems to be losing France to the gilets jaunes. Italy, Hungary, Poland and other eastern European states are in rebellion against Brussels. Some hope that Merkel will use her new-found freedom to attempt some grand European balancing act. But with all the European heavyweights except Germany paralysed by populism, Merkel will probably revert to form and leave AKK the job of sorting out the mess.

If anyone can do it, she can. As a Catholic from a small German state, she understands subsidiarity and the resentments of smaller countries within the EU in a way Merkel the Prussian never could. As an instinctive European, she will go the extra mile to preserve the Union. Who knows, she might even find a way to entice Britain back in.

• Alan Posener, a German blogger, writes for Die Welt and Welt am Sonntag

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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/10/angela-merkel-annegret-kramp-karrenbauer-germany-eu

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The post Could Angela Merkel’s successor be Europe’s saviour? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Berlin, where the only constant is change.

“If you move to Paris, chances are you want to become a Parisian. Those moving to Munich want to become Münchners. But people who move to Berlin,” says “Babylon Berlin” director Henk Handloegten, “want to subjugate the city.” Everyone declares the public space to be their own personal property and makes it clear to others: This is my city.

There are men everywhere peeing on trees like dogs marking their territory. Graffiti artists and taggers cover every free space they can find. Mothers with their twin strollers clear the sidewalks as if to say: “Get out of the way. Here comes your pension!” Aggressive bicyclists race among the pedestrians and, of course, ignore the red lights.

Like most people in this city, they have no doubt that they’re in the right, that they’re the good guys. Eco-athletes, the urban avant-garde, constantly in close combat with pedestrians who block their path. And with the cars, whose drivers have but a single goal in life: to run them over.

As Berlin gets more crowded, the mood in the German capital has grown more aggressive. Heedlessness and violence have increased in the city, says Karlheinz Gaertner, a retired policeman who spent over 40 years patrolling the streets of Berlin. These days, he writes books about Berlin, including his most recent one, “They No Longer Know Any Limits.”

Gaertner, who has the physique of a wrestler, is walking along Sonnenallee, a broad boulevard in the city’s Neukölln district, the area he used to patrol. Every now and then, he runs into men he once arrested. He offers guided tours through the neighborhood to groups of visitors interested in learning what a troubled neighborhood in Germany looks like.

A few years back, Neukölln served as a symbol for everything that had gone wrong in a Germany that largely ignored its immigrants and didn’t seem to care that they lived in isolated, almost ghetto-like neighborhoods separated from the rest of society. Chaos was the rule in some schools. Arab clans waged war against each other on the streets and the police seemed helpless.

The share of residents with an immigrant background in Neukölln is over 40 percent, with many coming from Turkey and Arab countries. It is the Berlin district with the lowest level of education, the highest dependency on social benefits and the greatest risk of poverty. The unemployment rate in some parts of the district is as high as 25 percent, and the proportion of migrants in some schools is around 90 percent.

Neukölln’s former district mayor, Heinz Buschkowsky of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), became a media star with his dramatic, boisterous descriptions of the state of his district in countless talk shows. Some fellow SPD members even wanted to expel him from the party, accusing him of resorting to “right-wing populism” in the debate over immigrants and migration.

For years, Gaertner has been campaigning for action against the knife attacks that are becoming rampant in Berlin. And it’s true: In the Berlin of today, there are many more people than there used to be from cultures where knives are frequently carried as an everyday item by young men.

“But you can only grab for your knife if you have one on you,” says Gaertner, who has witnessed the suffering of knife-attack victims countless times. The development prompted him to organize initiatives like football tournaments where players are required to disarm if they want to participate. It provides a venue where they can play against the cops and show their true abilities.

In southern Neukölln in September, an Arab repeat offender named Nidal R. was literally executed in broad daylight on the street, sprayed with eight gunshots. Around 2,000 mourners, mostly Muslims, attended his funeral, where they were separated by gender. Some told the television cameras at the event that the 36-year-old had actually been a good guy, despite the fact that Nidal R. had committed over 90 crimes and spent 14 years in prison.

On a concrete wall near the scene of the crime, someone daubed graffiti celebrating the victim as a hero. Meanwhile, the rest of Germany was forced to realize the existence of a parallel society in the country, one that apparently has its own ideas of heroism and masculinity — and perhaps even of law and order.

The Berlin chapter of the Free Democratic Party, a business-friendly party that isn’t opposed to a bit of populism should the situation call for it, quickly put up a poster at the wall: “It’s the law of the state that counts, not that of the street.” The city of Berlin sent painters to cover up the graffiti.

‘Security Guards Are Everywhere’

Berlin frequently whitewashes problems. But sometimes, paint isn’t enough. “Look over there,” Gaertner says, pointing across the street. A security guard is standing in front of Campus Rütli, which used to be called the Rütli School and became notorious throughout the country for its violence and problems. There are few other industries in Berlin, says Gaertner, that are growing as rapidly as the one for security personnel.

“Security guards are everywhere in the city these days. Several are posted at each outdoor public pool in the summer and, despite their presence, there are constantly fights.” Some emergency rooms at hospitals in Berlin are also having to hire security now. There have been numerous cases of assaults on nurses and care providers.

It’s no surprise that the Babylonian diversity of cultures and lifestyles in Berlin can lead to conflicts. Often, they’re just weird — such as when a Turkish couple doesn’t want their children to go to school with Romanians and opts to send them to a Catholic private school instead. Sometimes, though, the conflicts turn violent.

The Paradox of Integration

Take a jog through Hasenheide, a park nestled between the Neukölln, Kreuzberg and Tempelhof districts, and you’ll find yourself slaloming through the myriad drug dealers, most of them of African descent. The Tunisian Anis Amri was one of those Berlin dealers. At one point, he was arrested for such activity, but later released. The security authorities continued monitoring him, taking a wait-and-see approach. But they waited too long: On Dec. 19, 2016, he plowed a semi-truck into the Christmas market next to Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and killed 12 people.

Those who sell drugs day after day, night after night to partiers and hipsters, those who are released over and over again despite repeated run-ins with the police, can be forgiven for concluding that they have ended up in a rather decadent society, a den of sin, a lawless quagmire.

It is an erroneous conclusion, though widespread — on both the right-wing periphery of the political spectrum and among the secret fellow-travelers of global terrorism.

But perhaps the opposite is true. Sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani believes conflicts are often a sign not of the failure of a multicultural society, but of its success. “Successful integration increases the potential for conflict,” he writes in his book “The Integration Paradox.” And he asks: “Why do people think that now, suddenly, things are supposed to be harmonious?”

El-Mafaalani, who works in the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry for Children, the Family, Refugees and Integration, believes ongoing conflicts should be viewed as the basis for a new collective consciousness. But what should be done when values and moral concepts collide?

He believes the best approach is to foster a culture of debate, but says the goal should not be an anything-goes attitude. “If everything is equally valid, then people become indifferent,” he says. For decades, though, he adds, Germany avoided engaging in serious discussion about how to deal with the country’s history of immigration.

“A lack of language courses, no work permits, the threat of being deported every six months, no enforcement of mandatory schooling and catastrophic housing conditions: Those aren’t just problems that migrants faced for the first five or 10 years. It is still the reality for many Lebanese who arrived in the 1980s,” says El-Mafaalani “The fact that we have a problem with organized crime today doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s the legacy of past mistakes.”

How, though, does one go about establishing the culture of debate demanded by El-Mafaalani? It’s an illusion to imagine that the different immigrant groups in Berlin will somehow establish an intercultural dialogue of their own accord. People in the city often talk about each other, but not to each other. Multicultural idealism and monocultural nostalgia are often cut from the same cloth of impracticality.

The German television series “4 Blocks,” now in its second season, describes the culture clash between long-established members of Arab clans and the students and hipsters who represent a new generation of Neukölln residents. The influx has left many Arabs in Neukölln feeling like they are the original Berliners.

Indeed, diversity can also lead to its own kind of delineation. Many Muslim girls in some neighborhoods of Berlin, for example, are reluctant to leave their districts. They have deep roots in Berlin quarters like Kreuzberg or Neukölln, but they feel uncomfortable in some of the more well-healed districts of the city, like Zehlendorf in the southwest, which is home to the upper middle class and the wealthy. They say they are disparaged in such places for wearing the headscarf and don’t really feel like they are even in Germany anymore. Why not? “Because only Germans live there.”

On its surface, this may seem like a bizarre statement, but there’s also a kernel of truth to it. Terms like “immigration background” suggest a sense of uniformity that doesn’t really exist. The inhabitants of Neukölln, for example, hail from more than 160 countries and often share neither language nor religion nor much else — except the neighborhood where they live, the underfunded schools their children attend and poor job prospects.

Berlin’s ‘Strategy 2030’

In the popular recent television series “Babylon Berlin,” the stenographer Charlotte Ritter, played by the actress Liv Lisa Fries, moves through many different neighborhoods, milieus and social strata. The series’ three directors are convinced it is this permeability that has made Berlin special and distinguishes it from other big cities.

“But in the last several years, a phenomenon of prosperity emigration has become established, and that has led to a situation in which the neighborhoods hardly mix anymore,” says Handloegten. “People take over a neighborhood and eventually start defending it against change.”

The pressure on the real estate market means that those who signed favorable leases years ago now stay in their apartments. This can produce absurd situations, like that of a 60-year-old couple, whose children have long since moved out, living in a 150 square meter (1,615 square foot) apartment. But if they were to move to an apartment half that size, they might have to pay twice the rent.

As such, Berlin’s dynamism can lead to stasis, change to intractability. Might there be a danger of the city reverting back to its neighborhoods, back into the seven cities, 59 municipalities and 72 county jurisdictions that were merged a hundred years ago to create Berlin?

The city-state’s government is currently developing a strategy called “Berlin 2030” in order to rein the rampant metropolis back in. The plan is to be adopted in 2020. The growing city, according to the internal strategy paper, “is not perceived by large sections of the population as an advantage, but increasingly as a threat … above all through the rental developments and the gentrification associated with them.”

The plan is “to involve society in as representative a way as possible” in the process through workshops with “100 stakeholders,” “20 representatives of organized society” and “30 randomly chosen, representative citizens.” It certainly sounds nice, but to critics it is little more than empty verbiage. They say the plan is far too narrowly focused on housing construction.

“The Berlin Strategy 2030 in its current form doesn’t work,” says city researcher Klaus Brake. He argues that the strategy paper puts the city government in the driver’s seat and jumps to the second step before taking the first. It immediately wades into the urban development issue before the fundamental question has been clarified: How do we want to live together in Berlin?

In an open letter, critics have called for a “mobilization of urban society” in a manner that is free of “divided and selfish lobbyist groups.” At first hearing, that sounds like out of touch idealism. How, after all, are 3 million mavericks supposed to communicate with each other in this behemoth of a city?

A closer look reveals a hodge-podge of hundreds of individual initiatives. Take, for example, the “Lause,” an alternative housing project in Lausitzer Strasse in the Kreuzberg district with studios and handicraft businesses. It is in danger of becoming a target of real estate speculators. Among those demonstrating at a recent protest against the complex’s owner, a Danish real estate mogul, was the popular ice cream seller Mauro Luongo, who stores his supplies in the building. He even handed out free gelato at the event — from the very same ice cream truck that was struck by five bullets during the execution of clan member Nidal R., as children waited in line for their ice cream in front of the vehicle.

Google had planned to build a new campus on a neighboring street, and demonstrations by those opposed to the project regularly went late into the night. “Google is not a good neighbor,” the protest signs read. “Google off to Adlershof,” read another, referring to a technology center located far out in the city’s eastern outskirts. But precisely that kind of spatial separation of living and working is the opposite of the mix that characterizes life in Berlin.

Google finally gave up in late October and announced the building would be made available to nonprofit organizations. “It’s the city government’s job to mediate here and to communicate all of the advantages projects like this bring to the local community,” says Florian Nöll, the head of German Startups Association. Kreuzberg, he predicts, “will now immediately become known as a no-go area for tech companies.”

The Holzmarkt development along the Spree River in the city’s Friedrichshain district also has its own story to tell. If you walk from Alexanderplatz, Berlin’s eastern center, to the Spree River, you wind up at Holzmarkt. Here, where the Berlin Wall and the death strip once cut through the city, a village of wooden shacks with a restaurant, salon, day care center, campfire, nightclub, theater and bakery have been thrown together. Delegations from as far away as Tel Aviv and New York come here to marvel at the model project.

It’s creators once ran Berlin’s legendary Bar 25 club across the river until they were driven out. Then, they used a run-down building on the other side. Now, they’ve changed sides again. They are constantly finding ways to navigate through the inertia and ignorance of various government authorities who can’t fit the urban activists neatly into their Excel tables and who would rather do things by the book with a traditional investor.

The municipal administration’s helplessness creates a lot of freedom in the city. But that can then also be taken away just as arbitrarily. No matter, the Holzmarkt people will continue partying at their club for as long as they can — all night long, from Fridays to Mondays, often in the form of themed costume balls dedicated to the “golden gangster era of the 1920s: dark and glamorous.” Holzmarkt’s logo encapsulates this hard-partying metropolis’ disposition: a tomcat (a play on the German word for “hangover”) with a black eye and a broad grin.

Such extemporaneous facilities have something of a tradition in the city. If the series “Babylon Berlin” has a center of gravity, then it’s the devilish club Moka Efti, where different languages and social strata form a cocktail of Russian revolutionaries, German nobles, crooks, police and night owls.

A Culture Clash in the Garden

Chaos creates problems today, but it also points the way toward possible solutions. Immigration may be a strain on the city, but the scars of World War II and its Cold War division also provide some relief in the form of fallow land and open spaces, of which Berlin has far more than other metropolises. They are now being rediscovered, but they are also coming under economic pressure.

Berlin has a long tradition of allotment gardens, known as Schrebergärten, many of which contain small shacks for spending the night. They are the most German of all small German escapes — but they have an uncertain future. Berlin is home to almost 900 allotment garden colonies, which make up around 3 percent of the city’s total area. Demand for these gardens is huge and candidates often have to spend several years on a waiting list to secure one.

Some garden colonies have even appointed integration officers, an apparently necessary step. A garden with the rather ironic name of “Peace,” for example, has been a frequent site of dispute because members sought to reject applicants of Turkish origin by saying “they can’t be integrated.” That’s nonsense, of course. If there’s anything that can contribute to integration, it is spending time together among the carrot beds and fruit trees, a truth lived at other communal gardens in the city.

Such as the Allmende-Kontor at the vast Tempelhofer Feld park, an expanse established on the site of the now-closed Tempelhof Airport in the heart of the city. Students and creative types from the neighborhood started the urban gardening project here and were later joined by neighbors with Turkish roots as well as immigrants from some of the 190 other nationalities present in Berlin. In addition to kohlrabi and sunflowers, arguments are also cultivated here, a proclivity among nature lovers. Some gardeners with Turkish roots at times feel stifled by the aesthetic preconceptions of their ethnic German neighbors. They, in turn, sometimes find their foreign neighbors to be a blight on the garden because they “drag all their stuff out of the basement” and clutter the flower beds with old bicycle frames, kitchen cabinets and plastic furniture.

But once they get everything off their chest, they meet again and chat over shisha or beer and share watering duties. These delicate green shoots of a cultivated debate culture are currently under immense pressure, because Berliners not only have the need to hang out in gardens, but an urgent need for thousands of apartments in a city that has been hit with a housing shortage. Several allotment gardens are slated to be bulldozed soon to make way for new apartment buildings.

All of these are individual projects that, at most, will affect a few thousand residents. The search for a larger debate on strategy invariably ends up sooner or later in a discussion with a Catholic priest.

In 2006, Leo Penta founded the German Institute for Community Organizing at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. On Sundays, the priest, a charismatic man with a full beard, celebrates the Holy Mass in English. He was born in New York in 1952 and became a priest at the age of 27, going on to fight misery in the slums in keeping with Catholic social teachings.

“When I started as a community organizer in Brooklyn in the 1970s, things there looked a lot worse than anything you could imagine here in Berlin,” Penta says. “The area called Brownsville and East New York was completely rundown and destroyed, almost like Dresden after the war.”

Penta has lived in Berlin for 22 years and he has been striving to establish methods of grassroots community organizing here as well.

When asked what he thinks about the inclusion of “stakeholders” in projects such as “Strategy 2030” in Berlin, he says: not much. “Citizen participation at the government’s initiative is usually either citizen participation light or an elite event,” he says.

Penta’s German is perfect and almost accent-free, making him an example of the integration paradox. Penta has made Berlin his home, and he wants to change things here. He may be a foreigner, but he’s here to stay — and establish new local traditions along the way.

His services are idiosyncratic. An altar server with a pony tail dressed in sneakers and a T-shirt assists him. People arriving a half-hour late are still welcome because the grassroots priest is perfectly aware that 10:30 a.m. is an ungodly hour on weekends in Berlin. It’s only at around 11 a.m. that his chapel fills up, and he affably points latecomers to empty seats. After communion, the high point of the service comes when, rather than a sermon, everyone talks about the Bible — or simply about their personal experiences — with their Slavic, German or Italian accents.

Penta listens, talks, prods, and he believes the gospels are also about a kind of “counterculture.” His interpretation of the Bible is less about pure doctrine than about misunderstandings and squabbling between Jesus and his disciples. Penta asks his congregation over and over again: What do you think? “Yes” and “amen” don’t seem to be his thing. Can what he’s doing still even be counted as Roman-Catholic? Or is it more Berlin-Catholic?

Penta is also rather unorthodox in his approach to his second job as community organizer. In stark contrast to the city government’s vision of citizen participation, he wants organic participation from below and within rather than ordered from the top and outside. When industry went into decline in the Schöneweide district of eastern Berlin, the area was threatened with decay and unemployment. Snotty residents of central Berlin thumbed their noses at the district, acting as if it were a hopeless case. But Penta was familiar with the symptoms of crisis there from his years in Brooklyn. In 2000, he set about coordinating Germany’s first civic platform: an alliance of 23 civil society groups, associations and church congregations.

Pentas’ platform has helped shape the former industrial wasteland by, for example, successfully fighting for the establishment of part of the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) in the area. Today, Schöneweide is teeming with thousands of students. Of course, citizen’s groups can also have smaller goals — for example, his group’s efforts to keep Berlin’s oldest ferry connection in operation, the F11. While the Silicon Valley is turning to platform capitalism, Penta is banking on platform communitarianism.

He has already initiated four citizen alliances in the city — in Schöneweide, Neukölln, Wedding-Moabit and Spandau — which together incorporate around 80 groups that claim to represent a combined 100,000 people. And they don’t see themselves as just harmless clubs for discussion, but aim to negotiate at eye level with district leaders and city officials.

Can the chaotic, rudderless Babylonia of Berlin become a laboratory for a new form of citizen involvement? All coordinated by a Catholic priest in the diaspora of a godless city where 60 percent of the residents are unaffiliated with any religion?

That, too, might be part of this city’s laissez-faire approach — that in addition to all the other whackos, a Catholic priest can go ahead and do his thing in helping the deeply apostate Berlin society reinvent itself.

Penta’s skepticism of big top-down visions seems to have hit a nerve — as exemplified by Tempelhofer Feld, the vast empty field right in the heart of the city. Once an airport, the city proposed turning it into a new city quarter once it was closed down in 2008. But what did Berliners want? It’s not so easy to say. To approach an answer, it’s best to visit the place.

Freedom

Up until a decade ago, you could still fly from downtown Berlin to places like Vienna or Brussels. But in the 10 years that have passed since the last flight took off, not much has happened at the site. It is pretty much completely empty and it is so big that New York’s Central Park could fit inside with plenty of room to spare. It is a huge luxury in a city where housing is becoming increasingly tight.

But in a 2014 referendum, voters decided to keep it as it is. They elected to change nothing. No apartment buildings on the edges, no international garden exhibition, no lake, no mountain, no rocks. Critics complain that the city isn’t even allowed to put in bathrooms and park benches.

The vote was essentially the people of Berlin thumbing their noses at turbo-capitalism, which was threatening to chew up the city’s open spaces after having already transformed the real estate market into an El Dorado for speculators. It was a huge, loud rejection of change.

And it was fueled by the dream of creating a vast oasis, perhaps the biggest in the world located right in the center of a metropolis, a place where everyone can come together and relax, long-time Berliners and recent newcomers alike. A place where everyone can do more or less as they please.

The only things in the park are the two runways through the middle, a few trees here and there and a six-kilometer-long strip of pavement around the outside, with a string of red dots marking the best route for those biking or running the loop.

It has become a utopia for the stressed-out residents of the capital who yearn for the outdoors, for peace and quiet, for expansiveness, for a view of something other than the gray buildings and dour faces that otherwise dominate the cityscape. It has turned into an unregulated place of myriad possibilities in a constantly growing city — right where Adolf Hitler held a massive demonstration of his power on May 1, 1933, a place where warplanes were assembled underground during World War II. And a place where American planes landed during the Berlin Airlift, saving West Berlin from the Soviet blockade.

“That is the fascinating thing about Berlin,” says the Oscar-winning British actress Helen Mirren as she looks out over the field. “This city continually redefines historical places.” For the episodic feature film “Berlin, I Love You,” which will hit the theaters next year, Mirren filmed a part about the refugees who are sheltered at the old airport. “It is fantastic to have such a space where everyone can be themselves. It would be unthinkable in London.”

In fact, a kind of mini-Germany has taken shape at Tempelhofer Feld. It seems just as compartmentalized as the country at large, despite the referendum. It seems that every segment of the population has carved out a section of their own and lives their own reality there, separated from the rest of the world.

In one corner is the dog exercise area, essentially a vast kennel where men and women throw balls for their pets and stand at the edge smoking and watching the action. Then there are the small parcels set aside for the urban gardeners, so small that tears of sympathy well up when you think of the older rental-gardens elsewhere in the city, rejected for their uncoolness by many newer Berliners.

In the southwestern corner of Tempelhofer Feld, a Segway rental company has cordoned off its own section, a necessary measure to teach the lurching tourists how to ride the things. Next door is a go-kart rental. And a place to rent tiny electric cars. Each recreational-vehicle collection behind its own fence.

There is also a piece of asphalt for the oddballs with their drones and remote-control cars. Signs denote where the area for skate-sailing begins and ends. Toward one side of the field is an area reserved for barbecuing, though it isn’t fenced off — nor does it need to be. In the summer, the smoke creates its own kind of barrier.

For a good portion of the year, a huge chunk of the field is blocked off for skylarks, with signs noting that it is the only place left for them to breed. And this fall, a shepherd drove his sheep through the dried out, brown landscape for a week, with two dogs keeping the herd together and not a single fence to block their path. There were only the two runways — the shepherd calling to make sure it was okay before crossing them.

There is one, slightly larger clump of trees that has been taken over by mountain bikers — and it is generally frowned upon when lovers wander into the copse of trees. It is one of the few areas in the park that offers a bit of privacy. It’s for riding, not romance.

There’s also an area for pot smokers, though it isn’t fenced off. In the evenings, the clouds of cannabis smoke are almost as thick as the ones over in the barbecue corner.

There is a small rise that offers the kind of sunset view that you can’t find anywhere else in the city. In the evenings, everyone lies in the grass and watches as the sharply divided areas of the park slowly disappear into the gathering darkness.

Far away, on the other side of the field, are a bunch of white containers, a small village for the refugees. They, too, are behind a fence. But to ensure that residents don’t have to look through the mesh, a one-meter-high catwalk has been built along the fence around the village, allowing for an unobstructed view.

Tempelhof freedom. Berlin’s utopia. Berlin’s empty center. Everyone together, but to each their own.

Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/berlin-seeks-to-redefine-its-present-and-future-a-1243198.html#ref=rss

The post The German Capital at a Crossroads first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Who wants to deport refugees from Germany to Syria?

The rape of a young woman in the southwestern city of Freiburg has reignited the debate over deporting criminal asylum-seekers. At least seven Syrian men and one German man are suspected of raping an 18-year-old student in mid-October. In response, a number of conservative politicians have demanded the government be able to deport Syrian refugees accused of severe crimes back to their native country.

If the situation in war-torn Syria “continues to improve, even if only in parts of the country, deporting a limited circle of persons should no longer be barred across the board,” Mathias Middelberg, a parliamentarian and domestic policy spokesperson for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), told Die Welt newspaper.

Does deportation mean repatriation?

The terminology is often confused when debating the issue of asylum in Germany. Last year, lawmakers from the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party pushed for the voluntary repatriation of Syrians within the framework of an agreement with the Syrian government. Previously, however, the AfD had demanded repatriating Syrians against their will. The current proposal put forth by the CDU, along with its Bavarian CSU sister party, also focuses on repatriation, though it is limited to criminal offenders at this point.

Read more: How do deportations work in Germany?

Those people with an approved refugee status can only expelled if they pose a threat to public safety and order, for instance if they have been sentenced to at least two years in prison. When that happens, the person in question loses his or her residence permit and is legally obliged to leave the country. If the authorities are forced to remove the person from Germany, that is called deportation.

Is it likely Syrians will be deported?

By 2012, all of Germany’s states had put deportation to Syria on hold due to reports of torture and violence across the country, a decision that has been reviewed and extended every year, most recently until the end of 2018. The security situation in Syria has not been re-assessed since 2012.

At a conference of Germany’s interior ministers later this month, the states will again have to decide whether to extend the deportation ban to Syria. The vote must be unanimous. The CDU/CSU is currently represented by nine state ministers and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) by seven — it is considered unlikely that the SPD will agree to deportations to Syria.

How safe is Syria?

Opinion varies. Some observers, including the AfD party in parliament, say the danger of war has ceased completely in certain regions. Actual fighting is only going on in a small part of the country, according to the AfD.

Read more: Germans upbeat about immigration, study finds

The United Nations says violent clashes in Syria have in fact subsided somewhat. The UN’s refugee agency, however, says that every single region is directly or indirectly affected by the war and violence, and that no country should send refugees back against their will.

How many Syrian refugees live in Germany?

According to figures from June 2018, around 800,000 Syrians have fled to Germany since the start of the civil war. Only a few thousand of them are entitled to asylum. However, the vast majority are recognized as refugees under the Geneva Refugee Convention: they fled their country for fear of persecution and are therefore granted protection.

A third group has been granted what is known as subsidiary protection, due to the ongoing war in their own country. They do not qualify for asylum nor are they recognized as refugees under the Geneva Convention. They have not been deported, and instead are granted a residence permit that can be extended.

Have Syrian refugees been returning home voluntarily?

The number of returnees from Germany is probably negligible. The estimated numbers of Syrians who have returned to their country from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq vary between the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.

Read more: Germany ‘ignoring’ ECJ ruling on refugee reunification

Most Syrian refugees worldwide can only imagine a return once the war is over, and aid supply is reasonably secure again, according to a UN survey.

Who is subject to deportation?

Currently, 235,000 foreigners in Germany are legally obligated to leave the country. Around 174,000 of these people have obtained a “Duldung,” or tolerated permit to stay, and can thus legally remain for the time being. The other roughly 61,000 people without this permit are actually supposed to leave the country.

Asylum-seekers whose applications have been rejected are regarded as “obliged to leave the country.” They have up to two weeks to file an appeal against their asylum decision with the help of a lawyer. On average, these proceedings take about six months and as a rule, the applicants cannot be deported during this time. If they lose their appeal, they must leave the country. In the first half of 2018, around 12,000 people were deported from Germany.

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/german-lawmakers-push-for-syrian-refugee-deportations/a-46162773

The post German lawmakers push for Syrian refugee deportations first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.