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Germany Tag

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on October 31, 2017 7 Comments
More than a month after the parliamentary election, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel is struggling to form a coalition government. Merkel's conservative CDU party, which won 33 percent of the vote, will need half of the seats in the German parliament to build a ruling coalition. With her previous coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), deciding to sit in the opposition after posting its worst result ever at 20 percent, Merkel is hoping to rope in the libertarian Free Democrats and ecological Green Party to reach the 50 percent mark.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on October 26, 2017 3 Comments
It’s that time of the year here again in Germany. As winter sets in, the first Christmas decorations have started appearing on the shop fronts. Before you know it, the Christmas markets will be coming up in every town and city across the country. For Merkel's Germany, however, it is also the time of the year when radical Muslim terrorists target the Christmas markets and innocent shoppers.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on October 16, 2017 8 Comments
Just two weeks after the right-wing AfD Party’s surge in the German election, Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) is set to join the country’s next coalition government. The Freedom Party, Europe’s oldest surviving right-wing party, which ran on an anti-Islamization and anti-mass migration platform received 26 percent of the votes, party’s strongest performance in twenty years.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on October 15, 2017 18 Comments
Not just former US President Obama, Chancellor Merkel of Germany, too, regards the nuclear deal with Iran as her greatest diplomatic accomplishment. The prominent German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung summed up the central role played by the Merkel government, writing, "Among all the parties working to bring about a negotiated deal, Germans enjoyed [Iranian regime's] special trust." Corporate Germany loved the deal too. The Bavaria Chamber of Commerce, the leading trade body in the country, told its clients ahead of the deal that the "German media landscape across the board agrees that lucrative deals worth billions are waiting to be made in Iran. As soon as the sanction are lifted, the run on the markets begins."

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on October 13, 2017 3 Comments
German Chancellor Angela Merkel promoted the architect of her open borders policy to her new chief foreign policy adviser. Merkel’s hand-picked Jan Hecker, widely regarded as the man enforcing Germany’s ill-advised refugee policy, has no foreign policy experience. Mainstream media that nitpicked President Trump on every single appointment, is apparently giving a pass to their favorite world leader on this one.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on October 09, 2017 7 Comments
In a strongly worded resolution passed by the Green Party in the southern German state of Bavaria, the state unit of the party has rejected the anti-Israel boycott campaign, or the BDS Movement as antisemitic. The resolution titled "No to Antisemitism, no to BDS" (embedded and translated below) declared the Bavarian Green Party's intention to actively challenge the BDS activism in the state.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on September 26, 2017 19 Comments
At the White House press briefing yesterday, a German reporter wanted to know why President Trump hasn’t called Chancellor Merkel to congratulate her on election victory. “We’re just working on the logistics,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded. The White House may have been trying to gloss over the issue of frosty ties between the two world leaders, but as far as Chancellor Merkel is concerned: this isn’t much of a victory and there isn’t much to congratulate about. Merkel’s Pyrrhic victory comes at a great cost to her Christian conservative party (CDU), which registered its worst performance in nearly 70 years -- getting just above 33 percent of the vote. Merkel’s desire to extend her 12-year-old reign also pulverized her junior coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), in many of its traditional working-class bastions. At 20 percent, the SPD, Europe’s oldest socialist party, also clocked its worst performance since 1949.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on September 24, 2017 9 Comments
Despite her party's worst showing since 1949, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has managed to secure her re-election bid. Merkel's main rival, the Social Democratic challenger Martin Schulz conceded defeat earlier this evening. Merkel was quick to stake her claim to the Chancellorship, saying, "We are the strongest party, we have the mandate to build the next government — and there cannot be a coalition government built against us." Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), along with her Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU), secured over 33 percent of the vote.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on September 19, 2017 5 Comments
Germany's right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD)  is set to become the third largest party in this month's parliamentary election, the latest polls suggest. The anti-mass immigration party is polling around 12 percent in most polls. Chancellor Angela Merkel, still ahead of the competition, is widely tipped to form the next government. But her current junior coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), is tanking in polls with less than a week to go before the election.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on September 14, 2017 25 Comments
In a drastic move that would further exacerbate the European Union’s east-west divide, the European Commission, the EU executive arm, has given a month’s notice to the Polish government to roll back its national judicial reform. Poland risks forfeiting its voting rights within the EU if it does not back down in the current dispute with Brussels. The EU officials oppose the legal reform undertaken by Warsaw, arguing that it weakens the judiciary and gives more power to the country’s elected government. Polish government dismissed these allegations and insists that is acting within the purview of the national constitution.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on September 02, 2017 19 Comments
NATO ally Turkey seems to be going out of its way to tweak German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  Last month, Turkey arrested, among others, a German citizen, and Merkel called the move "unacceptable." Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have been unimpressed because his government just arrested two more Germans.  Merkel has now declared that "decisive action" must be taken.  She does not specify what action she means, though she does threaten to "rethink" Germany's relations with Turkey.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on September 01, 2017 9 Comments
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Palestinian terrorist organization, has been allowed to run in this month's German election. The PFLP is not only a designated terrorist organization in both the European Union and in the United States, but  it has also committed acts of terror against German citizens. An Arab Marxist-Leninist outfit, PFLP first gained notoriety in the 1970s for carrying out aircraft hijackings, including that of a Lufthansa plane in 1977, in an unsuccessful attempt to free the ringleaders of the Left-Wing 'Baader-Meinhof Gang' that were languishing in the West German prisons.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on August 31, 2017 2 Comments
With the Western leaders divided in their strategy to counter the rising threat of Islamic terrorism, the Islamist terror groups continue to work on new ways of attacking the West. According to Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), modeled after the American FBI, Islamic State might be planning to sabotage railway networks to inflict heavy civilian casualties in the West, as part of its evolving Jihad warfare strategy.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on August 29, 2017 16 Comments
With less than a month until the German elections, Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her Open Borders Policy for illegal migrants on German television over the weekend. "German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her controversial decision to admit over a million refugees in 2015, and insisted she had no regrets, saying she would take the big decisions 'the same way again,'" British newspaper Daily Express wrote. She also placed the blame ironically on the border restrictions already in place -- prior to the autumn of 2015 -- to check the unregulated inflow of the refugees into Europe. "She criticized the so-called 'Dublin Regulation' on refugees, which requires those seeking asylum to register in the first EU state they enter," German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported. Merkel's arbitrary suspension of the Dublin Regulation, in fact, started the migrant influx from the Middle East and North African countries that continues to this day.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 25, 2017 2 Comments
There is a growing recognition of the anti-Semitic nature of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Anti-Israel activists claim BDS was a spontaneous 2005 call from "Palestinian civil society" for an academic, cultural and economic boycott of Israel to end "the occupation." (They are deliberately vague on what is occupied, and the leadership and activists make clear they consider all of Israel occupied.)

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on August 17, 2017 15 Comments
Just weeks until the September election, Merkel government is threatening "legal measures" against large German companies that fail to implement a 'gender quota' by putting more women on their executive boards. In what could simply be cheap antics to garner votes from women, the Merkel government is waging a war against “male-dominated” corporate boardrooms. Germany's Women's Affairs Minister Katarina Barley has “threatened legal measures if the firms fail to fix the problem within the year,” German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported on Wednesday. The Women's Affairs Minister presented a report on the “Corporate Gender Imbalance” to the Merkel-led cabinet this week. According to the report, large German companies had 27.3 percent of women on their supervisory boards. This still isn't good enough for the Merkel government. The State wants large companies to allocate more than 30 percent of seats on their boards to women.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on August 12, 2017 27 Comments
U.S. President Donald Trump has rejected German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s advice on how to handle the North Korean crisis. "Let her speak for Germany," Trump told reporters yesterday referring to the statement made by Merkel earlier in the day. "She's a very good friend of mine," Trump said. "Maybe she's referring to Germany, she's certainly not referring to the United States." Merkel had criticised Trump’s recent statements aimed at North Korean regime, saying, "I consider a verbal escalation to be the wrong response." “Trump reacts to Merkel rebuke with a clear message," reported the leading German daily Die Welt.  The country's state-run broadcaster Deutsche Welle came to Merkel's defense, complaining, peace-loving German Chancellor "advocate[s] an international diplomatic response" and "Trump ignores Merkel's pleas against violence."
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