A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has caused uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime.
The legislation, which went into effect on 1 January, aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription.
Another week, another reminder that the German government’s rhetoric on migration rarely matches reality.
Friedrich Merz was clearly hoping to claw back some support from the anti-migration AfD when he said on Monday that he expected 80% of Syrians in Germany to return home within three years. The only problem is that the figure is disputed—and rapidly unravelling.
Is it right for American troops to still be stationed in Germany more than 80 years after the end of the Second World War? Their presence has long inflamed passions on sections of the German Left, but some on the Right are now also questioning their continued presence.
Tino Chrupalla, co-leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) populist party, reignited this debate at the organisation’s regional conference last weekend. He was keen to remind supporters that there was more to the AfD than its anti-immigration stance. Its official programme demands the withdrawal of all remaining Allied troops from German soil. Keen to move the AfD on from being a “one-issue party”, as he put it, Chrupalla told delegates: “Let’s start implementing this with the removal of US troops from Germany.”
The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has launched an interactive online tool tracking knife attacks across Berlin, as the party seeks to make rising violent crime a central issue in the city’s election campaign.
The so-called “knife app” provides a detailed overview of incidents reported by police over the past 30 days, including an interactive map showing where attacks occurred, the number of injuries, and comparisons with official police crime statistics (PKS).
The German chancellor said up to 80% of Syrians could return within three years, citing Damascus—an account now disputed.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s claim that Syria supports large-scale returns of its nationals has been contradicted by the country’s interim president.
The German chancellor stated in Berlin, alongside Syrian interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa, that around 80% of the Syrians currently living in Germany should return to Syria within three years. It was the central figure in the CDU’s new narrative: migration toughness, Syrian reconstruction ,and the recovery of political control after a decade of crisis.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has called for the withdrawal of all US soldiers from the country.
Tino Chrupalla, the far-Right party’s co-leader, told a meeting on Saturday that it was time to remove allied troops and nuclear weapons from Germany in order to pursue an “independent” foreign policy.
“Let’s start implementing this with the withdrawal of US troops from Germany,” he told supporters in Saxony.
Long a popular opinion in Germany, it may hasten the end of NATO.
For months, the German public has been treated to a media-concocted spectacle of moral panic—manufactured, amplified, and weaponised with surgical precision and malign intent. At its centre stood the now-infamous so-called “Potsdam meeting;” a 2023 gathering in which right-wing figures, including Austrian activist Martin Sellner and figures linked to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, and the Werteunion discussed the topic of remigration. The encounter was elevated overnight from an innocent private event into the affirmed locus of a dark, conspiratorial ‘master plan’ to deport millions of people, including legal citizens of the German state. The only problem with the lurid tale? What the media claims to have been discussed never actually was.
More than six months after an arson attack that caused a large-scale blackout in Berlin, police carried out a coordinated raid operation early on Tuesday, March 24.
The September 2025 outage affected almost 50,000 households and thousands of businesses. A claim of responsibility published on the left-wing extremist platform Indymedia by a group calling itself “Some Anarchists” said the attack aimed to expose what it described as the “unspeakable entanglement of research, science and technology with war, environmental destruction and social control.”
“Germany made a huge strategic error” by rushing to shut down its nuclear power plant fleet, a mistake which has exacerbated the energy crisis in Europe, the director of the International Energy Agency said.
The regional elections taking place this weekend in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate have become a more significant political event than usual.
Pre-election polls suggest that Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) could obtain around one fifth of the vote, more than double the result achieved in 2021, when it remained at around 8%.
Two-thirds of asylum seekers who entered Germany last year had no proof of identity. Almost all refugees from African countries were unable to present any identifying documents, according to asylum figures released by the Federal Ministry of the Interior.
Authorities registered 113,236 refugees over the age of 18 who applied for asylum for the first time last year. According to the Interior Ministry, 74,089 of them had no identity documents. That represents 65.4%, the highest percentage ever recorded.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has drawn criticism for calling on migrants in Germany to vote against the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Merkel, who served as the architect of the European Migrant Crisis in 2015, when she unilaterally decided to open the EU’s borders to unprecedented waves of foreigners from the Middle East and Africa, resulting in dramatic demographic transformations in her country and across the continent, appears to have let the cat out of the bag as to her motivation for doing so.
The mask is off.
Angela Merkel, who flooded Germany with third world men, admits it was votes.
Says it was to stop the AfD party!
pic.twitter.com/gGvdQgJKsP— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) March 13, 2026
A newly released study by the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), nearly 50 percent of Muslims under the age of 40 in Germany hold “Islamist” views, with these Muslims expressing an attraction to Islamism, a preference for Sharia law over the German Basic Law, and harboring anti-Semitic prejudices.
What do they think they are doing? Germany’s AK Polis are running a campaign with posters of supposed Muslims showing a man drinking alcohol and saying, ‘I am a Muslim and I drink alcohol’. Another says ‘I am a Muslim’ and shows two Muslim men kissing and wearing suits with roses, indicating they have just been married [1]. Would AK Polis run commercials showing ‘I am Catholic and I had an abortion’ as a way to celebrate diversity as well?
No, they would not.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is in favor of a proposal to build new nuclear power plants in the EU. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz says it’s impossible.
At a nuclear summit near Paris earlier this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the transition from nuclear energy undertaken by some EU countries as a “strategic mistake.” Nuclear power, she said, is a “reliable, affordable source of low-emission electricity.” She announced new EU financial assistance for nuclear power plants.
Von der Leyen’s words reverberated in Germany, which switched off its last nuclear reactor in 2023.
