Elon Musk has stirred up the German election campaign by endorsing the radical right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), saying that it is the only party that could “save” the country.
The world’s richest man, a sponsor and ally of Donald Trump, has already flirted with the populist right in a number of other countries, including Britain, Italy and the Netherlands.
Elon #Musk würde #AfD wählen! Und Du? #AliceFuerDeutschland #DeshalbAfD pic.twitter.com/LXYxMYPiPp
— AfD (@AfD) December 20, 2024
After Elon Musk posted his support for Germany’s far-right AfD, the party’s leader Alice Weidel expressed her gratitude. Other German lawmakers have criticized “interference” in the country’s upcoming federal elections.
Nationalism will rise from the ashes
“Today’s Germany is the best Germany the world has seen.” So effused the Washington Post columnist George F. Will five long years ago. It’s hard to imagine anyone — even a German — writing those words today. The country is in crisis. On Monday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a humiliating no-confidence vote, and now Germany is hurtling towards a divisive snap election in February. The nation’s economy has barely grown since 2018, and it is de-industrialising at an alarming rate. The unfolding calamity represents a strategic opening for China and Russia which the West cannot afford to ignore.
At the root of Germany’s industrial woes is electricity, which is now nearly twice as expensive as it is for their American counterparts, and three times more expensive than in China. Prices have been rising since the early 2000s, but a policy embraced by the German government in 2011, following the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, sealed the nation’s fate. The proponents of the Energiewende (“energy revolution”) policy made the astonishing argument that Germany could rapidly abandon both fossil fuels and nuclear energy without losing its industrial edge. This was, as one Oxford study put it, a “gamble”. Or a game of Russian roulette, a cynic might have added.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lost a vote of confidence in parliament, paving the way for early elections on 23 February.
Scholz called Monday’s vote and had expected to lose it, but calculated that triggering an early election was his best chance of reviving his party’s political fortunes.
It comes around two months after the collapse of Scholz’s three-party coalition government, which left the embattled chancellor leading a minority administration.
h/t DS
Conservative and liberal politicians in the eastern German state of Thuringia are calling for the resignation of the head of the state’s domestic intelligence agency, Stephan Kramer, who —according to a report—is abusing his public office to pursue a political rival, the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.
An explosive article by the media outlet Apollo News revealed that Kramer has chosen to disregard legal and factual arguments while pursuing a campaign against the AfD, effectively weaponising his office for party political purposes. He has also been described as a “serious security risk” and threatened at least one of his employees with physical violence.
Two foreigners are sipping cappuccinos on a Saturday morning in a bustling restaurant in Asuncion, sharing notes on what made them decide to come to Paraguay. “You can really forget about the rest of the world here,” says one, Paul Kittson, an Australian entrepreneur. He is not the first to have come to that conclusion.
For much of the past two centuries this sweltering, landlocked country in the heart of South America has been the destination of choice for those who wanted to get away from it all. Some were utopians: such as the group of socialists from Sydney who set up a colony they called “New Australia” in the 1890s.
Others were escapees, including the Nazis who hid in southern Paraguay in the late 1940s. Still more were isolationists, like the Mennonites from Russia and Germany who came in the 1920s to preserve their traditional way of life, far from modern threats.
What was Berlin’s chief of police thinking, when she warned Jews and gay people to hide their identities in certain parts of the city?
In an interview last month in the Berliner Zeitung, Barbara Slowik said: ‘There are areas of the city, we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay or lesbian to be more careful.’ She also said that while she didn’t want to blame any one group for this, ‘there are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups… and are openly hostile towards Jews’.
She was wrong about everything — except Russia
“Merkel-Nostalgie” has swept a Germany grappling with war, a tanking economy and a collapsed government. The former German chancellor’s autobiography sold 35,000 copies on the day of publication, and Berliners queued for hours to have her sign their copies. As Angela Merkel said herself: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Especially if your successor is Olaf Scholz — one of the weakest and least popular chancellors in the history of the Federal Republic, who has presided over Germany’s dramatic fall in economic and international standing. Thus, it’s perhaps not surprising that Germany has unexpectedly found itself longing for the stability and leadership symbolised during her 16 years in power, drawing voters back to her old party, the centre-right CDU. But is this nostalgia really justified?
Germany will promote the inherent value of its “dominant culture” and make migrants assimilate, an MP from the country’s government-in-waiting has said.
In a clear shift from the Angela Merkel era, the centre-right Christian Democrats Union (CDU) has made the concept of “Leitkultur” a key pillar of its manifesto ahead of snap elections in February.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Alexander Throm, the CDU interior affairs spokesman, said Leitkultur was fundamentally the principle that foreigners should adopt German cultural values and not vice versa.
This is a win for the AfD. h/t DS
European Parliament President Roberta Metsola has voiced her anxiety about upcoming German elections and noted that a strong performance by populist parties could have significant consequences for Europe.
“What happens in Germany in the next four years has a major impact on the next four years of the European Union,” Metsola said in comments to the Funke Media Group, a major publisher of German newspapers.
The far-right Alternative for Germany and the recently founded left-wing, anti-migrant Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) are expected to achieve historic results in the elections, which are expected to take place on February 23, 2025.
The European way of life is in danger from Nato’s adversaries, the head of the German army warned as his French counterpart said that poorer countries were beginning to acquire destructive technologies that could overtake the West.
Military leaders have issued a series of warnings recently about Europe’s ability to defend itself as Ukraine loses ground to Russia in the east and Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House piles pressure on America’s allies.
General Alfons Mais, the German army chief, said the time had come to be frank with the public about the price that would have to be paid to ensure their future safety, in the form of considerably higher defence spending.
Swedish investigators are looking into the movements of a Chinese vessel in the Baltic Sea after two internet cables were severed, in what some Western leaders suspect was an act of sabotage.
The Yi Peng 3, a Chinese-registered bulk carrier passed close to Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German cables at the time both were mysteriously damaged on Sunday and Monday, according to ship tracking data.
Sweden is now “taking a hard look” at Yi Peng 3 and the role it might have played in both incidents, a source familiar with the investigation told the Financial Times.
Today, Germany embraces the ideologies of “green energy” and a zero-carbon society — a society that no longer emits CO2. Germans seem serious about ideology; they seem serious about everything. Once they buy into an ideology, it might be hard to change their mind.
This is how Chancellor Angela Merkel came to power (2005-2021). Many forget that she did not emerge from the extreme green left, although judging by her record, one might think so. She came, in fact, from the CDU/CSU, Germany’s “center-right” party.
Are you one of those schoolmarm hall-monitor types?
Do you have a screechy voice and do you enjoy looking down your nose at other people?
Do your favourite pastimes include complaining to the manager, telling teenagers not to say bad words and levelling self-superior moral disapproval at everything you don’t like?
In 2015, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany swung open wide the gates to her country, and welcomed more than a million Muslim migrants with her famous — now infamous — remark that “Wir schaffen das!” “We can do this.” But in the nearly decade since, it turns out that the people and government of German “can’t do this.” They cannot integrate successfully millions of Muslim economic migrants. The government cannot turn them into loyal and productive citizens. Many of them continue to avoid employment, and instead batten on the many benefits that the generous welfare state of Germany provides: free or greatly subsidized housing, free medical care, free education (including vocational training), unemployment benefits (without having been previously employed), family allowances, and more. When they want more than those benefits, Muslims more often than the indigenous Germans turn to crime — street robberies, house burglaries. Some also engage in the sexual molestation and rape of German girls and women who, by their dress and demeanor, appear to these primitive Muslim minds to “be asking for it.”
