On Tuesday morning, unknown perpetrators attempted to attack the power supply near the coal-fired power plant at Jänschwalde in the eastern state of Brandenburg, partly succeeding in their objective. Then, later the same evening, a substation near Cologne suffered a disruption in what is believed to have been an act of sabotage.
On Wednesday, an explosion occurred near the railway station in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, caused by a hand grenade, according to investigators.
This Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt – a federal state of just over two million in eastern Germany – is of enormous significance. For the first time, the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) could win an election so decisively that no alternative coalition could be formed to exclude it. Recent polls have consistently given the AfD more than 40 per cent of the vote – almost double that of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is currently the biggest party in Saxony-Anhalt’s governing coalition. If these polls are accurate, not even a ‘firewall’ of anti-AfD parties governing together can keep it from winning political power.
A homeless immigrant man will continue to receive benefits and not be asked to find a job by the Ennepe-Ruhr district job center in Germany, as the office says the man is dangerous and should not be “provoked.”
The man in question is Amer G., a Syrian asylum seeker who reportedly arrived in Germany in 2015 and has become known in Witten for publicly reciting verses from the Quran using a loudspeaker.
Police have found several explosive devices near the Jänschwalde power station in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, according to media reports on Tuesday.
The devices were discovered at an electrical substation in Turnow-Preilack, southeast of Berlin, after potential damage to a power line was detected at around 8 a.m. on Tuesday, police said.
“Evidence is being secured,” a police spokeswoman said. “Bomb disposal experts are on site.”
Germany’s economy has shown surprising signs of strength lately. Consumer, investor and business confidence has rebounded, factories are taking more orders and growth is the fastest since 2022.
This wasn’t on most economists’ bingo cards for 2026. Beleaguered by high energy costs, cut-throat Chinese competition and swathes of red tape, Germany is perennially called “the sick man of Europe”.
But nobody is quite sure whether the patient is set to climb out of the sick bed. If you want to figure that out, you might be better off consulting a meteorologist rather than an economist.
How do you say ‘Wir Schaffen Das” in Arabic?
Sven Hüber, the deputy federal chairman of Germany’s Police Union (GdP), has stepped down from his post with immediate effect following public scrutiny regarding his service as a political officer for East Germany’s border guards. Hüber recently made headlines for his stance against the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
The German right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party is heading into the final days of the Saxony-Anhalt election campaign with a commanding lead, as its candidate for prime minister Ulrich Siegmund seeks to form the party’s first ever state government.
A new poll puts the AfD at 42%, while the centre-right governing CDU of Prime Minister Sven Schulze is at 22%. The far-left Die Linke stands at 11%, the Social Democrats (SPD) at 8%, and the Greens at 6%. Other parties would currently fail to clear the 5% threshold.
According to official German government data, the number of foreign suspects in violent crimes have skyrocketed in Germany, since the start of the century. The number of foreigners accused of homicide increased by 77.1% between 2000 and 2025, while the increase in suspected sexual offenses was even more pronounced, rising by 148.2% over the same period.
The 2025 figures show that the proportion of foreigners involved in violent crime has increased overall by 71.6% since 2000. The number of non-Germans suspected of negligent simple bodily harm also rose by 169.3%.
Berlin is heading towards one of its most fragmented elections since reunification, with the radical-left Die Linke (The Left) and hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) surging as establishment parties that have dominated the capital for decades lose ground.
A Forsa poll published by t-online on Saturday put Die Linke first on 22 per cent, four points ahead of both the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and AfD on 18 per cent. Die Grünen (Greens) stand at 16 per cent and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) at just 12, while Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW and the liberal–centrist Free Democratic Party (FDP) would miss the 5 per cent threshold.
Early on 13 August 1961, Berliners woke up to find their city divided. The East German regime was building the Berlin Wall in a desperate attempt to stop its people from leaving. Around 2.5 million had already done just that, since the foundation of the two German states in 1949. When the Wall fell peacefully in 1989, the exodus wasn’t supposed to resume. But it did, and on a devastating scale.
Sixty-five years on from when the wall went up, Germany’s eastern regions are trapped in a depopulation spiral. Nearly a quarter of former East Germans have moved west or abroad since German reunification. Most are young, well-educated and female. That’s left behind a region that is now Germany’s oldest, with its birth rate among the lowest, and with many of its communities watching schools, playgrounds, clubs and traditions slowly disappear.
The number of people admitted to German trauma centres with life-threatening stab wounds linked to violent crime has risen sharply over the past decade, according to an analysis of data from hundreds of hospitals.
The study by the German Society for Trauma Surgery (DGU), published in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, examined 3,664 seriously injured patients treated at 600 German hospitals between 2013 and 2024.
The number of such cases rose from 212 in 2013 to 336 in 2024, an increase of almost 59%. The figure peaked at 382 in 2023.
The self-inflicted migrant crisis threatens to destroy the European Union, and illegal migrants, their enablers, and political activists will resist deportation efforts so hard it would plunge Germany into “civil war”, a security researcher has warned.
The ongoing migrant crisis is pulling the European political project apart because the Union has no answers to border control problems, this is driving political polarisation, and the crisis has been left to fester so long any attempt to claw the situation back will spiral into violence, a German newspaper has been told.
German actors, sports personalities, business leaders, and NGOs are teaming up to try to dissuade voters in Saxony-Anhalt from voting for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), to prevent the party from winning an outright majority in the state election on September 6.
The campaign, titled Wahre Heimatliebe ist (“True love of home is”), features actors including Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Anna Schudt, and Max Simonischek, alongside figures from academia, business, and sport.
The organisers say an AfD majority and an AfD-led state government would have “serious social and economic consequences” for Saxony-Anhalt and beyond. They are calling on voters to participate in the election and support “democratic parties.”
Germany’s defense and security overhaul entered a new phase on Wednesday, with cabinet approval for a bill to significantly expand the powers of national intelligence agencies. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt celebrated the biggest intelligence shake-up since the Second World War as “transforming our intelligence services into genuine secret services”, but opponents see something more sinister behind the reforms.
