The far-right AfD has topped the polls for the first time ahead of the Berlin election – UA.NEWS
News Source
Germany Elections
Merz warns Trump against election meddling – irishsun.com
News Source
News Source
EXCERPT:
Germany’s federal system of government makes the country’s politics seem so complicated that most people outside Germany give up trying to understand it. At the federal level, there is the parliament (the Bundestag), a ceremonial president and a chancellor. At the moment, all of those branches of power seem normal enough, and are run by the same few democratic parties that have been there since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if you look the next level down, at the individual states (or länder), the picture that emerges is terrifying.
Germany is still culturally and economically split in two by the old Iron Curtain. Nearly 40 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the promised reunification has still not been completed. People living in the former East look at the Berlin government and see policies that seem to ignore them. There are five states in the eastern part of the country, and opinion polls show majority support for the radical right party Alternative for Germany in all of them. This September, two of these states, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, will be holding elections in which AfD candidates are expected to win, putting them in charge of state governments for the first time. They are hoping for absolute majorities. That would give them sole control of the education system, the prisons and the police force.
To the despair of the European establishment, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the most hated political force in Germany, keeps showing robust signs of life, whether in its impressive showing in a state election on Sunday or in a recent courtroom victory. On Sunday, the AfD more than doubled its previous vote share for the parliament of Baden-Württemberg, a key industrial state in western Germany. On February 26, a German court enjoined the country’s domestic spy agency from classifying Germany’s second most popular political party as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization. The “confirmed right-wing extremist” designation has been a key tool in the campaign among establishment and left-wing politicians to ban the AfD entirely.
The AfD’s fate should not be a matter of indifference to American conservatives. The globalist elites must be broken everywhere if they are to be permanently broken at all.
Growing numbers of the German public defy their overseers and welcome the AfD as an antidote to the EU-Davos philosophy of open borders and the deindustrialization and immiseration that go under the banner of climate-friendly energy policy. The AfD polls second nationally to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The CDU was once the cornerstone of postwar conservatism, but its leaders have pulled it to the left in order to marginalize the AfD. In February 2025, Chancellor (and CDU party head) Friedrich Merz cobbled together an ideologically incoherent governing coalition whose sole purpose is to shut the AfD out of power, despite the AfD’s receiving the second largest share of the German vote. The establishment proudly refers to this exclusionary strategy as the “firewall,” which allegedly protects German democracy from falling into the hands of purported neo-Nazis.
BERLIN — Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party has made a disappointing start to a year packed with German state elections, suffering a narrow defeat in an important industrial region after a prominent candidate powered the environmentalist Greens to a come-from-behind victory.
Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union was long confident of winning back the governor’s office in Baden-Württemberg, a region of more than 11 million people in southwestern Germany that is home to automakers Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, among many other companies. The country’s first and so far only Green governor, Winfried Kretschmann, is retiring after 15 years in charge of a traditional conservative heartland.
A CDU victory long looked likely despite the unpopularity of Merz’s 10-month-old federal government, which has struggled to get Germany’s stagnant economy moving. But the party’s poll lead shrank ahead of Sunday’s election thanks to a Green campaign focused on Cem Özdemir, a longtime federal lawmaker and former German agriculture minister.
Differing opinions on the U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran have emerged in Europe, with key Western allies standing strong with the United States, despite some voices bemoaning the escalation and calling for restraint.
Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, joint chairs of the AfD parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, issued the following statement:
“We have noted with great concern the attacks by Israel and the USA on Iran. We call on all warring parties to exercise absolute restraint. The civilian population and civilian infrastructure must be protected. International law and international humanitarian law must be fully respected. The renewed destabilization of the Middle East is not in Germany’s interest and must be stopped,” wrote the party in a statement.
The AfD’s stance on Israel, one of the two main actors currently attacking Iran, has been at odds with many other European conservative parties, which are often extremely pro-Israel.
Source Link
Excerpt:
Since Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition collapsed over budget squabbles and a lost confidence vote on 16 December 2024, Germany has entered an unusually tense campaign ahead of snap elections on 23 February 2025.1 The country’s political arena has moved away from long-standing centrism toward heightened polarization — a shift that is also felt in the streets. Just weeks before the elections, hundreds of thousands protested nationwide after the center-right Christian Democratic Union party’s Friedrich Merz — the likely next chancellor according to polls — relied on support from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to push a parliamentary motion for tougher migration laws.2 Although the bill was ultimately rejected and Merz ruled out any coalition with the far right, it nonetheless breached a post-war norm observed by Germany’s mainstream parties referred to as the ‘firewall,’ whereby collaboration with far-right forces was consistently avoided.3
Long seen as Europe’s engine of stability and growth, Germany is grappling with mounting challenges. A sluggish post-pandemic recovery, rising populism, and entrenched urban-rural and East-West divides have fueled discontent and polarization. Meanwhile, infighting among members of the ruling coalition and reignited debates over energy, immigration, and foreign policy have sparked street activism and bolstered the opposition.4 The AfD, in particular, is gaining ground, with polls projecting it as the second-strongest parliamentary force in the upcoming elections.5
Amid such polarization, national vote season appears to be an increasingly perilous time for German politicians. The 2024 European Parliament election campaign offered a worrying preview, as it was marred by a spate of aggressions against local centrist party officials, candidates, and campaign volunteers, while revealing a larger pattern of violence targeting politicians across the spectrum.6 Looking at both last year’s European vote and the high-stakes federal election on 23 February, this piece explores how rising polarization has intensified street activism in the form of demonstrations, both against far-right parties and government policies; it also considers whether polarization is contributing to an uptick in political violence, particularly amid the mounting tensions surrounding national elections.
