Politics German Politics & News

[muck]

So … for weeks German farmers have protested against government plans to end diesel tax breaks which they say would put smaller farms out of business. The protests yielded some results, Berlin promised to exempt smaller farms and introduce pauses for struggling ones.

Yesterday, a 200-strong group of angry farmers waited for German economy minister Robert Habeck in a north sea port as he was returning by ferry from vacation on the Isle of Hooge. They prevented the ferry from landing. Habeck is a fool, but he did something smart and fair last night, I'll give him that: He asked the farmers to appoint a speaker with whom he could meet and listen to their grievances.

The farmers refused, instead trying to board the ferry by force. The police had to use pepper spray and the ferry had to depart for safety reasons. Obviously, further talks are well and truly off the table now.

In my mind, there's no real difference between activities such as this and the Extinction Rebellion blockades. (And in fairness to this otherwise useless administration, even though the coalition includes the Green Party they've given ER the same treatment: no negotiations or meetings until you start to obey the law.)

Even if you think it wasn't wrong for them to essentially jump the minister during the holidays and to put up such a threatening posture, you'll concede at the very least that it wasn't smart. The media paint them as right-wing insurrectionists now and the government (not without reason, I'm afraid) says they can't negotiate with people who try to coerce elected representatives.

I just don't get it – on both sides of the aisle. Why can't they see they're doing their respective causes a massive disservice?

 

[muck]

On German politics …

The Left, the heir to East Germany's regime party SED, is currently showing signs of disintegration. The right-wing populist AfD has long since overtaken The Left as the "natural" representative of East Germans, but above all there now has been a mutiny.

The popular Russia-friendly communist MP Sarah Wagenknecht has declared her defection and is in the process of founding a new nationalist-communist party with other rebels. She's a classical non-woke leftist in whose opinion The Left has strayed too far from its roots and betrayed the ordinary people. Her departure has forced The Left's parliamentary caucus to disband.

It remains to be seen whether Wagenknecht is capable of putting up candidates in East Germany's state elections later this year, but if the answer is yes, then her movement has the potential of upending Germany's political landscape due to our caucus recognition clause.

If 1.) Wagenknecht steals too many votes from The Left in Saxony but 2.) neither manage to get more than 5%, there's a very real chance AfD could win an absolute majority in that state. They'd have their first state prime minister, and from AfD's most extremist chapter to boot.

The implications of Wagenknecht potentially winning federal caucus recognition in 2025 cannot even be fully appreciated at this point. Should both she and her old party (i.e. The Left) manage to win seats on the federal level, the result could very well be the first hung parliament in the Federal Diet's history. It's really looking grim, to be honest.

 

[Redav]

It's obvious, staying in the coalition hurts FDP the most.
Let's compare the support during the general elections in 2021 to the current support.
FDP: 11.5% -> 5%. That's a decrease of 56.5%.
SPD: 25.7% -> 15%. That's a decrease of 45.5%.
Gründiots: 14.8% -> 13%. That's a decrease of 12%.

The conclusion is very simple: although FDP is the least influential party in the coalition, the partners drag it down.

"I sink but I will take everybody with me because i cannot afford to loose the benefits of being in the government"

Politicians only care about themselves

 

[muck]

Wonders will never cease, the German government did something reasonable for a change. They've just announced it'll be made illegal for public healthcare providers to offer coverage for homoepathics and anthroposophic "medicine". Flipping heck, I've been waiting for that for years. My own provider won't cover my glasses (even though I'm quite short-sighted), but they would pay for globules to "cure" my condition?!

(For context's sake – public healthcare providers in Germany are basically organised as cooperative societies. They all must meet certain standards when it comes to what treatments they cover, but all insurants also have an indirect vote every couple of years to determine which additional health services should be covered. And since "alternative medicine" is so stupidly popular in this idiocracy of a country, it always gets voted in and never voted out despite it being a massive sham that only ever increases the financial burden for the rest of us …)

 

[Redav]

German far-right leader hails Brexit as ‘model for Germany’

Alternative for Germany chief Alice Weidel says she will hold a referendum on EU membership if elected

www.ft.com

 

[muck]

German far-right leader hails Brexit as ‘model for Germany’

Alternative for Germany chief Alice Weidel says she will hold a referendum on EU membership if elected

www.ft.com

Do she also want to wait 45 minutes for an ambulance, like the English do on average after tens of thousands of non-British NHS workers have left the country? Jokes aside, Germany isn't Britain. Even if we pretend that Brexit has been a "success" (and I have yet to see evidence for that claim) – Germany's economy is much more export-reliant and we heavily depend on foreign workers, whether we like it or not.

A Dexit would be a bad idea and plunge Germany into a deep recession. Besides, Weidel is bullshitting the public here.

She cannot legally hold a referendum without an amendment to the constitution, for which she'll need a supermajority in both chambers – which is even less likely than her ever winning a general election. She and her party will never win two-thirds of the federal vote or snatch state premierships in two-thirds of Germany's states. No German party ever has achieved that and AfD won't be the first one who does.

I just wish the right would act a little more constructively and work towards desparately needed EU reforms rather than pursuing the mirage of a "Dexit" whhich is never going to happen. Polls consistently show a solid 70% of the electorate prefer Germany being in the EU, a result incessantly mirrored in generals elections; and even AfD's own voters oppose the idea 58:42.

 

[Picanha]

Producer prices fell for the last seven months.

Prices consecutively fell with a reduction on energy by more than 10% this month marking an unexpected large drop.

Germany Producer Prices Change

Producer Prices in Germany decreased 2.90 percent in March of 2024 over the same month in the previous year. This page provides the latest reported value for - Germany Producer Prices Change - plus previous releases, historical high and low, short-term forecast and long-term prediction, economic...

tradingeconomics.com

 

[primer]

German govt ban of trophy hunts leads to unforseen consequence----

Botswana threatens to send 20,000 elephants to Germany over proposed trophy hunting ban​

Nonetheless, the governments of both Botswana and Namibia have raised concerns in recent weeks that a ban would harm their economies and exacerbate issues with burgeoning elephant populations.

Mr Masisi said that elephants were trampling through farmers’ crops and even posing a risk to people’s lives.

“It is easy to sit in Berlin and have an opinion on our affairs in Botswana, but we pay the price for keeping these animals for the world,” he said.

Botswana has around 130,000 elephants, the world’s largest population. Conflicts with farmers have led the southern African nation to try to direct some of its elephants into neighbouring Angola.

yet animal groups they tell us they are almost extinct. Any parralel with global warming fears here?

 

[muck]

I did a bit of digging into these two and good God, man, what an epic freak show. Prince Reuß has been a Reichsbürger (i.e. a "sovereign citizen") for a couple of years. In mid-2022, he sent letters to all 6,000 inhabitants of Lobenstein to "inform" them that the Federal Republic of Germany "does not exist and never has", and that they ought to apply for a "passport of the German Reich" in his castle, provided the Russian embassy (presumably because Lobenstein lay in the Russian zone of occupation?) would vouch for their "germanic descent". He's got also a bit of an ego-problem, claiming descent from the last Prince Regnant of Reuß (deposed in 1918) although he actually belongs to a cadet line.

Von Pescatore is even more of a freak – and an actual career criminal. In the early 1990s, he was reprimanded and fined for ordering a Huey to take him from his garrison to his home just because he was late for opera. In 1996, he was handed two years behind bars for an embezzlement scheme against the military spanning over more than three years. The good Colonel had withheld assault rifles left over from the East German National People's Army and sold them for profit. Following his discharge, von Pescatore migrated to Brazil were he did all kinds of jobs to stay afloat, most notably he sold homoepathics to German expats. He also ran a blog ranting against the free masons.

This is why I hate extremists. What makes people as retarded and absurd as these two clowns think they can run a country? F***. This is not to say that they weren't dangerous, by the way. Several of the conspirators legally owned firearms, and one of their accomplices was a licenced arms dealer with access to some 200 semi-automatic weapons and personal gear like helmets. They really did mean business.

Even though they probably didn't exactly know what their business was.

The freak show continues.

One of the primary suspects in the coup plot is one Maximilian Eder, who recently admitted to gaining access to the Reichstag with the aid of the far-right member for Berlin-Zehlendorf. Prosecutors say he mapped all the entries, exists and strongpoints of the building but Eder insists his purpose there was to look for a sacrificial chamber where the elites, as he believes, sacrifice children to regain their youth. He wrote a manifesto of sorts which is rife with QAnon bullshit and reads like something written by that f***ing January 6 "shaman" prick.

Who is this Maximilian Eder, you ask?

Why, he's a retired German Army colonel and once served as the chief-of-staff of Germany's Special Forces Command (KSK)!

How the actual fᴜck did a crazy nutjob like that ever manage to rise through the ranks in this country's most prestigious military unit?

And like in seemingly all cases involving extremist shitheads, there had been warning signs and delinquent behaviour. Eder was suspected of corruption whilst serving as NATO's representative to Tbilisi, Georgia. In 2020, he threatened to order KSK to arrest politicians on account of Covid restriction policies. In 2021, during the Ahr Valley floods, he went to the desaster zone unauthorised and tried to give orders to military and civil rescue crews, becoming so much of a nuisance he had to be physically removed by police.

What the actual … Seriously!

 

[Musashi]

A major sh1tstorm developed on the Polish Twatter after a German general declared that Germany wanted to take responsibility over the NATO eastern flank.

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The German ambassador in Poland posted the same thing translated into Polish.

I've contributed there as well:

Herr General, in Polen machen wir am 1. April einen Witz, nicht am 17. Eine Bundeswehrbrigade ist ein kleiner Bruchteil der NATO-Kräfte an der Ostflanke und viel kleiner als die polnischen und litauischen Kräfte. Es muss eine Kraft hinter der Übernahme von Verantwortung stehen, die nicht da ist.

 

[muck]

@Musashi With all due respect, but you appear to be mistaken. Breuer never said anything about taking responsibility "over". He wrote 'übernehmen Verantwortung', not 'übernehmen die Verantwortung'. The missing article makes all the difference: "we're taking responsibility" versus "we're taking the responsibility", as in sole responsibility. If I were to translate both snippets into English, I'd interpret them as "we're playing our part" and "we're taking over". Breuer meant the former. For a German speaker, there is no ambiguity there.

 

[Musashi]

@Musashi With all due respect, but you appear to be mistaken. Breuer never said anything about taking responsibility "over". He wrote 'übernehmen Verantwortung', not 'übernehmen die Verantwortung'. The missing article makes all the difference: "we're taking responsibility" versus "we're taking the responsibility", as in sole responsibility. If I were to translate both snippets into English, I'd interpret them as "we're playing our part" and "we're taking over". Breuer meant the former. For a German speaker, there is no ambiguity there.

Thanks for the explanation.
The thing is, we don't use any articles in Polish and the German ambassador wrote "we are taking over responsibility" in Polish. It's possible that he used a machine learning translator to translate this text.
You can see the Polish version here and you can translate it back into German:

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[muck]

Yeah, that seems to explain it.
Frankly, ambassadors should always know the language of their host state.

 

[Picanha]

Germany arrests 3 suspected China spies – DW – 04/22/2024

Germany's Federal Prosecutor has said three German citizens were arrested for alleged involvement in providing Chinese secret service with information on state-of-the-art machine parts for ship engines.

www.dw.com

The couple also bought a specialized laser cutting machine.

Seems like China isn't so developed after all.

Use more Chinese telecom parts dear German government.

And make more Joint Ventures and science cooperations.

And pour more free technology and money into China it's just the best for Germanys future.

 

[Picanha]

Oh noes their company profile is down

https://www.idragon.eu/ueber/firmenprofil/personen

If you Google innovative dragon it's their company Thomas is a pro China activist, making open pro China statements even at the IHK (Industrial and Commerce Chamber).

Luring naive German companies into their ruin. And getting all the tech they need for free.

German security forces should start scanning lots of people's

 

[Picanha]

Next China Spy busted:

An employee of AfD European parliament candidate Krahl was arrested under the suspicion of spying on Chinese emigrated oppositionals in Europe. For that purpose he participated in Chinese expat venues to identify them and relay information to the CCP police.

Furthermore he helped identify products and technologies useful for weapon system production.

German far-right AfD staffer arrested on China spy charges – DW – 04/23/2024

Police in Germany have arrested a staff member of the German far-right Alternative for Germany party. Prosecutors say the individual was spying on behalf of China.

www.dw.com