Tag: Germany

Germany’s Early-Election Campaign: A Dispute over Competence in Racism and Inhumanity

A Free Retriever

On the same day as the US presidential elections resulted in Trump’s win of a second turn in the White House, the long ailing coalition government of SPD, FDP and the Green party in Germany was finally terminated, giving rise to early parliamentary elections on February 23, and the perspective of a “rightist” turn, notably by strengthening the right-wing extremist AfD at the federal level.

Previously, broad street demonstrations throughout the country against political extremism and racism, in particular against anti-immigration and anti-refugee tendencies “in defence of democracy” had emerged, as a secretive conference on deportation plans of migrants had been publicly revealed – however without preventing significant electoral gains of the AfD in the federal states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia last autumn.

So, the stage for the electoral campaign for the Bundestag had already been prepared as the murderous car attack of December 20 on a Christmas market at Magdeburg, committed by a Saudi immigrant (who appeared to have a notorious track record of harassment and intimidation), fanned the flames of racism and xenophobia and gave rise to an instrumentalisation of the political tribunes of German officialdom and its contesters that is beyond the pale.

Continue reading “Germany’s Early-Election Campaign: A Dispute over Competence in Racism and Inhumanity” →

Pages: 1 2

A comment on the political crisis in Germany

A Free Retriever
Heinrich von Rustige: Unterbrochene Mahlzeit, 1838 (Interrupted Meal)

Over the month of June the political business of the German bourgeoisie has been dominated by the outburst of a long-smoldering conflict within its government apropos of issues of migration and refugee policies, which has put the historic party alliance between the CDU and its Bavarian junior partner CSU in jeopardy and has risked the fall of Merkel’s coalition government on the very threshold of its first 100 days in office.

Continue reading “A comment on the political crisis in Germany” →

The political crisis in Germany and the tortuous road to a “European bloc”

A Free Retriever

‘Nuevo Curso’ apropos of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe (June 25, 2018)

1.  The anti-immigrant revolt of the German petty bourgeoisie

» In December last year, we alerted on our Telegram channel that the CSU, the Bavarian party associated with Merkel’s CDU, was turning to the right in an increasingly nationalist discourse. In the context of the stagnation of the bourgeoisie in Germany, which – like the British, Italian or Spanish bourgeoisie at the time – had not yet found the ways and means to renew its political apparatus, the advance of identity politics, beyond the electoral progress of the AfD seemed significant to us. Significant because it pointed out that the nationalist revolt of the European petty bourgeoisie was beginning to condition even the heart of European continental capital. And this up to the point where the “migration question” – the center of all suspicions and fears of the Central European petty bourgeoisie – has come to fracture the most solid German party apparatuses this June. Continue reading “The political crisis in Germany and the tortuous road to a “European bloc”” →