Germany

A rather impressive performance by Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany’s regional elections. Second in Saxony-Anhalt and double digit percentages in Baden-Württemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate. Today’s papers have tended to conclude that despite AfD’s shock success, the elections were nonetheless a triumph, of sorts, for Angela Merkel’s policy towards migrants, if not for her party, the CDU. I can’t say that I see it like that. For a party which did not exist four years ago to take a quarter of the votes in one lander is a remarkable expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Add into that the fact AfD is held in some suspicion as being exclusively middle-class, if not

Angela Merkel continues to reap the whirlwind. In this weekend’s elections Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has emerged as the fastest-growing political insurgent party since 1945. It has managed to enter all three state parliaments – with over 10pc of the vote in Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and almost a quarter of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than double the centre-left SPD. It focused its campaign as a protest against Merkel’s migrant policy, a policy that paid off. Its success is more than just another example of Europeans letting off steam. Imagine if Nigel Farage declared that police should be ready to shoot migrants trying to make it from Calais to Britain; saying: ‘I don’t want to do

Surely there is a difference between Mark Carney’s intervention in the Scottish referendum last year and in the EU one now. In the first, everyone wanted to know whether an independent Scotland could, as Alex Salmond asserted, keep the pound and even gain partial control over it. The best person to answer this question was the Governor of the Bank of England. So he answered it, and the answer — though somewhat more obliquely expressed — was no. For the vote on 23 June, there is nothing that Mr Carney can tell us which we definitely need to know and which only he can say. So when he spoke to

Imagine if Nigel Farage declared that police should be ready to shoot migrants trying to make it from Calais to Britain; saying: ‘I don’t want to do this, but the use of armed force is there as a last resort.’ And imagine that in spite of this — or perhaps because of it — Ukip were to overtake the Labour party in a national poll to become the most popular opposition party. This, in effect, is what is happening in Germany. The words above were spoken by Frauke Petry, leader of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the insurgent party which is threatening to make large gains in state elections in three

The head of Amnesty, Kate Allen, was busily talking the most terrible balls on the radio this morning. In an interview on the Today programme she reminded everyone of how bad the situation in Syria is and indulged in the usual Conservative-bashing by arguing that Britain wasn’t doing enough to alleviate the refugee situation. Despite spending more than almost any other country on regional solutions to the humanitarian catastrophe and a commitment to take in 20,000 refugees over 5 years, Ms Allen particularly lamented that we were ‘not joining with the rest of Europe.’ Seemingly unaware that most of the ‘refugees’ flooding into Europe are not Syrians and not refugees, she

If I was in charge of the Home Office I’d employ someone whose sole area of expertise was Hitler’s Germany and whose only job was to keep an eye out for any vague echoes of Nazism, however fatuous, in the working practices of the government or its contractors. This would have avoided Monday’s controversy over asylum seekers being made to wear red wristbands in order to receive free meals, because being asked to wear ID to qualify for things is exactly like being a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. A chilling echo, as many people commented. I imagine the reason for this policy is that it’s more convenient than asking someone with a not

Over the weekend a number of strange tweets were emitted from Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account. The Labour leader appeared to be taking his call to attack the Tories — and not other members of Labour — to new heights when he tweeted ‘Davey Cameron is a pie‘ along with ‘Here we… here we… here we f—ing go!!!’. While the tweets were swiftly deleted and put down to the account being hacked, new information has now come to light surrounding the incident. The Times Red Box reports that the ‘hack’ occurred in a hostel in Germany. One of Corbyn’s staff was enjoying a break in Berlin when the orders came to tweet from

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has a socialist doppelganger in Germany. Her name is Sahra Wagenknecht and she serves as co-chairperson of the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag—The Left Party. Her remarks blanketed the German media on Tuesday because she equated Islamic State terrorism in Paris with Britain’s aerial campaign designed to help destroy the terrorist organisation in the Syrian and Iraqi theatres of war. ‘Of course it is no less a crime to murder innocent civilians in Syria with bombs than it is to shoot them in Parisian restaurants and concert halls. One is individual terrorism, the other state-sponsored,’ Sahra Wagenknecht, an admirer of the now-defunct East German communist state