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Russia ‘stoking refugee unrest in Germany to topple Angela Merkel’

Russia is trying to topple Angela Merkel by waging an information war designed to stir up anger in Germany over refugees, Nato’s most senior expert on strategic communications has claimed.

Jānis Sārts, director of Nato’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, Latvia, told the Observer that Russia had a track record of funding extremist forces in Europe, and that he believed there was now evidence of Russia agitating in Germany against Merkel.

Fairy tales are where you find them, but any number seem to begin in the dark German woods where Angela Merkel spent her childhood.

The year 2015 marked the start of Merkel’s 10th year as Chancellor of a united Germany and the de facto leader of the European Union, the most prosperous joint venture on the planet. By year’s end, she had steered the enterprise through not one but two existential crises, either of which could have meant the end of the union that has kept peace on the continent for seven decades.

But to a child of 3, Angela’s age when her family arrived, it was a world unto itself, and would remain so until she went to school in the adjoining town of Templin. There, she came to realize that, like the 17 million other residents of East Germany, she actually was living within the walls of a fortress.

Angela Merkel replaces Hillary Clinton as prime target of fake news, analysis finds

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has become a target of websites spreading fake news, misleading stories and conspiracy theories ahead of her country’s election, according to an analysis compiled by BuzzFeed News.

Five years ago today, Greece’s then Prime Minister, George Papandreou, disclosed to the world that his country was in severe fiscal difficulties. Recessions dipped and then double dipped, while debt soared. Unemployment rates, especially among young people, hit record highs in many parts of eurozone. Growth plummeted, and in many parts of the continent has yet to recover.

One constant throughout the eurozone crisis has been Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. Since Merkel took office in 2005, there have been 54 different leaders atop eurozone member countries - an average of more than three per country.

None of the eurozone’s current leaders has held office as long as Germany’s chancellor.

Angela Merkel's faith in America was deeply shaken when Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016.

The German Chancellor who grew up behind the Iron Curtain was quicker than most to perceive his threat to the kind of US global leadership that has traditionally underwritten European security. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Merkel may well have opted not to run for a fourth term. But she would not retire with Trump in the White House, seeing him as a peril to the West, its common values and security architecture like NATO.

A sense of relief four years later pulsed through her congratulatory message

it is that people should learn from their history

which is expected to overwhelmingly approve a resolution that officially declares the century-old Armenian massacres to be genocide

warned Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in a telephone call that there could be consequences if the resolution passes

After reviewing almost 1000 hours of sound recordings in three European zoos, Angela Stöger at the University of Vienna, Austria, found no evidence of infrasonic communication – but she did pick up a weird humming coming from the giraffe enclosures in all three zoos at night.

Angela Merkel is traditionally known as Germany’s “safe pair of hands,” but when government-coalition talks unexpectedly collapsed late Sunday night after just four weeks, her future as the country’s chancellor was suddenly in question.

pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) party announced that it would no longer take part in coalition talks to form Germany’s next government. Though Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and its Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party won the largest share of votes during the country’s general election in September, they failed to win enough seats to govern on their own.

With Jamaica no longer an option, Germany is faced with three choices: The first is a minority government, formed by Merkel’s CDU/CSU party in coalition with either the FDP (which would leave the government 29 seats short of a majority) or the Greens (short 42 seats). Though that’s not impossible, Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me this option would be alien to both Merkel’s leadership style and the country as a whole. “For historical reasons, Germans are very skeptical of minority governments because it reminds people of the Weimar period,” he said, referring to the post-World War I period between 1918 and 1933 known for its political instability. “For somebody like Angela Merkel, it’s not in her style of governing to run a minority government because she’s not exactly a big gambler.” And a minority government would certainly be a gamble for Merkel—effectively denying her the authority she needs to push through reforms both at home and within the eurozone. “She’s somebody who doesn’t just embody stability, but I think she also likes stability herself.”

, my sense of the state of Western elites after Trump and Brexit is similar to the analysis offered recently by Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review. Dougherty has been circulating in high-level confabs since Trump’s election and reports a persistent mood of entitlement and ’90s nostalgia — a refusal to take responsibility for foreign policy failures, to admit that post-national utopianism was oversold, to reckon with the social decay and spiritual crisis shadowing the cosmopolitan dream.

there is something mildly encouraging in the willingness of Merkel’s competitors in the political center, not just on the extreme right, to act as though they’ve learned lessons from her high-minded blunder, and to campaign and negotiate as if the public’s opinions about migration policy should actually prevail. Better that kind of crisis-generating move by far, in fact, than a grand coalition of parties united only in their anti-populism

What will save the liberal order, if it is to be saved, will be the successful integration of concerns that its leaders have dismissed or ignored back into normal political debate, an end to what Josh Barro of Business Insider has called “no-choice politics,” in which genuine ideological pluralism is something to be smothered with a pillow.

The leader of Germany’s Social Democratic party has denied reports that he has green-lighted talks about another “grand coalition” with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

“The reports are plainly and simply wrong,” the SPD leader, Martin Schulz, said on Friday after claims in the German newspaper Bild that the two parties had agreed to begin exploratory talks on a new coalition following a meeting with the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, on Thursday

“We need big ideas for our country,” said Manuela Schwesig, the state premier of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and a former family minister. “As before, I remain sceptical that you can do that by carrying on ‘business as usual’ in a grand coalition.”

One of the most striking positive trends in the world these days can be found in the democratic strength, character and leadership of Germany.

This came to mind as I was reading German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s speech this week in Prague, in which he promised that his country would support Ukraine “reliably and for as long as it takes.” He explained that Germany had “undergone a fundamental change” on providing military aid to Ukraine. He affirmed Germany’s support for a stronger, more integrated Europe — one that would welcome new members that aspire to Europe’s democratic values and ideals.

This is all part of what he calls a Zeitenwende in German foreign policy, a “turning of the times.”

Based on the global reputation and overall popularity of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany appears from the outside to be a country where equality between men and women has long been established.

In a country where mothers who are deemed to spend more time focusing on their jobs than their children are labeled Rabenmütter, or raven mothers, and where the definitive tome of the German language, Duden, only this year considered adding a feminine term to refer to a woman who heads a board of directors, “Vorständin,” many view a public debate on sexism as long overdue.

Yet thousands of German women have taken to social media in recent days to tell a radically different story — one of daily sexis

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government plans to fine social media networks such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. if they fail to combat hate speech, as German officials accuse media companies of being too slow to take action.

many sections of the work – on globalisation, migration and technology, to name a few pertinent topics – read differently in the light of decisions she has made since reading it, such as the treatment of Greece at the height of the eurozone crisis

If Europe was able to pull ahead of China economically in the 19th century, Osterhammel argues, it was because the Chinese empire was hampered by a “chaotic dual system” of silver and copper coins, while much of Europe had created a “de facto single currency” with the Latin monetary union of 1866.

Osterhammel says he can see “she is very serious about the way world order (or disorder) has been evolving in the long run. She seems to understand, for instance, that migration and mobility have a historical dimension.”

The angry allegation by the German government that the National Security Agency monitored the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel may force President Obama into making a choice he has avoided for years between continuing the age-old game of spying on America’s friends and undercutting cooperation with important partners in tracking terrorists, managing the global economy and slowing Iran’s nuclear program.

The pressure to make such a choice builds each day, as some of the United States’ closest allies have demanded explanations from Washington after similar disclosures about the breadth and sophistication of American electronic spying.

The tension with Germany built last week after German officials were given evidence of the cellphone monitoring by Der Spiegel, the German weekly newsmagazine. The first protests to Washington came in an angry phone call to Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, from her German counterpart, Christoph Heusgen.

after spending billions of euros to accommodate the newcomers, Germany is beginning to reap some gains. The number who are either working or participating in a job training program has been growing, and was at more than 400,000 as of the end of 2018. Of those, 44,000 were enrolled in apprenticeships, according to German business groups.

That’s on pace with, or even slightly ahead of, what many experts had predicted. 

we’re on track,”

Boris Johnson and health secretary Matt Hancock have both tested positive for coronavirus and will have to work leading the government’s efforts to tackle the pandemic in isolation.

Johnson posted a video on Friday morning on Twitter saying he had a temperature and a persistent cough. “I am working from home, I’m self-isolating, and that’s entirely the right thing to do,” he said.

“Fortunately for me the symptoms so far have been very mild so I’ve been able to carry on with the work driving forward the UK response,” he said. “I’ll be continuing to do everything I can to get our carers the support that they need. And I’ll be doing that from here but with no less gusto.”