German police have arrested some Eritrean raping farm animals . Welcome to Germany.

https://www.presseportal.de/blaulicht/pm/110970/4102185


https://www.welt.de/regionales/baden...eter-fest.html

Just out of curiosity, do you have an email alert set up for ‘juicy migrant sex offences’?

No, I'm subscribed to a PETA newsletter

New Storm blowing up about illegal campaign donations to AfD.

Source (German language)

Seems they were getting money from Switzerland

Horst Seehofer has confirmed he will also step down as leader of Bavaria's CSU. However, he intends to remain Germany's interior minister for now.

Source

Not surprising, he mad a lot of false moves in the last year culminating in a dreadful result in the last election

Old thread but Sunday's elections
In Saxony, the CDU saw its share of the vote drop by 7.4 points from the 2014 election to 32%, with the AfD coming second 27.5% , according to preliminary results.

In Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, the SPD - which has run the state since German reunification in 1990 - won 27.2% of the vote with the AfD on 22.9%, preliminary numbers showed.

All of the parties represented in Germany’s federal parliament maintain their steadfast refusal to govern together with the AfD which will likely result in some strange coalitions!

Results for CDU + SPD actually improved compared with the EP elections and Federal Elections.


This is actually a win. For certain definitions of "winning".


Not sure what they're gonna do if no coalition against AfD is possible anymore.


In the long run, voters always get what they want.

That's of course not always a good thing for the voters (or those who didn't vote for the thing at all). But such is the nature of democracy.

For the AfD this is pretty significant because people have been saying, the AfD is a protest movement that will blow over. They said, back then, they are being voted into parliaments now but their popularity will soon nosedive and, come the next election, nobody will remember who they were. Now they are not only being returned to parliaments in which they were previously represented but are being returned with significantly larger support. And this despite the refugee crisis no longer being as centre stage as it was in 2015. And this despite (or maybe thanks to) a campaign that was, more than anything else, characterized by vicious attacks by the other parties on the Afd.

And the result is actually being sold (by some) as a roaring success for the other parties. The take home message will be that they did nothing wrong and should change nothing.

Lots of cause for popcorn in Thüringen right now, where Thomas Kemmerich has just been elected governor by the state parliament. The left parties had agreed to form a coalition and thus elect their own man. What went wrong? Well the AfD voted for the FDP man and because the FDP and part of the CDU also voted for him, that put him into first place.

The FDP only barely scraped into the parliament at all,having only barely passed he 5% threshold. It is unusual, to say the least, to see the weakest party provide the governor.

Kemmerich has accepted the election but has also stated that there was no behind the scenes deal and that he will not be working with the AfD. But others are calling that into question, and Merkel herself has got involved and is demanding a new election.

According to the BBC Kemmerich now says he is resigning

Maybe he'll wait a few days until his pension gets a little boost?
;-)


(Sorry to be so cynical).

More fall out from Thüringen...
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer plans to step down as leader of Germany's governing Christian Democrats and will not be the party's candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor, German media reported Monday.

Kramp-Karrenbauer, who was widely seen as Merkel's preferred successor as chancellor, informed the party of her decision at a CDU executive committee meeting on Monday morning.
Seems she is blamed for the local CDU supporting Kemmerich.

This throws the nicely ordered plans of the CDU into disarray, so where next.....

Come back Merkel, all is forgiven

Typical that when a strong leader leaves there is no good succession plan, probably because they have suppressed all potential competition during their reign.

Not completely:


One person is left: Friedrich Merz

She wants to have the DDR back!

I don’t think that Kramp Karrenbauer‘s resignation is that surprising . From the beginning she came across as a lackluster leader. She lacks charisma and doesnt do well in debates and interviews. Under her leadership the party has lost ground and lost elections and Kramp Karrenbauer is always fast to find excuses and slow to find answers .

Maybe Thüringen was the straw that broke the camel‘s back. But it was a train crash in the making .

What I would like to know is why anybody thought she would be a good leader in the first place .

She's very good at actually talking to people, AFAIK.



The townhall-meetings went very well.


She's not GNTM nor is she a TV-personality.
And that's why politics has gone down the drain.

She's not a visionary either. Especially when a party is in decline you need somebody who can reinvent the party, formulate what they stand for, have a vision, and sell it to both the party and the public at large.

Kramp Karrenbauer comes across as somebody who would make an excellent senior civil servant or manager of a hospital, whose job it is to keep things ticking and make sure everybody has what they need to do their job and to keep everybody happy.

But IMHO she doesn't have what it takes to manage a crisis or turn things around.

Isn't it a bit hard to know that before a crisis arrives? Cometh the hour, cometh the (wo)man....

The CDU is already up to their neck in crisis. What more are they waiting for?

They've allowed their support to crumble from 42 percent in 2013 to below 28 percent today. They have a huge credibility problem and are allowing other parties to take ownership of key topics, including topics that in the past were core competencies of the CDU. If the hour for the (wo)man to come forth and save the party isn't here already, I don't want to know how much worse they want to allow things to get.

Well written article from NZZ

https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/cdu-der-k...ben-ld.1539589