politics Archives - Page 12 of 38

Security in the Widest Sense

On 14 June 2023 the federal government presented Germany’s first National Security Strategy. Its approach, called integrated security, means the interplay of all means and instruments. Its fields range from defense and civil protection to development policy, raw materials, the climate crisis, pandemics and food security.

Experts at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs criticized the strategy. They counted 129 fields of action in 14 chapters and found no explicit setting of priorities.

The Members Approve the Coalition

In April 2025, the SPD put its coalition agreement with the CDU and CSU to a vote of all party members. About 85 percent voted yes. Turnout was 56 percent. The vote was valid only if at least 20 percent of the members took part.

The party had held such votes before. In 2013, 76 percent voted yes. In 2018, the youth wing campaigned against another grand coalition under the slogan NoGroKo. Even so, 66 percent voted yes. Turnout in both years was over 78 percent.

Phones Out of the Classroom

Several German states have tightened their rules on smartphones in schools. ZDF reported that Brandenburg, Bremen, Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia did so at the start of a new school year, um die Konzentration zu fördern, to support concentration. In March 2025, Hesse announced that it would ban the private use of smartphones, smartwatches and tablets through a change to its school law, starting in the 2025/26 school year. The Hessian education minister, Armin Schwarz, said schools should be places where students can frei von Ablenkung und Ängsten lernen, learn free of distraction and fear.

The Ethics Commission on Nuclear Power

After the Fukushima accident, the federal government set up an Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply. It began its work on 4 April 2011. Its seventeen members included Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Bishop Ulrich Fischer and the sociologist Ulrich Beck.

The report was handed over on 30 May 2011. It said that reducing the risks to purely technical aspects would not meet the demand for ganzheitliches Denken, holistic thinking. “Ökologische, wirtschaftliche, gesellschaftliche und technische Risiken sind zudem eng miteinander verzahnt.” Ecological, economic, social and technical risks are closely interlocked.

The commission concluded that, with the measures it proposed, Germany could complete its exit from nuclear power within a decade.

Voting After Six

On 26 September 2021, Berlin elected its state parliament and its district assemblies. Many polling stations did not have enough ballot papers, and some received the wrong ones. Voters waited in line, often for hours. Voting time ends at 6 p.m., and after that only voters who are already present may vote. Across the city, people were still voting after 6 p.m., when the first forecasts based on exit polls had already been published. On 16 November 2022, the Constitutional Court of Berlin declared both elections invalid in the entire city. The court named voting after 6 p.m. as one example of the defects that violated voters’ constitutional rights. The election was repeated on 12 February 2023.

Polling stations across the city were still open long after the closing time, while forecasts were already public, and the court counted that among the breaches of the voters’ rights.

The Mask Affair

In 2020 and 2021, during the pandemic, several members of the Bundestag and of state parliaments from the CDU and CSU arranged deals for protective masks and received commissions. Georg Nüßlein of the CSU is said to have received 660,000 euros. Nikolas Löbel of the CDU said he had received 250,000 euros. In 2022, in the case of Nüßlein and another CSU politician, the Federal Court of Justice found that this was not bribery under existing law. Closing the gap was a matter for the legislature. Since 18 June 2024, Section 108f of the Criminal Code has made it an offence for members of parliament to demand or accept an unjustified financial advantage in return for acting, during their term, on behalf of someone else’s interests.

Who Shoots Down the Drone?

As drones disrupted German airports, 144 times by the end of August 2025, a central question was whose job it was to stop them. The police of the states are in principle responsible for averting danger. On 26 February 2026 the Bundestag passed an amended Aviation Security Act, which allows the armed forces to support the states and their police. At the committee hearing in January, experts still disagreed. One of them, from the drone industry association UAV DACH, said the planned reform would leave das Zuständigkeitschaos, the chaos of responsibilities, unsolved.

Is Having Friends a Disgrace?

Max Streibl, the minister-president of Bavaria, had to admit in the state parliament that he had twice gone on holiday in Brazil at the expense of the aircraft manufacturer Burkhart Grob. At the Political Ash Wednesday in Passau in 1993, he greeted his supporters with Saludos Amigos! He asked: Freunde zu haben, ist das eine Schande bei uns in der CSU? Is having friends a disgrace with us in the CSU? He resigned in May 1993. Since then Amigo has been a German word for affairs that entangle politics and business.

A Decree on Who Is Responsible

On 6 May 2025 Chancellor Friedrich Merz issued an Organisationserlass, an organization decree. It created the Federal Ministry for Digital Affairs and State Modernization. The new ministry took over departments and responsibilities from six others: the Chancellery and the ministries of the interior, transport, economy, finance and justice. The news site netzpolitik.org described the previous coalition’s arrangement as eine totale Zersplitterung der Kompetenzen, a total fragmentation of competences. It reported that the finance ministry had resisted giving up its responsibility for the federal IT service center.

Plain Speaking on Prime Time

On 13 February 2025, before the federal election, the public broadcaster ZDF aired its election forum Klartext, plain speaking. The chancellor candidates Olaf Scholz, Friedrich Merz, Robert Habeck and Alice Weidel each faced questions from citizens in the studio. During Friedrich Merz’s turn, a question came from Thyssenkrupp, where employees feared mass layoffs: Wie wollen sie uns helfen? How do you want to help us?

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