In 2001 Saarland became the first western German state to shorten the Gymnasium, the academic high school, from nine years to eight. Most other states followed. The Abitur after only twelve school years got a nickname, the Turbo-Abitur. Then the states turned back. Lower Saxony returned to 13 years after the summer of 2015. Bavaria, Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein also decided to return. North Rhine-Westphalia began the change in the 2019/20 school year, and its first regular nine-year class takes the Abitur in 2027. An SPD education expert in the NRW state parliament said that politics had bowed to the pressure of business associations when it introduced the eight-year system. Pupils, he said, now needed more time for the development of their personality. The German Economic Institute estimated the direct cost of the return at about 1.2 billion euros nationwide. In Baden-Württemberg a parents’ initiative collected more than 100,000 signatures. On 29 January 2025 the state parliament passed a law to return to the nine-year Gymnasium from the 2025/26 school year.
politics
Many Steps and Many Stations
On 15 July 1963 Egon Bahr spoke at the Protestant Academy in Tutzing about the divided Germany. He said that reunification was ein Prozeß mit vielen Schritten und vielen Stationen, a process with many steps and many stations. His first conclusion was daß die Politik des Alles oder Nichts ausscheidet, that a policy of all or nothing was ruled out. He summed up his proposal in a formula: Wandel durch Annäherung, change through rapprochement.
Since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, this long, step-by-step policy toward the East has been disputed in Germany. A 2023 paper of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung notes: Seit dem Angriff Russlands auf die Ukraine wird in Deutschland über die jüngere sozialdemokratische Geschichte gestritten.
Stuttgart 21
Stuttgart 21, the new underground main station, sollte rund drei Milliarden Euro kosten und schon 2019 in Betrieb gehen. It was supposed to cost about three billion euros and open in 2019. In June 2026 representatives of Deutsche Bahn told the Bundestag transport committee that it would open at the end of 2031. The latest cost estimate is about 11.3 billion euros. The financing contract of 2009 had committed the project partners only up to a little over 4.5 billion euros. A court ruled that the railway must bear the extra costs alone.
The Minister on Insolvency
In September 2022, during the energy crisis, Economics Minister Robert Habeck was asked on the ARD talk show Maischberger whether bakeries and other small firms faced insolvency. He answered: Und dann sind die nicht insolvent automatisch, aber sie hören vielleicht auf zu verkaufen. Then they are not automatically insolvent, but they may stop selling. The trade paper Deutsche Handwerks Zeitung wrote of the Unkenntnis, the lack of knowledge, that the minister partly showed. Two days later the president of the Leipzig chamber of crafts said the minister was not familiar nicht einmal mit dem kleinen Einmaleins der Betriebswirtschaftslehre, not even with the basic times table of business administration. The chamber offered to put together a training course in insolvency law for him.
The Rapporteur’s Recommendation
Why do the members of a parliamentary group usually vote the same way? In 2022 Jakob Blankenburg, an SPD member of the Bundestag, answered this question from a citizen on the platform abgeordnetenwatch.de. The members have divided the committees and topics among themselves, he wrote. No single member can study every topic in detail. Dementsprechend geben die sogenannten Berichterstatter:innen … in der Fraktionssitzung eine Empfehlung zur Abstimmung ab. Accordingly, the so-called rapporteurs give a voting recommendation at the group meeting. He also named shared values as a reason.
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?