Germany megathread

[Lord Halifax]

You increasingly wonder how he managed to keep this foot in mouth tendency in check when he was trying to get elected - I certainly don't recall this many gaffes from him back then.

Silent Olaf had the advantage of not saying much about anything during the election campaign therefore coming from behind and eventually overtaking the more (publicly) scandal-ridden competitors Laschet and Baerbock. A much repeated criticism against him during his Chancelloship is that he has the habit to "disappear" from important debates actually.

A recent editorial on ZEIT ONLINE was headlined though: "The Scholzian boomer realism. Whether it is the Ukraine war or climate change: Olaf Scholz can only do it moderate. That's so radical that it threatens Putin's victory and the devastation of our living environment."
(https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2022-05/olaf-scholz-ukraine-krieg-klimakrise-politikstil)

Still better than Laschet would have been, presumably.

How do you think Söder would have handled Ukraine?

[Lord Halifax]

EDIT: Ah, I see... according to Wikipedia, Pistorius used to be a member of the "German-Russian Friendship Group" of the Bundesrat (Federal Council).

[Lord Halifax]

https://twitter.com/TheresaAFallon/status/1630129964388343808?s=20

ungrateful bastards, should have dissolved their sh**thole country after the war

#morgenthauwasright

[Lord Halifax]

Well, resuming or substituting a banned Party ist a felony, so in theory that should bei hard.

did you use German words on purpose?

[Lord Halifax]

A video from December has Björn Höcke (AfD) saying that he wants to deport 20%-30% of the German population, arguing the country could easily handle it provided that ethnic German women would increase their birthrates in the aftermath.

20%-30% is more or less the share of all residents with some sort of migrant background (30% would actually exceed the total number of people falling in that category a bit - the Federal Statistical Office defines "migrant background" as someone with at least one parent who at one point in their lives was not a German citizen).

Technically, that would include the incumbent Minister of Agriculture, the co-chairman of the Green Party, the general secretary of the FDP, the president of the German Trade Union Confederation, and, well, Sahra Wagenknecht.

https://www.derwesten.de/politik/afd-hoecke-remigration-deportation-id300814756.html

Also presumably including however many million Russlanddeutsche and the few people still alive who grew up in the Sudetenland and east of the Oder–Neisse.

the ones growing up east of the Oder-Neisse were born as German citizens