GERMANY: Against the Ultra-Right & more – 8th Feb 2024

Hallo from BA! This is the Rorshok Germany Update from the 8th of February twenty twenty-four A quick summary of what's going down in Germany.

The biggest topic right now in Germany is the fight for democracy and against the ultra-right. This weekend was the third in a row in which huge demonstrations took place all over the country, with hundreds of thousands attending in over 200 cities. This is the first time in Germany’s history that so many people attended such massive demonstrations that fought against the same issue.

Since we mentioned the ultra-right: On Tuesday the 6th a court said that The Young Alternative, or JA, which is the youth organization of the Alternative for Germany, or AFD, party is a right extremist group. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Constitutional Protection, had previously classified the JA as right-extremists, which the JA protested against in court. The district court in Cologne has agreed with the intelligence agency, and ruled that the JA can be clearly classified as a right extremist group.So now the Constitutional Protection will be able to use extensive means to surveil them.

More on the AFD as the Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale, has drawn criticism from its own ranks and from the outside for inviting three AFD politicians to the opening Gala. Several employees of the Festival and a few future and past attendees have signed a letter of protest, calling out the Berlinale for threatening to undermine its own values. The Berlinale is famous for picking very political movies, often related to queerness, immigration, or other forms of societal change. The signees said that the festival would give the AFD politicians a chance to present themselves in a good light. The Berlinale responded that the invitations are sent randomly to members of the national parliament and the senate of Berlin. It is yet unclear if the AFD politicians will get their invitations rescinded. So far two out of five AFD members have announced that they will attend the festival.

In previous episodes, we talked about the Union of Locomotive Drivers, or GDL, and how the national train company, or DB, has always said that the GDL’s demands are impossible to meet. On Wednesday, the 6th the GDL signed an agreement with the second biggest train company of the country, Transdev. This is the 24th company that the GDL has signed agreements with, which begs the question, why doesn’t the DB sign an agreement? Transdev and all other companies agreed to similar terms, a step-by-reduction of working time to thirty-five hours a week with the same pay until twenty twenty-eight, a one-time payment of 3.000 Euros, and an increase in monthly pay of around 400 Euros by the end of the year. The head of Transdev said that these demands were extraordinary and too extensive, but he still signed the agreement.

In other news, the EU has enacted a new law against greenwashing. What’s that you ask? It’s when companies that emit lots of CO2 pretend that they are acting ethically and say they are environmentally conscious. One popular practice is to offset carbon emissions after they have been emitted. For instance, companies might say they are planting trees somewhere in the world where it’s impossible to check if they are indeed planting trees. Then they say they are, carbon neutral.

Continuing on fake environmentalism, the Free Liberal party or FDP has always said that hydrogen fuel is the solution to climate change but has still kept cars with combustion engines. The fact that the majority of experts say that hydrogen fuel technology is completely unfit for usage in individual cars or generally on a big scale has never bothered them. Now, it has become clear that a group of friends in and around the Ministry of Transportation are involved with major hydrogen lobby organizations and have received extensive funds from the FDP-run transportation ministry. The group “lobby-control” uncovered a connection between one department head in the ministry and two heads of lobby organizations. Apparently the trio regularly goes skiing together, and later one of them makes sure the two others get millions in government funds for the lobby organizations that align with the talking points of the FDP-ministry he works in.

Next up, all sixteen states have agreed on implementing a system of payment cards for asylum seekers to replace cash payments into personal bank accounts. This system aims to exercise more control over what the asylum seekers buy and where and when. The political justification is that allegedly big sums are flowing out of Germany, and are being sent back to the refugees’ countries of origin. There are no official numbers, and estimates rank it at a few hundred million (but that’s taking into account all transactions made to the Middle East, and Africa, there is no tracking of only the transactions made by asylum seekers). The actual reasons the states want payment cards are to exercise more control over people, and, allegedly, disincentivize people from going to Germany. The bureaucracy cost of the cards alone is estimated to be higher than the money flowing out of the country.

Moving on, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is currently visiting Germany. He first spoke in the former parliament in Bonn, and then met with German chancellor Olaf Scholz. In Bonn, Attal spoke mostly of Franco-German relations and the concerning decline in German language students in France. In Berlin, the talks focussed on more pressing issues, such as military aid to Ukraine, the planned trade deal of the EU with South America, and the EU-wide farmers protests, which erupted in France and many other countries over farmers’ fears of cheap imports.

Speaking of farmers’ demonstrations, in Germany, for the past month, farmers protested against cutting subsidies. In France, Belgium and other EU countries, farmers were protesting against the EU’s new pesticide regulations On Tuesday the 6th, the European Commission announced that they would halt their plans for these new regulations. The proposed law would give farmers until twenty thirty to reduce the use of pesticides by 50% in order to slow down the process of species extinction.

And to close this edition, the government coalition is planning to implement responsibility union, a social contract similar to marriage. Civil marriages bring a lot of benefits. For instance it allows married couples to make decisions for each other in emergency situations and ease other bureaucratic processes. The responsibility union will have similar benefits. It’s designed to support other non-traditional family models. Up to six people will be able to form a responsibility union if they meet certain criteria. The plan is to make this model flexible so as to accommodate as many different lifestyles and realities as possible.

And that is for this week.

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