GERMANY: Attack & more – 6th Jun 2024

Hallo from BA! This is the Rorshok Germany Update from the 6th of June twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Germany.

This week starts off with big news from the city of Mannheim: on Friday the 31st of May, an Afghan islamist attacked right-wing populist and vocal islam-critic Michael Stürzenberger, with a knife.

Stürzenberger was on a tour through Germany hosting small information events where he promoted his anti-immigration and anti-muslim ideology in migrant neighborhoods, apparently to provoke heated exchanges on Social Media. Finally, he got more than he asked for, since he was attacked with a knife and injured. Attempting to dissolve the situation, a policeman was also attacked, stabbed in the neck and later died in the hospital.

The attack on Stürzenberger sparked a new debate on deportations to insecure countries of origin. On Thursday the 6th, Chancellor Scholz of the Social Democrats (or SPD) said in a government declaration that he wants to deport criminals back to their homelands, such as Afghanistan or Syria He said that the security interest of Germany weighs heavier than the personal safety of criminals. He still warned not to put the 20 Million people of foreign origin in Germany under general suspicion. Critics have pointed out that this the same rhetoric the right-wing Alternative For Germany (or AFD) has been using for the past ten years, and that such a decision would legitimize the terror regimes in Afghanistan and Syria.

Speaking of the conservatives, another wave of demonstrations against the right has hit Germany. Starting in the city of Cottbus in the state of Brandenburg, a group of a few hundred protesters gathered on Monday the 3rd, which is an amazing feat since Cottbus is a stronghold of the right-extremist AFD and everybody going to the protests is putting their own safety at risk. Various local groups have planned more demonstrations all over Germany in the days leading up to the European Elections.

On that note about demonstrations, the university protests in Berlin in solidarity with the people in Gaza continue. On Monday the 3rd, around 200 students gathered in Berlin to show its solidarity with Gaza and to protest against a plan of the Berlin parliament to allow forced exmatriculations. The plan of the parliament is clearly aimed against pro-palestinian protesters that have camped on university campuses regularly for the past weeks.

Another issue dominating the news this week was the intense flooding in southern Germany following strong rainfall of the past weeks. Authorities said that several dams in Bavaria state have broken, and all major rivers there are at their maximum capacity. However, on Monday, the 3rd, the rain finally let up, and the situation is expected to improve soon. As of Thursday the 6th, Bavaria experienced several days of sunshine, and most train lines began operating again. However, more heavy rain is expected for the weekend. The Danube River still faces the risk of severe flooding.

Still on climate change and extreme weather: The UN Climate Change Conference met on Sunday the 1st in Bonn. Every year representatives of the UN meet in the city to prepare for the next World Climate Conference (or COP), and normally, the event doesn’t get a lot of attention. However, the negotiations are unusually important this year because members agreed that Azerbaijan would be the host country and because this year, they will discuss financial reparations from industrial nations to the countries most affected by climate change.

An important issue is the mistrust of countries of the global south toward northern industrial states, who have often not fulfilled their promises. Conservative estimations by the International Monetary Fund assure that 1 Trillion Dollars are needed to offset the effects of climate change but it is unclear if the global south will see that money.

More on climate politics, as a new report published on Monday the 3rd by the Expert Council on Climate Questions, which is responsible for determining if Germany is doing enough against climate change, shows that the country will miss its climate goals by a lot. The government had in the past repeatedly said that they are on course to reach the climate goals, but as this report shows this is false. The executive was using numbers from the past four years, in which a European war, a gas price spike, and a pandemic drastically slowed down the German industry.

In related news, Wolfgang Metzeler-Kicka, a climate activist, was on hunger strike for more than ninety days. However, he was brought to a hospital in a life-threatening condition on Monday the 3rd. His hunger strike was supposed to bring Chancellor Olaf Scholz to admit a simple scientific fact: That there’s no CO2 rest budget and that the capacity of the atmosphere to hold CO2 has been reached. Instead of easing off his hunger strike, after being released from the hospital and brought back to the protest camp, he stopped drinking water as well. His condition remains critical, and the government is ignoring his supporters’ pleas.

Moving on, on Tuesday the 4th, the police conducted another round of house searches in connection to the trial against the group surrounding Prince Reus, who is accused of plotting to violently overthrow the government. Police officers searched the house of a married couple in Southern Germany, a bunker facility in the north, and a palace in the east. The married couple is accused of giving logistical support to the conspirators.

On some energy updates, the Christian Democrats (or CDU) in the parliament have started an investigation committee into Germany’s nuclear energy exit, which is the decision to no longer produce electricity from nuclear energy. Merkel’s CDU government implemented the nuclear energy exit following the catastrophe of Fukushima in twenty eleven. Throughout the last years, the CDU has come out in support of nuclear energy time and again.

The new investigative committee is supposed to answer the question of whether the shutdown of the last reactors in twenty twenty-three could have been avoided and if Robert Habeck, the leader of the Green party and minister of the economy, was guilty of any untoward behavior.

While the CDU is opening up closed issues again, the future of energy clearly seems to be renewables. In the first quarter of twenty twenty-four, 58 percent of Germany’s domestic energy production came from renewable sources. By far the biggest contributor to that number is wind energy, with 38 percent. In comparison: By the first quarter of twenty twenty-three only 48 percent came from renewable sources and 52 from conventional sources. The most significant change was with energy from coal-burning which dropped from 29 percent in twenty twenty-three to 21 percent in twenty twenty-four. While this is a step forward, the economy isn’t going great and the currently slowed-down production requires less energy.

And to close this edition, the country has ordered 200.000 artillery 155-millimeter caliber grenades from the German weapon manufacturer Rheinmetall. In total this will cost Germany around 880 Million Euros. Rheinmetall has been under some pressure to produce more and more ammunition as the war in Ukraine drags on and the demand for artillery shells keeps increasing. The company had to widen its production capacities to meet the demand. It’s likely that Germany will sell a sizeable portion of the ordered shells to Ukraine, as other NATO partners are reluctant to sell these specific shells to Ukraine. The 155-millimeter shells of Rheinmetall are a precision artillery piece which, if positioned accordingly, could conduct precision strikes either deep behind the Russian lines or even within Russian territory, which is why several NATO partners don’t want to deliver the ammunition to Ukraine.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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