One of the traditional ways to tell how an upcoming general election is going to play out is by looking at the elections leading up to it. In Germany, they don't have all their state government elections on the same day as the national elections. Last weekend, for example, there were elections for state legislatures in Saxony, Saarland, and Thuringia (the names for these sound strange in English, by the way). It had been expected that the CDU, the center-right party, would be very successful in these elections, because they're showing well nationally right now.

But last Sunday the people of these three states gave their politicians a little surprise. Let's start in the western part of the country and work east.



5 Years ago was the most recent state election for Saarland and it was generally a safe CDU winner. But this year has been a big change. Mr. Oskar Lafontaine, a staunch leftist and generally considered to be somewhat weird in the rest of the country, let Die Linke (the Lefts) to a huge portion of the electorate, controlling 21.3 percent of the final tally. That's up from about 6% in 2004, if I recall correctly. CDU was the big loser, winning a plurality of 34.5% of the votes, while center-left SPD got 24.5%. Both B90/Grün and liberal FDP beat the 5% hurdle with 5.9% and 9.2% respectively. The state may be headed to a Jamaica Coalition, with CDU, Green and FDP put together, for a total of about 49.5%. A couple of extra seats might make that work out. The only other option would be for SPD to rule with Green and Linke, but SPD and Linke don't get along, because Linke is full of former GDR communists and Western socialist anarchists (to be frank). Compared with 2004, it looks like this:


Next time I will go into Thuringia and Saxony. But you can see with a CDU drop of 13% in an otherwise safe place, party leader and Chancellor Angela Merkel has had to revise some of her expectations of winning an absolute majority later in September. When I show you the other two states, you will see exactly how perilous the situation is for the center-right in the next national election.

After a long hiatus, I'm hoping to restart this Hammelsprung blog. This is a response to the fact that I blog about stuff that's uninteresting for much of the day, so I figure I should start writing more interesting things. On top of that, I have learned a lot about how to make a blog look cooler too! So here's to my continued interest in posting here and we'll see where it leads us. I doubt that I'm going to affect the elections in the heart of Europe, but that's not the point. The point of this blog is to learn more, to write about a topic that interests me, but which I don't know much about.

I always welcome your comments. I know some of the people who read this blog know more or read different sources of information about this than I do. So please, bring in your knowledge. This is an open space for us to talk about Politik in Deutschland!

The arrest of three terrorist suspects in Germany earlier this week came immediately following a practically identical scene in Denmark.  The German suspects, in a small central village, were found to have bought explosive making materials in Hannover and a Baden-Württemberg city and were only just barely caught, according to news reports.  They seem to have been planning to damage a section of the Frankfurt airport.  The suspects were Germans who converted to Islam. 
This has reopened the debate in Germany about the safety of the country with regards to terrorism.  The police presence is generally light, but perhaps it has increased in recent days.  Just on the streetcar this morning I noticed at least two and maybe even four people who looked like they were security guards.  They stayed mainly by the doors and kindly pressed the "door open" button for people, and chatted amongst themselves (two at each door).  
Is this really enough?
NO! Is the resounding reply from the Conservative CDU/CSU, part of the ruling Grand Coalition.   The deputy leader of the party in the Bundestag said on Wednesday that "The dramatic events of the last hours show us that there is a real issue for us here...and that applies particularly to the areas of terrorist training as well as the dispersal of bomb-making directions though the internet..."  He claimed that in the original negotiations with the center-left SPD party, they had discussed this issue, but the Justice Minister, Brigitte Zypries, has not seen fit to take care of the issue.  "(She) must now explain whether she still has the same goals we set out two years ago" he said.  
The two questions that have arisen are the following: should it be legally punishable to simply attend a terrorist training camp? and should the police and intelligence agency be allowed to check internet searches?  The CDU/CSU seems to have decided that the answer to the first is "yes".  The Green Party has practical problems with making such a law, because it would be difficult to prove whether someone had been in such a camp or not, since they dont have that evidence.  The SPD, half of the ruling coalition, has some problems with it as well.  Bundestag SPD member Joachim Stünker believes that it's potentially unconstitutional to have a preventative law like this one.
An attempt by the CSU's Bavarian internal ministry to create a law allowing for the police to check online searches fell on it's face when 3 different states put up opposition immediately.  Commentators think that's quite unlikely that this would even come up in other serious discussions.  The FDP, a libertarian party, claims that the police have much better methods to use than random internet searches in finding terrorist suspects.  Some more conservative officials described it as a very important tool in the search for terrorist suspects and that "the people expect a quick consensus from us" (Lower Saxony internal minister Uwe Schünemann).  
Obviously this has to be watched carefully.  Germany has lots of laws watching people, but repeatedly they have not noticed when there are actually plotting people in the country.  At the same time, with all the laws watching people, would anyone notice one more?  How about another?  Enough yet?  How far do we go?  The opposition parties are doing a good job checking the acts of the two Grand Coalition partners.  The CDU is trying to stick it to the SPD, essentially saying "soft on security!" And the SPD is playing the same game.  The other main parties are actually asking the questions and getting out in the media to ask them.  It changes the tone of the discussion from simple partisan bickering, to "how can we be protected while still holding freedoms?" 

For my first official entry, there is a major story in German news today:
From the Tageszeitung on Monday, 16 April: "Ich kann alles. Außer Geschichte" (I know everything.  Except history.)

The issue is the following quotes from the Ministerpräsident of Baden-Württemberg, Günther Oettinger:
"Hans Filbinger was no National Socialist (Nazi).  There was no judgment from Hans Filbinger through which anyone lost his life."- 11 April 2007. ("Hans Filbinger war kein Nationalsozialist.  Es gibt kein Urteil von Hans Filbinger, durch das ein Mensch sein Leben verloren hätte.")

"In our land, the victims of the 3rd Reich will not be forgotten.  Models for me are the men and women of the resistance, for example the brothers Graf von Stauffenberg." -14 April 2007

And this beauty:
"Ich glaube nach wie vor, dass Hans Filbinger ein Gegner der Diktatur gewesen ist." ("I believe still that Hans Filbinger was an opponent of dictatorship.") -15 April 2007.

What's this all about.  It all started last week when a man named Hans Filbinger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filbinger) passed away.  According to Wikipedia, his record during World War 2 is unclear; he seems to have played on both sides of the game, on the one side working in the judicial system of the Nazis but on the other, secretly attending lectures of anti-Nazi intellectuals. 

But don't be tricked by this article.  The former view of him is much more common here in Germany, based on the coverage on TV and my conversations with people.  After he died, Oettinger, the MP of B-W, went to the Freiburg Cathedral and gave a speech at the funeral (after all, Filbinger had also held that post 40 years ago). In this speech, he praised the man and claimed that he had never harmed anyone--essentially the German equivalent of saying "if we'd elected him, we wouldn't have had all these problems" or "say hello to my friend makaka over here!"  A quote that was recorded and can be replayed repetitively again and again.

And, if this isn't enough, Oettinger stuck by his comments since then.  All the way up until Sunday the 15th, he continued to hold onto his claim that Filbinger would have never hurt a fly.  This may be a good moment to note that Oettinger is from the CDU party, the Christian-Democratic Union, which is the relatively conservative party, center-right.  On occasion, CDU members will fall down into the depths of Neo-Nazi ideas or parties. Not that this is happening in this situation, but there is a certain attitude in some circles that members of the party are susceptible to this kind of political conversion; this sets the scene for Oettinger's comments to seem much more dangerous than they are.

After nearly a week of escalating political pressure, Oettinger was summoned to Berlin by his boss, Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. He canceled his trip to the Vatican, where he'd planned to celebrate the pope's 80th, and instead went to get a talking-to.  After meeting with Merkel, he came out to a short press conference where he said, very mechanically, "I distance myself from my comments of last Wednesday."  It sounded very forced and his face looked as though he weren't happy to be there.  Afterwards, I saw a clip from his spokesman, who took questions and parried them fairly well, but also found himself tied up, trying to distance Oettinger from comments that he's been embracing for almost a week. 

Still, many are calling for Oettinger's resignation from his position.  He has of course refused but there are some very important people still calling for him to step down.  In spite of his attempts today to get out of it, this story isn't yet disposed of.

Hello.  This is a new project from me, where I am trying to create a blog for German politics partly in the form of an American blogosphere blog.
This blog has various purposes:Part of the idea is to force me to pay attention to politics here (ie broaden my hobby a bit)
Another part is to think about and study how blogs are written and researched
I would also like to create a certain echo chamber effect and some satire (the two things that many blogs do), with the use of exaggeration and humor to comment upon current events in Germany.

Basically, I want to insert a bit of chaotic American style discussion into the very reserved and quiet German political discourse.