Germany
What’s the problem with Gareth Southgate’s ‘war talk’?
War analogies are a cherished football tradition. From chants of ‘Stand up if you won the war’ to the Daily…
The lost legacy
Merkel is leaving the EU in chaos
The German takeover of the EU is accelerating
Vetoes should no longer be allowed. Smaller countries should not be able to block the will of the ‘majority’. And…
Why the far-right flourishes in East Germany
A spectre is haunting Germany — the spectre of the AfD. Having come to prominence on a wave of anti-migrant…
Artist’s Notebook
I’m blessed by the fact that I live almost smack-bang in the middle of old London, a pebble’s toe punt…
Still Can do
Krautrock pioneer Irmin Schmidt talks to Graeme Thomson about taking risks, playing badly and ignoring the Brits
How Denmark helped America spy on Sweden
A large, investigative collaboration between Scandinavian public service outlets and European newspapers such as Le Monde and Süddeutsche Zeitung has…
Germany’s growing extremism problem
On 2 June 2019, a German politician was found lying in a pool of blood outside his home in Hesse.…
France needs Britain more than ever
‘What is grave about this situation, Messieurs, is that it is not serious’, was how General de Gaulle addressed his…
Putin’s on manoeuvres – are we ready?
‘What follows plague?’ I asked a medieval historian at the start of the pandemic. ‘War,’ he replied. In recent days,…
Queen of the Greens
Could Annalena Baerbock decide Germany’s future?
From beyond the grave
Give dead bones a voice and they speak volumes: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo was clamorous with the departed…
Home affront
What we can learn from Britain’s rationing mistakes
Merkel’s radical lockdown plan could quickly backfire
In its flailing response to the Covid crisis, the German government appears to have finally given up on federalism. Angela…
Biden’s backhanded bid to kill Nord Stream 2
Washington, D.C. is universally known as a town divided, a place where compromise and dialogue are often sacrificed at the…
Berlin has been bounced into accepting Sputnik
Munich has had enough of the vaccine chaos in Berlin and Brussels. In a surprise announcement on Wednesday, Bavaria’s minister…
Merkel’s blundering lockdown U-turn
During her 16 years in office, Angela Merkel has produced a couple of memorable sentences that will be imprinted into…
Merkel declares a ‘new pandemic’ as Germany locks down again
A year on from the onset of the Covid crisis, Angela Merkel had grim news for Germans this morning: our…
Europe’s reckless caution
The first smear campaign against AstraZeneca, when Emmanuel Macron falsely claimed at the start of the year that the jab…
Support for Merkel’s party is crumbling
On Sunday, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) suffered a historic election defeat in their former heartlands of…
The mask scandal threatening to destroy Merkel’s legacy
In Germany, masks have been one of the least controversial elements of this pandemic. Most people have accepted that they…
The rapid fall of Germany’s health minister
Young, polished and confident, Germany’s health minister became the country’s most popular politician in 2020. A darling of the conservative…
Germany is regretting its criticism of the Oxford Covid jab
Germany’s fridges are filled with Oxford jabs. But there’s a problem: 80 per cent of the 735,000 doses delivered to Germany…
Are Germans losing faith in the European project?
Germans are increasingly losing faith in the European Union due to its bungled handling of the vaccine roll-out. Germany and…
Biden’s rift with Brussels is only set to grow
It was meant to be a special relationship. After the tumultuous Trump years, President Biden was planning to reset relations…
