Still Raising Questions: How Angela Merkel Started Her Career In German Politics

 

Angela Merkel is considered to be the world’s most powerful woman and perhaps Europe’s most powerful person. She’s about to be re-elected as Germany’s Chancellor for the fourth consecutive time. Her policies have provoked a lot of debate, from Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear energy over the Eurozone bailouts onto her refugee policies.

What has received much less attention is how she entered politics. A number of biographies have been written about her, with the most critical one perhaps being “the first life of Angela M”, written in 2013 by a journalist for Die Welt who later joined the rightwing populist AfD party. This centered on how she was a member of the FDJ, the communist youth organization, when she was at school, and how she later served as cultural secretary for the FDJ while working as a physicist at the Academy of Sciences, leading to Merkel denying this role included propaganda.

Modern Strategy Concept (III)

BERLIN (Own report) – The elaboration of the German Ministry of Defense’s new White Paper is oriented on Cold War era scenarios. In her programmatic speech on this basic military policy document, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen (CDU) accused Russia of following a “geostrategic hegemonic policy” and of using “military force” to “achieve its interests.” Members of the panel of experts appointed by the minister, therefore, call Russia a “threat” and demand a revival of the “deterrence” policy applied against the Soviet Union by the West. The authors of the first White Paper in 1969 had already used these terms to legitimize “limited” nuclear war against the USSR, allegedly oriented toward expansion. The subsequent military policy doctrine of the mid 1980s, even included nuclear first use to “combat the enemy’s potentials” on its own territory, because, in the event of war, Soviet territory would “not be inviolable.”

Russia considers censuring West Germany

Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of Russian parliament’s lower house, on Wednesday ordered legislators to consider an appeal from a Communist Party deputy to denounce the reunification of Germany as an illegal land grab of East Germany by its western neighbour.

The collapse of Socialist rule in East Germany – officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – heralded the end of the Cold War, and was met with jubilation in the West.

Former Communists from East Germany set to return to power

Days before Germany is set to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the way has been cleared for the former communists who ruled East Germany to return to power.

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The Left Party, widely seen as the successor to the SED, East Germany’s communist party, is expected to head the government of a German state for the first time since reunification, after the Social Democrats voted to enter a coalition with them in the state of Thuringia.

Many of the Left Party’s leadership were senior figures in the old SED, which ruled East Germany as a single-party state. And the prospect of the party’s return to power has caused alarm in some quarters.