Free Republic

Raging street battles that marred Germany’s G20 summit have sparked a political fight over how Hamburg could descend into “mob rule” and why Chancellor Angela Merkel chose a hotbed of leftist militancy as the venue. Germany’s top-selling Bild daily was withering in its condemnation of the chaos that saw far-left and anarchist radicals torch rows of cars, loot shops and hurl rocks and bottles from burning barricades at riot police. “One should use with caution the words ‘failure of the state’. Sadly, it applies in Hamburg,” the newspaper thundered Saturday, slamming the summit as a “debacle”. “Of course, the police...

Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) would introduce a law which would focus immigration on trained professionals, if she is re-elected in September. Speaking at the presentation of her party program in Berlin, Merkel said that the CDU, along with Bavarian sister party the CSU, would introduce a “skilled employee migration law.” The Chancellor said that the goal of the law would be that “no job vacancy remains unfilled,” Spiegel reports. A booming economy and an aging population have put pressure on the German government to increase the levels of immigration into the country...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats fell to third place in a state election on Sunday behind the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, TV exit polls showed. In a stinging defeat for Merkel one year ahead of parliamentary elections, the upstart AfD won 21 percent of the vote in their first election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state by campaigning hard against the chancellor's policies on refugees, according to an exit poll by the ARD TV network.

Last Thursday we previewed that in today's regional election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the home state of Angela Merkel, she was looking at the unthinkable: losing and not just to anyone but to her nemesis, the anti-immigration AfD. This is what we reported: "According to the latest shock poll, released late on Wednesday, the AfD is leading the CDU by 23 percent to 20 percent, with the Social Democrats, who currently run the rural state in coalition with Merkel’s party, at 28 percent support. What’s more, according to Bloomberg the AfD’s recent history in regional votes suggests it will perform better...