A group of African gentlemen, all dressed in hoodies, were posted at the entrance to Berlin’s Görlitzer Park, standing around idly until I passed by. “Hey, hello, you good?” they muttered, nodding in my direction. “Need some help?” As a …
Flailing Germany is the future of Europe
For much of the Merkel era, Germany stood as an island of economic and political stability amid Europe’s perennially stormy waters. Those days, however, seem like a distant memory. Europe is still in crisis — but now Germany is the …
Will Jews return to the Ghetto?
It is a warm Monday morning in Rome, and the city’s ancient ghetto resembles an armed camp. As carabinieri line the streets, a cloud of melancholy hangs in the air: not only had more than 1,400 Jews recently been slaughtered …
The Left-wing maverick who could stop the AfD
“The future of The Left is a future without Sahra Wagenknecht.” Despite the rapid rise of the Right-wing party AfD in Germany, which secured 18% of the vote in this weekend’s Hessian election, the Leftist party Die Linke wants nothing …
One year on, who blew up Nord Stream 2?
So whodunnit? Who destroyed the Nord Stream 2 at three minutes past midnight on September 26, 2021? Explosives set 262 feet below the surface of the Baltic caused a blast registering 2.5 on the Richter Scale. It ripped apart the …
Legal prostitution is a gift to pimps
“Do you have what it takes to become a Brothel Tester?” Unsurprisingly, this sentence caught my eye while I was researching the latest atrocities in the sex market in Germany. Legalisation of all aspects of prostitution in what I call …
Will Starmer be Britain’s Merkel?
A smell of death is now seeping out of Westminster, choking the atmosphere of the nation, poisoning everything it touches. With each new crisis, the smell only gets stronger and the reaction from the public more visceral. Where there was …
Wolfgang Münchau: the end of the German era
For decades, Germany was a beacon of centrist political stability. During her 16-year leadership, Angela Merkel led a succession of grand coalitions which neutralised the political extremes, and piloted her country through an era of steady economic growth.
Today, that …
The four thinkers who took on the mob
What is the formative connection between the private self and other people? Or, as the architect of libertarianism Ayn Rand once put it, how should we order “the two principles fighting within human consciousness — the individual and the collective, …
The lost boys of England’s youth hostels
The year before Tony Blair’s first victory, I cycled from Whitehaven to Newcastle on the C2C route. My companion was Bill, a 16-year-old from Sunderland, whom I met at a Youth Hostelling Association mountain-biking weekend and who was off to …
How the AfD won over Germany
To understand how the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) became Germany’s second-largest party, consider the events of the past five days. In an interview with the state broadcaster ZDF on Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic …
At Nato, America recaptured Europe
It is now clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the end of one era in world politics and the beginning of a new one. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of détente …
Germany’s self-destructive Greens
The Greens were supposed to be Europe’s new hope. At the twilight of the Trump era, their champions on both sides of the Atlantic argued that they would be the perfect antidote to the far-Right. Back then, the largest and …
The capitalists are revolting over China
After marshalling Europe in its proxy war against Russia, America is now determined to repeat this success against China. Here, the consequences for Europe could be even more significant than the economic shock of the past year. Yet, despite a …
Germany’s car industry has a libido problem
Growing up as a German kid in Britain in the Seventies and Eighties, one of the things that left a lasting impression on me during our annual visit to my German grandparents was sitting in the back of their Mercedes …