#HenrietteReker – Something is rotting in Germany (and we are not talking about Volkswagen)

October 26, 2015October 12, 20162 Comments

Election Poster 2015

Saturday 18th October 2015, Henriette Reker – a mayor-candidate of Cologne – was stabbed several times during a pre-election party. Reker was not only an independent – yet very promising – candidate but she also used to be in charge of the local accommodation of refugees in Cologne. Even though she and four other persons got severely injured, she won the election the next day.

So what’s the story behind the attack? The offender claims Reker’s refugee policy to be the cause: “By killing her, I wanted to do Germany a favor”. Now we know that his motives were xenophobic, and that he was connected to a – nowadays forbidden – right-wing extremist organization called Liberal German Worker’s Party[1].

An attempted murder motivated by someone’s refugee policy must be a meaningful wake-up call for Germany. So far, this gesture remained an isolated incident. However it is very important to ask: how did we come to this? Continue reading →

Zombies in Fortress Europe: the migrants as a metaphor

September 30, 2015September 23, 20193 Comments

Lega Nord _ Abbiamo fermato l’inavsione (We stopped the invasion)

“In its contemporary manifestations, the migrant figure has been imagined variously as a mechanical, animalistic, spectral, zombified, vampiric or cyborg entity”

Nikos Papastergiadis

The frame used by politicians and mass media to describe migrants and refugees recalls the tradition of horror movies. A devilish, dangerous, elusive and relentless presence threatens the borders. They come from the sea.

Zombies.

A shapeless horde, a scary multitude.

The zombies are what we do not (want to) understand. They are the American Indians, the slum dwellers, the colonized, Iraqis and Afghans, Eritreans. They are the by-product of an (internal and external) Apartheid imposed by relationships of strength.

The doors of the fortress (or hotspots) are the critical junctures of the system, the crumbling bastions of a civilization under siege: Melilla, Lesbo, Ventimiglia, Calais, Budapest, the Eurotunnel, Lampedusa. Between land and water, the entrance to “heaven” is strewn with rotting corpses, and the stench goes straight to the nostrils of all. Continue reading →

Crisis of a midsummer night

July 22, 2015October 11, 2016Leave a comment

Donald Trump

This blog wants to show also the paradoxical, extreme, funny, and soft aspects of complex political phenomena.

This is why, if one is prepared to cast an amused look to the Greek crisis, this link is phenomenal:

http://www.random-austerity-measure-generator.com/#

You can generate your random austerity measures from the comfort of your hammock.

Another aspect of this grotesque situation, is the controversial reply of Angela Merkel to a fourteen-year-old refugee. Merkel, accused of having humiliated Tsipras, had then to face the critiques for her reply to the young girl. I found the critiques to Merkel out of focus. She has not been mean. She has not been hypocritical. She just defended her policies on migration. She told the young Palestinian that Germany cannot host all the migrants. She did not make an exception for electoral purposes, even if that would have been easy. She didn’t say: we don’t want migrants, but since you’re here, in front of me, and you’re cute, and you’re crying, I will make an exception and let you come with your family. One can argue that the German policy about migrants is wrong, but not that Merkel has been mean. Here a good analysis of the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/merkel-and-the-crying-girl-five-lessons

In case you didn’t see it yet, you can judge by yourself:

POP goes on holidays for a while. The last suggestion for now is to read this interesting article from The Telegraph. The title is self-explanatory: Republican race has the flavour of ‘populism on crack’.

Here you go: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/11734022/Republican-race-has-the-flavour-of-populism-on-crack.html

Have a good summer folks.

“When libertarian sentiments take a populist form, it looks like this: a mix of anger, fear, anti-intellectualism, and fierce government hostility. Welcome to the Tea Party movement.”
David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

How German right-wing parties always sabotage themselves: the example of AfD

June 16, 2015June 24, 2017Leave a comment

Tanja Wolf is the author of this post for POP. Her research interests concern the right-wing parties in Europe as well as right-wing populism and extremism. She also studies left-wing propaganda, especially in former socialist or communist states. She works at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg, Germany.

In this article she investigates the case of Alternative für Deutschland and its peculiarity when compared with traditional right-wing parties in Germany.

Continue reading →

#Blockupy ECB – When The Wind Blows

March 18, 2015October 12, 2016Leave a comment

What is going on in Germany? The country which is supposed to lead European’s economy is plagued by anti-Muslim movements like Pegida, several important strikes (the last one from the Lufthansa pilots), and today the Blockupy movement protests in Frankfurt. They demonstrate against the inauguration of the headquarters of the European Central Bank, hosted in the new Eurotower.

Blockupy is an anti-capitalist network including around 90 organizations from several European countries, showing interesting similitudes of style and content with the protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999.

With a populist touch, they want to ”draw attention to ECB policies which, they say, have favored the rich over the poor, the banks over the people, the creditor class over debtors – policies that have amounted to bailing out irresponsible financiers at the expense of ordinary citizens”.

Continue reading →