Germany

In extraordinary times, ordinariness can be a virtue. That, in any case, is the hope of Armin Laschet, who was elected as the new leader of Germany’s largest party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), on 22 January. A moderate Catholic from Aachen, Germany’s westernmost city, Laschet

With so much else going awry in the world, it’s perhaps easy to forget that the Syrian civil war is rolling on into its tenth year. Scholars and policymakers have long been despondent about the prospects for an end to the conflict and the bloodshed it has caused. Bombs continue to fall on schools

It was supposed to be a routine technical procedure: upgrading telecommunications networks from the old fourth-generation (4G) standard to the newest fifth-generation (5G) technology. But this process quickly became the subject of heated debate in many Western capitals, essentially around one

Two-and-a-half centuries ago, Saxony and Brandenburg were two of Central Europe’s great powers and rivals. Even today, in their more modest post-1990 incarnations as German federal states, they continue to evince vastly different identities. Centred on the historic cities of Dresden and Leipzig,

In announcing this week that she would recontest neither the leadership of her Christian Democratic Union in December nor the German Chancellorship at elections scheduled for 2021, Angela Merkel was being her characteristic self. Conceding to political reality without acting impulsively, her plan

It was a political scandal that cooler heads could so easily have resolved: Hans-Georg Maaßen, President of Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, publicly expressed ‘scepticism’ that footage showing migrants being chased by right-wing demonstrators through the streets of