Western Europe Archive

While much has been made of the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, it was the left-wing Greens that recorded the biggest gains in last week’s state elections in Bavaria. By winning more than 17 percent of the vote, the Greens nearly doubled their total from Bavaria’s last elections in 2013 and will enter the new state parliament as the second-largest bloc. Their success amid the ongoing collapse of Germany’s political center was a sign that across the spectrum, and not only on the right, voters are beginning to harden around the political extremes. If that […]

Last weekend’s state elections in Germany’s reliably conservative region of Bavaria smashed a tradition that had endured since the end of World War II and reinforced a trend that is spreading across the world in this tumultuous political age. In country after country, moderates are getting squeezed while parties advocating a less conciliatory approach on both the right and the left make gains. Bavarian voters refused to give a majority to the center-right Christian Social Union, or CSU, the sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, the CDU. In keeping with the emerging pattern, voters punished the CSU […]

Last month, the European Parliament took the unusual step of formally censuring a member state, voting by a wide margin to condemn Hungary under far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban as a “systemic threat to the rule of law” and trigger the Article 7 process of the Lisbon Treaty that could suspend its EU voting rights. The vote followed a report from the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs warning that the Hungarian government was abusing the rights of asylum-seekers, migrants and women and restricting freedom of the press, while it permitted corruption and suffered from a […]

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s state visit to Berlin last month came at a turbulent time for both Turkey’s relationship with Germany and Erdogan’s personal relationship with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. While the visit has been billed as a sign of rapprochement, the reality is that Germany and Turkey need each other and are willing to work together on a transactional basis despite persistent irritants in the bilateral relationship. In an email interview with WPR, Lisel Hintz, assistant professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, discusses the backdrop to Erdogan’s visit and how it […]