The future of Europe - Macron vs. Lindner

This week, Emmanuel Macron threw down the gauntlet for his vision of a stronger, more federal European Union. But his bold words were tempered by the election result in Germany two days earlier. And just a few days later, violence in Catalonia further undermined his vision of European unity.

One speed or two? Juncker challenges Macron's EU vision

In this week's podcast, we dissect President Juncker's State of the European Union speech and talk to journalist Soeren Kittel about next week's German election.

 

This one map of Berlin shows all you need to know about Europe's refugee divide

Huge gains for an anti-immigrant party in East Berlin reflect the East-West divide in Europe as a whole.

Yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel waited nervously in her unassuming Berlin residence while the voters in Germany's capital city determined her fate.

The vote taking place outside her door technically had nothing to do with her. It was a local election for the Berlin Parliament (landtag), not the national one (bundestag). Berlin and two other German cities (Hamburg and Bremen) are, for historical reasons, also federal states.

But the result would have a direct effect on Merkel's chancellorship because it came hot on the heels of her centre-right CDU party's humiliating defeat in her home state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania. The CDU came in third, behind the centre-left SPD and, alarmingly, the new nationalist party Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Merkel's far-right home state

The German chancellor has suffered an embarrassing electoral defeat as the dark cloud of nationalism spreads over Europe. But predictions of her political demise are premature.

Last month, I took a trip with some friends to the Northwest German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. It's a beautiful holiday island full of white chalk cliffs and rolling green hills. But when we were there, it was also full of sights of a more disconcerting variety - political ads for the far-right and racist messages splattered in graffiti. 

As we left Berlin on the train and travelled north through Mecklenburg-Pomerania, signs for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the extreme-right (neo-Nazi) National Democratic Party (NPD) became more and more frequent. They were all over the island, and were an especially frequent site in the island's departure city, Stralsund. On the posters for the main centrist German parties, Angela Merkel's center-right CDU and the center-left SPD (who are currently governing the country in a coalition), was written a chillingly familiar word in graffiti: volksverräter (traitor to the nation).

The only ads not splattered with grafitti were those for the AfD and NPD, some of which called Germany's new arrivals "rapefugees".

This is Chancellor Merkel's home turf - the constituency which she represents in the German parliament. And like parts of neighbouring Poland, it is not a friendly place for people of color.