Today it will be decided in the USA what the remaining two years of Donald Trump's presidency will be like. If he retains the majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate, then he can rule until the end. His nationalist and anti-minority policies would have prevailed. The Americans would have permanently handed over the country to him. His renaming madness (more on that here) would have a good reason: in the future we could truthfully speak of Donald Trump's United States.
Or Trump's Republicans will lose the majority in both chambers. Then the US President would be a lame duck, a lame duck who would no longer be able to push through major projects, but might chatter all the more angrily. Trump would almost certainly not accept defeat, would complain furiously about voter fraud and use every possible opportunity to challenge the result. Trump would then rule even more than before by executive order, i.e. by decree - possibly even more radically than before.
Neither are particularly great prospects, if you ask me. The world will only really be able to breathe a sigh of relief in just over two years, when Donald Trump finally leaves office and certainly never returns to the White House. Until then, we non-Americans will have to deal with what is decided in the USA. Because one thing is certain: we have no choice.
My colleagues Paul-Anton Krüger and Christian Teevs asked participants and reported a somewhat unpleasant appointment for the Chancellor. Long queues had formed in front of the hall microphones, and more than 30 district leaders wanted to send a message to Merz. About the sugar tax: What is a party conference resolution worth if Merz and the SPD decide it anyway (more on that here)? Overall, said one, “more CDU line” is needed. And another participant reported that they would rather not print the CDU logo on the posters in their district, otherwise they would not be elected.
Sometimes you learn amazing things from interviews, especially as a legal layperson. For example, I would have assumed with great certainty that it was a criminal offense to have classified documents brought home to you by a confidant from the Federal Intelligence Service. But apparently that's not true at all: "The possession of secret documents from the BND is not punishable as such," says Leon Kruse. However, you have to know: Kruse is the criminal defense attorney for former BND chief August Hanning, who is in custody. The Federal Prosecutor's Office accuses him of "treasonous spying" (more on that here).
In a conversation with my colleague Astrid Geisler and my colleague Sven Röbel, Kruse says that only state secrets can be spied on in a treasonous manner. However, not every secret is a state secret. And even if it were state secrets that he was obtaining, Hanning had no intention of revealing them, but, as a former intelligence chief, may simply have been personally interested in them. And this general from the Chinese military intelligence service with whom Hanning talked about politics is already a pensioner, like Hanning. So just two pensioners met there? Then perhaps it really is as defense lawyer Kruse says: “There is nothing to these allegations.”
But perhaps it is more like what the Federal Prosecutor's Office says, and the former head of the Federal Intelligence Service took money to reveal state secrets after he left office. Ultimately, this will have to be clarified by a court.
The whole interview here: "Further investigations will show that Mr. Hanning did not reveal any state secrets."
...is Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), who, for his talk of "chaos from the migrant milieu" during the Gen Z protests, is not only receiving opposition from SPD coalition partner Boris Pistorius, but also from the Union: "There is not one milieu of migrants in Germany," CDU politician Norbert Röttgen made clear: "They are lone perpetrators, always lone perpetrators." But does that also apply to the Interior Minister's analysis? Or is Dobrindt possibly part of a dangerous Bavarian milieu? We'll have to keep an eye on that.
More background here: Röttgen contradicts Dobrindt's statement about "chaotic people from a migrant environment"
