Henning Schäckelhoff
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is supposed to defend democracy from extremist threats. But new statistical evidence suggests that branches of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland are most likely to be labelled extremist in regions where the party is electorally strongest. This pattern, says Henning Schäckelhoff, raises a difficult question: is militant democracy protecting the constitution – or shaping political competition? Read more
Lisa Brünig
Germany recently passed incremental liberalisations to its abortion law. Yet access to abortion remains under threat, and far-right and conservative forces blocked its partial legalisation. Lisa Brünig explains how the erosion of reproductive rights in Germany is symptomatic of broader democratic backsliding Read more
Sebastian Jäckle
Few moments captured the volatility of transatlantic relations better than the explosive Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy on 28 February 2025. Sebastian Jäckle, Ronald Schleehauf, Judith Reinbold and Marius Fröhle studied its impact on German public opinion using a natural experiment based on an online survey Read more
John Ryan
The recent municipal election results in North Rhine-Westphalia barely disguise Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s unpopularity. The result offers no respite for the CDU/CSU-SPD government at national level. Bold actions are needed domestically to tackle Germany’s deep and structural challenges, argues John Ryan Read more
Ugur Tekiner
European elections are traditionally seen as less significant than national elections. But Ugur Tekiner argues that the recent challenges facing the EU force us to rethink this classification. Recent European elections accurately reflect the national political mood in Member States, and reveal the growing polarisation around Europe Read more
Federico Taddei
Linguistic precision matters, but the term 'hard right' isn’t the real threat to clarity. Federico Taddei argues that the real problem lies in how journalists and scholars misuse or oversimplify the categories political science has worked long and hard to define Read more
Yunus Poblome
Right-wing populism has gone beyond the nation state. Analysing JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Yunus Poblome describes how US foreign policy under Trump depicts Europe as being led by a corrupt elite which refuses to listen to its conservative people. This, he argues, further legitimise Europe’s own right-wing populists Read more
Corinna Kröber
The new German Bundestag will be smaller and more right-wing wing. And it will be more male-dominated. Corinna Kröber and Lena Stephan discuss how the political shift to the right and the new electoral law have influenced this trend, and the potential long-term consequences for women’s political representation in Germany Read more
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