The anti-immigrant Pro-Germany Alternative for Germany (AfD) party holds a commanding lead in the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern as voters across several regions are set to cast their ballots in a bumper election year.
The AfD topped a representative survey by pollsters Forsa in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with 37%, followed by the Social Democrats (SPD), who lead the current state government, with 23%.
New federal data reveals a steady climb in criminal offenses targeting Germans based on their ethnicity. According to a government report requested by Alternative für Deutschland MP Martin Hess, authorities recorded 377 anti-German incidents in 2025. While this represents a modest 3.3% increase from the 365 cases in 2024, the long-term trend is stark: in 2019, there were fewer than a third as many cases (132).
Germany was postwar Europe’s greatest economic success story. Today, it is a cautionary tale. Once the continent’s industrial engine, Germany has spent the past decade dismantling the foundations of its prosperity through energy and immigration policies driven more by ideology than evidence or good sense. The results have been rising costs, falling competitiveness, social disorder, and political backlash. Canada should study this record closely because we are pursuing many of the same policies.
Germany has one thing going for it Canada does not – The AfD.
In the early morning hours of January 3, 2026, a reportedly leftist radical network, “Volcano Group” (Vulkangruppe), committed an arson attack against the power grid in Berlin, Germany, causing an electricity blackout that left 45,000 households and 2,000 businesses – approximately 100,000 people – without heat and light during freezing winter temperatures for up to five days. It was reportedly the longest blackout in Germany since World War II.
The radicals in Volcano Group claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement, they said that the network had aimed to “cut the juice to the ruling class” and claimed that the attack was about action to protect the climate from fossil fuels, artificial intelligence and a “greed for energy.”
The defense chief of Germany’s Bundeswehr, General Carsten Breuer, and the United Kingdom’s chief of the defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, have jointly stated the case for rearming, amid the threat posed by Russia.
The top military officials penned a joint letter, published in The Guardian and German newspaper Welt, in which they said there was a “moral” case to be made for rearming.
German police have uncovered a large-scale fraud network that enabled migrants to obtain language certificates and naturalization documents without meeting the required standards.
Authorities in Nuremberg said several suspects organised German-speaking deputies to sit language and naturalization tests on behalf of applicants who were unable to pass the exams themselves. The forged certificates were sold for between €2,500 and €6,000 and later used to secure residence permits or German citizenship.
The results of Germany’s energy and immigration failures have been rising costs, falling competitiveness, social disorder, and political backlash.
Germany was postwar Europe’s greatest economic success story. Today it is a cautionary tale. Once the continent’s industrial engine, Germany has spent the past decade dismantling the foundations of its prosperity through energy and immigration policies driven more by ideology than evidence or good sense. The results have been rising costs, falling competitiveness, social disorder, and political backlash.
Canada should study this record closely—because we are pursuing many of the same policies.
The Berlin Hospital Association (BKG) has issued a warning describing a spate of seemingly “inexplicable incidents” at hospitals and health care facilities in the capital. These range from drone incursions over hospital grounds and cyberattacks to forced entry and arson.
The BKG said Germany’s security and intelligence services have classified at least some of these attacks as potential acts of hybrid warfare. The protection of health care facilities is “no longer a purely internal matter for hospitals, but a task that must be addressed together with the security services,” according to the BKG.
For security reasons, the BKG told DW that it could not disclose exactly where the incidents it refers to in the statement took place. The “growing hybrid threat” had prompted the BKG to raise awareness among Berlin hospitals to establish effective self-protection, it said.
The vote comes as prosecutions under the statute surge and critics warn the law is being used to shield those in power from public scrutiny.
The German parliament has rejected a proposal by the right-wing AfD to abolish Section 188 of the Criminal Code, a provision that gives public officials special protection from criminal insults, defamation, and slander.
The vote took place on Thursday evening, with all parliamentary groups except the AfD opposing the motion.
But the AfD are the fascists.
A 25-year-old South Sudanese migrant killed an 18-year-old woman in a fatal subway attack in Hamburg on Thursday evening, after seizing her and pulling her with him into the track bed in front of an incoming train. Both the victim and the perpetrator died at the scene. German police are investigating the case as a suspected homicide.
🇩🇪 A South Sudanese migrant grabbed an 18-year-old girl on a Hamburg metro platform before jumping into the path of an incoming train, dragging her with him and killing them both.
The attack happened at 10 p.m. last night at the Wandsbek Markt metro station.Witnesses report… pic.twitter.com/Lx7h463KXC
— Europa.com (@europa) January 30, 2026
German police are still no closer to identifying a suspect over the left-wing terror attack that plunged much of Berlin into darkness for days during freezing weather, and have posted a bounty to encourage the public to turn in those responsible.
Russia launches a full-scale war of aggression against Nato and the German armed forces are in the thick of the action from the first hours.
A 4,800-strong mechanised infantry strikes from a forward base in Lithuania before another 15,000 rapid-response troops are rushed to the front in a matter of days.
Over the weeks that follow tens of thousands of allied soldiers arrive at German North Sea ports to be shuttled east along road and rail routes plagued by Russian sabotage, cyberattacks and possibly long-range missile strikes.
Storage of reserves must be reassessed because US ‘no longer reliable partner of the EU’, say economists
Germany has been urged to withdraw more than £100bn worth of gold from US vaults because Donald Trump’s unpredictability has made the deposits too “risky”.
The country currently stores 1,236 tons of gold, roughly the same weight as three Air Force One jets, at the US Federal Reserve in New York worth around €164bn (£122bn).
Economists and politicians have warned this leaves the vast wealth exposed to the whim of an increasingly erratic US president, who this month alone has threatened Europe with crippling sanctions over Greenland, burst into Venezuela and captured its president, and is poised to launch air strikes on Iran.
As if the EU was ever reliable on any matter.
German police have arrested a Lebanese national on suspicion of being a member of Hamas and planning attacks in Europe.
The man, named as “Mohammad S”, was stopped at Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport after arriving from Beirut on Friday evening.
Federal prosecutors said that in August 2025 he helped procure 300 rounds of ammunition and was involved in an alleged plot to attack Jewish and Israeli institutions.
BERLIN—The country on the front line of Europe’s rearmament effort is struggling to meet its military recruitment goals. The problem isn’t pacifism, but young people posing a new variation on the age-old question: “What is in it for me?”
European nations have stepped up military spending and begun preparing for a potential conflict with Russia. As a part of the effort, countries such as Germany and France have sought to get young people thinking about military service again.
Germany has introduced a new military service, initially on a voluntary basis. Some 700,000 men and women born in 2008 started receiving questionnaires this month about their fitness and willingness to serve. Only men are obliged to answer, and they will have to report for medical evaluation, whether they want to serve or not.
Related – German weapons failing in Ukraine
