German Greens relieved after controversial migration bill rejected
Germany's Greens have expressed relief after a controversial bill to tighten migration policy tabled by the opposition centre-right CDU/CSU bloc failed to garner a majority in parliament.
The co-leader of the Greens' parliamentary group Britta Hasselmann called the result good news after a very difficult day in parliament.
At the same time, she said, events in recent days showed "large cracks" had become visible in the democratic centre. "Nobody can be happy about that."
She was referring to the fact that the conservatives had been willing to rely on votes from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to pass the bill.
Had they succeeded, that would have been a historic first, as all of Germany's mainstream parties have ruled out cooperating with the anti-immigration AfD, which is being monitored as a suspected right-wing extremist party by domestic intelligence.
The other parliamentary group co-leader Katharina Dröge accused the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, of blackmailing the other parties to push through the vote.
The conservatives, she said, had acted according to the motto: "Agree, otherwise we will vote with the Nazis."
"You can already see how destructive it is for parliamentary democracy when democratic forces start forming alliances with the far right," she added.
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Repressing thought Current proponents of the 'anti-woke' agenda at both the federal and state level are focused on reshaping educational curricula in a way that will make it inconceivable for future generations to question their historical claims. Orwell's '1984' ends with an appendix on the history of 'Newspeak,' Oceania's official language, which, while it had not yet superseded 'Oldspeak' or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect. According to the appendix, 'The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.' 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