European Politics

In the Bundestag: 1957. Mind you however, this is not a party, but a fraction. It is a union of two parties, CDU and CSU.
 
It's however very, very narrow so far. Nothing is certain yet.
 
Berlin (CNN) -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party appeared close to obtaining a super majority in Sunday's parliamentary elections, making it only the second time in the country's history that a ruling party has gained such political control.

Early returns showed Merkel's bloc -- the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) -- with a slim 42.2% to 41.7% lead, according to exit polling by Germany's Forsa Institute and released by German broadcaster RTL Television. With those early results, Merkel's party was within two seats of obtaining a super majority.
 
The preliminary end result is as follows:

Union (CDU/CSU): 41.6%
SPD: 25.6%
FDP: 4.7%
LINKE: 8.5%
Greens: 8.4%
AfD: 4.7%
Piraten: 2.2%
Others: 4.3%

The Conservative Union, Merkel's fraction, narrowly misses absolute majority. The Liberal FDP, currently in the government coalition, drops out of the Bundestag for the first time ever. The AfD narrowly misses the 5% barrier, which is quite remarkable considering the party was only founded in April. The Leftist LINKE. and the Greens both have significant losses. SPD wins over 2009, but this is still the second-lowest result in history. The Piraten miss the Bundestag by a long shot, making my vote go in the dumpster.

Analysts are going wild about speculations for a future government coalition. The two hottest items are a grand coalition (Union/SPD) as in 2005, or a Union/Green coalition, deemed unthinkable four years ago; the two previous attempts at such a coalition in Saarland and Hamburg were both spectacular failures, but there is a growing base of bourgeois supporters for the Greens, so who knows.
 
The AfD was at 4.9% for most of the evening, so the trend is downward FDP is dead cert not to be in, they were at 4.5-4.7% all evening. All in all, this result could be seen as reliable, there will only be minor modifications from now on.
 
So, I assume the CDU and SPD will enter into coalition talks ... Any change that does not happen and how much negotiating power does the SPD have. This is interesting as we have nothing similar to this here.
 
Merkel has so far said absolutely nothing about a possible future coalition (which is typical of her), but it is most likely that the first talks are going to be with the SPD. I'm not ruling out a CDU/Green coalition, but those will be long talks.
 
Yay, we'll get another grand coalition. Why look towards the future when you can just repeat the shit you've been doing all over?
 
Gotta love freedom of speech ... too bad it does not seem to really exist in much of Europe

The brief appearance of a concrete sculpture in Gdansk last Saturday depicting a Red Army soldier raping a pregnant woman has sparked ire on both the Polish and Russian sides. Now the artist could be facing two years in prison.

http://www.spiegel.de/international...-soldier-raping-woman-in-gdansk-a-928492.html

He wanted to depict the tragedy and "the whole suffering" of rape victims. But now Jerzy Bohdan Szumczyk is facing up to two years in prison. Prosecutors have launched an investigation into a possible charge of inciting racial or national hatred against the 26-year-old artist, even though his concrete sculpture was only in place for one night. It was erected without permission in the northern port city of Gdansk next to a Soviet tank, a communist-era memorial to Red Army soldiers who liberated the city from Nazi forces in 1945.

The reason for the heated reaction is the theme of Szumczyk's life-sized sculpture: It shows a soldier -- identifiable as Russian by his helmet -- kneeling between the legs of a heavily pregnant woman lying on the ground. He is holding her hair in his left hand as he puts a pistol into her mouth with his right. The title of the piece, "Komm, Frau," is a German phrase meaning "Come, woman."
Police removed the sculpture just a few hours later -- but the deed had already been done. According to the English-language Moscow Times, Russia's ambassador in Warsaw, Alexander Alexeyev, said he was "deeply outraged" and that Szumczyk had "defiled by his pseudo-art the memory of 600,000 Soviet servicemen who gave their lives in the fight for the freedom and the independence ofPoland." Alexeyev also called for an "appropriate reaction" from Polish authorities.

The incident has stirred up much controversy in the media and on Internet forums. One person wrote that the sculpture is not an insult to Russian soldiers, but a silent scream of the victim. Others emphasized that sexual violence had occurred on all sides, and not just in World War II.

Journalist Marek Gorlikowski also spoke out critically in a commentary for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, writing: "Such a monument is absolutely not the way to commemorate the victims of rape." A proper memorial should be established, he added, perhaps at the Museum of World War II in Gdansk, but such nighttime happenings do not do them justice.

Soviet soldiers' rape of women was especially frequent in the last months of the war, although exact figures are unknown. In Gdansk, the victims were largely made up of German women as well as Russians and Poles who had been Nazi prisoners. Before the war, the free city of Gdansk -- or Danzig, in German -- had a mostly German population. In Russia, discussing the crimes of the Red Army during World War II has remained largely taboo.
Click to expand...
 
Gotta love Europe for punishing incredibly retarded speech. Seriously, he made the dumb decision of making it a soldier of the Red Army and why did she have to be pregnant? wanted to depict the whole suffering of rape? He can tell that fairy tell to his grandmother, because it seems he just wanted to piss a lot of people off, he did and now he can go to prison. I wish they did that here in the U.S. There's free speech and then there's blatant racism/hate/retardedness like this one.
 
That is a bit of an over reaction ... and besides, even if the Red Army was a model of restraint and purity as the headed west ... so what . someone deserves to go to jail for a statue?
 
Tad overreaction? Ok, I'll admit that, but he still clearly wanted to push buttons, not create "awareness." Jail/prison is too much, canceling the display would be enough.
 
You know, sometimes raising awareness means pushing buttons.
 
The other option is let the guy put it up and if people do not like it, they can feel free to ignore it.
 
Ignore it? Sure, if there was a rape in a film, I could turn off the TV. But how could something like this be shut out? How can this be explained to a child?
 
That is a fair point ... if it were in a museum or somewhere where people would have to make a choice to see it or not might be better ... but I get the impression that that is not the reason some people are so opposed to this.
 
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