To be taken at (country): Missouri School of Journalism and U.S. newsrooms, USA
About the Award: The Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships are aimed at providing fellows with experience in reporting, writing and editing that will enhance future professional performance; transferring knowledge gained during the program to colleagues at home; and fostering ties between journalists in the United States and other countries.
Type: Fellowship
Eligibility: To be eligible, candidates must be:
Early-career professional journalists from developing countries with proficiency in English
25-35 years old
have at least three years of experience as a journalist at a print, online or broadcast media outlet.
Participants who work as staff reporters in their host newsrooms are required to develop training plans that they implement when they return to their home newsrooms.
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of Program: Fellows receive travel, health insurance and basic living expenses.
Duration of Program: 6 months. The all-inclusive fellowship starts in mid-March and ends in early September.
About the Award: The Biodesign Innovation Fellowship is a 10-month experience that equips aspiring innovators with a proven, repeatable process to identify important healthcare needs, invent novel health technologies to address them, and prepare to implement those products into patient care through start-up, corporate channels, or other channels. In addition, the Innovation Fellows become part of the Stanford Biodesign community, which is a life-long, worldwide network of innovators passionate about improving healthcare.
Type: Fellowship
Eligibility: Individuals with advanced degrees and/or substantial work experience in the engineering, science, computer science, business, product design, law, medical, or nursing fields are encouraged to apply. Fellows will be selected based on their experience, passion, and drive, as well as their potential to become leading innovators in the health tech field. Applicants are welcome from any country.
Eligible Countries: Any
To be Taken at (Country): Stanford Biodesign Fellows become members of the Stanford Biodesign team at the James H. Clark Center on the Stanford University campus. Clinical immersion is completed at Stanford Health Care, as well as a variety of other settings across the continuum of care.
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of Award: The Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellowship is a launch pad for initiating, redirecting, or accelerating a career in health technology innovation. Stanford Biodesign graduates apply their talents to:
Catalyzing innovation inside major health technology companies
Building their own health technology start-ups
Teaching and/or leading translational research programs for world-class universities
Driving innovation initiatives within academic or private medical centers
Becoming specialists in design, investing, or other aspects of the health technology innovation ecosystem
They also become part of the Stanford Biodesign community, which is a life-long, worldwide network of innovators passionate about improving healthcare.
Duration of Award: 10 months. The fellowship is a full-time, intensive experience that runs from the beginning of August through early June each year. Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellows receive a monthly stipend and health benefits during their fellowship period.
About the Award: With co-funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the European Union, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) gives young postdocs the chance to spend a period of time researching abroad, in combination with a research phase in Germany. What is special about this programme is that is provides jobs, not scholarships. Applications are invited from postdoctoral researchers of all nationalities and subjects.
Type: Research
Eligibility: Requirements for applicants include the following:
PhD completed before the start of funding
free choice of country for the research phase abroad, providing that the candidate did not spend a total of more than twelve months there in the previous three years
agreement of host institutions in Germany and abroad
confirmation from the German host that it is willing to employ the postdoctoral researcher for the entire funding period if funding is approved
Number of Awardees: Not specified
Value of Program:
basic salary and international allowance, plus travel allowance for the researcher, spouse/partner and children
invitation to attend an orientation seminar before programme begins
Duration of Research: 18 months
twelve months spent abroad
six months spent in Germany
How to Apply:
The application form is available in the application portal. To get to the portal please click on Stipendiendatenbank für Deutsche, fill in Fachrichtung (subject of your research), Zielland (country of the period abroad) and Status “Promovierte” (position), and select the programme.
Please mind the instructions on registering on the portal, choose English as portal language, activate, if necessary, the compatibility view of your browser and choose English as browser language. After registration in the portal, please click on the tab “personal funding“.
About the Award: MOFA Taiwan Fellowship is established by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) to award foreign experts and scholars interested in researches related to Taiwan, cross-strait relations, Asia-Pacific region and Sinology to conduct advanced research at universities or academic institutions in Taiwan. Up to now, there have been 1117 scholars from 83 countries accepted by this program. MOFA Taiwan Fellowship, echoing the APEC Scholarship Initiative, provides 12 Chinese Taipei APEC Fellowship openings per year exclusively for scholars and experts from developing APEC economies. MOFA Taiwan Fellowship is open for application in May and June every year and recipients will conduct their research in Taiwan as early as January the next year.
Type: Fellowship
Eligibility: Recipients shall be foreign professors, associate professors, assistant professors, post-doctoral researchers, doctoral candidates, or doctoral program students at related departments of overseas universities, or are research fellows at an equivalent level in academic institutions abroad.
Eligible Countries: International
To be Taken at (Country): Taiwan
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value & Duration of Award:
(1) Monthly grants are paid at the beginning of every month.
a. Professors, associate professors, research fellows, or associate research fellows: NT$60,000
b. Assistant professors, assistant research fellows, or doctoral candidates: NT$50,000.
(2) One round-trip, economy-class ticket for the most direct route to Taiwan (The subsidy will be decided by MOFA in accordance with the relevant regulations).
(3) The terms of fellowship are 3 to 12 months.
(4) Accident insurance (plus a medical insurance for accidental injuries) coverage of NT$1 million.
How to Apply:
(1) Fellowship administrator: Center for Chinese Studies at National Central Library: http://ccs.ncl.edu.tw/
(2) The year of 2023 online application period is from May 1 to June 30, 2022.
Application Deadline: Application opens 15th June 2022 and will stay open all year long.
About the Award: The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) is the leading R&D funding agency in Turkey and an internationally renowned organization that supports and coordinates scientific research, provides scholarships to researchers and supports R&D activities and innovation in industry by promoting university-industry collaborations.
Type: Research
Eligibility: TÜBİTAK aims to attract leading researchers, espTurkish researchers, with international working experience to come to Turkey and conduct their research in leading Turkish academic, industrial or public institutions through its BİDEB 2232 programmes.
Newspaper headlines are warning of rising inflation and the possibility that voters will respond to it by punishing Democrats in the midterm elections this fall. But there are few, if any, headlines about the enormous numbers of Americans who are low-income and poor—a travesty in one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
The problem of poverty is marked by several factors, the first of which is a deeply flawed government indicator of who qualifies as poor. Measured by the federal poverty line, about 37 million Americans live below the poverty line—that’s about 11 percent of the population.
The second factor is mainstream media coverage that routinely skews in favor of wealthy elites by downplaying the extent of poverty. For example, when President Joe Biden cited the PPC’s estimate in an address in June 2019, the Washington Post engaged in a lengthy fact-checking investigation, interviewing numerous analysts who nitpicked over the difference between “poor” and “low-income” people, saying, “The two terms sound alike, but they describe different economic conditions.”
A third obstacle is corporate greed and how wealthy elites are vacuuming up every dollar they can into their own pockets, taking advantage of an economic system they helped to build in order to benefit themselves. For example, the investment giant Morgan Stanley released a report recently complaining about how rising wages were eating into corporate profits.
But of course, any wage increases are dampened by inflation rates rising much faster. This is a decades-long trend, not a new phenomenon, as any honest economist would explain.
But now that inflation is rising faster than it was before, media pundits and news outlets suggest that the fault lies with Americans earning higher wages and spending too much money.
There is evidence to the contrary—that inflation is rising because of bloated corporate profits, not an increase in wages and consumer spending—a point that the corporate media has failed to elevate or investigate with the same enthusiasm with which it has decided poverty is not a serious national problem.
When Biden was running for president, he addressed the PPC in September 2020, affirming the moral necessity of eradicating poverty and promising to do what he could to end it. The message was consistent with his platform to “Build Back Better,” a slogan that became the name of his ambitious anti-poverty legislation.
In December 2020, after it was clear that Biden had won the election, his transition team reached out to the PPC for a meeting and discussed a list of 14 policies that the organization laid out for his first 100 days in office that included COVID-19 relief for low-income Americans, guaranteed health care for all, a $15 per hour federal minimum wage, and more.
In June 2021, once he was elected, Biden once more reached out to the PPC with a recorded message for the PPC ahead of its annual national gathering affirming his alignment with its goals.
But in spite of Biden’s numerous nods to the PPC and its agenda to eradicate poverty, few, if any, of the organization’s demands have been met. Biden’s Build Back Better bill is languishing, stymied by the stubborn refusal of two corporate Democrats, Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), to support most of their party’s progressive legislative proposals.
Bishop William Barber II and Rev. Liz Theoharis, the PPC’s co-chairs, recently wrote a letter to Biden requesting another meeting with the White House ahead of their June 18 March on Washington.
In their letter, the two progressive leaders reminded Biden that when he addressed their gathering as a candidate running for office, he “promised that ending poverty would be more than an aspiration.”
According to Barber and Theoharis’ letter, it’s not enough to aspire to enacting anti-poverty measures. They wrote, “We have offered a moral narrative that refuses to accept the lies of scarcity or partisan gridlock as excuses for taking action. We are determined to change the conversation about what is possible, so that we can ensure all of our justice, here and now.”
It’s a call for the president to engage directly with what matters most: not economic phenomena like inflation, not politics and the midterms, but that which impacts more than 40 percent of the nation’s population—poverty and financial precarity.
Rev. Theoharis told me in a recent interview that Biden had made a “commitment to ending poverty, not managing, not ameliorating, to actually looking at the policies that could lift people up.” Still, Theoharis said, “we’ve been pushing and will continue to push Congress because we know that those two Democratic senators [Sinema and Manchin] and 49 Republican senators have stood against living-wage jobs and voting rights.”
Among the anti-poverty measures that the Build Back Better bill would have enacted was the renewal of an expanded child tax credit. During the brief time that an increased child tax credit was in effect, it helped to push millions of American families out of poverty.
Theoharis said that the challenge of making headway on poverty lies in the question of, “how can the president be able to use the microphone that he has to turn it toward poor and low-income people, low-wage workers?” In other words, how can Biden use his bully pulpit to pressure the media and congressional lawmakers into taking seriously the needs of 140 million Americans?
“Any nation that has 43 percent of its population living in poverty or one couple-hundred-dollar emergency away… from absolute economic ruin is an impoverished democracy,” said Theoharis. The PPC has for years been trying to shift the culture and the national conversation away from the pro-business mentality that measures economic health by stock prices and Wall Street’s profits rather than by whether or not most Americans are financially stable.
But Morgan Stanley had it right when it pitted corporate profits against rising wages. There cannot be both rising profits and rising wages. Corporate profits depend on keeping wages low. In order to lift most Americans out of poverty, we need higher wages that will necessarily cut into corporate profits. If Wall Street sees such logic as class warfare, so be it, for Wall Street has been waging just such warfare on the American people for far too long.
“What happens when you actually provide for the people, when you actually ensure that people are making living wages and have housing, is that that actually saves the nation, both spiritually and morally,” said Theoharis, reminding us that what matters much more than the unquenchable thirst of a handful of wealthy elites is the well-being of all Americans.
Last week, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia Adam Abdel Mawla warned that Somalia was “on the brink of a deadly famine that could kill hundreds of thousands.” He said that 213,000 people face starvation by next September as global food prices hover near record highs and drought worsens.
The price of imported foodstuffs in Somalia has reached record levels, jumping by up to 160 percent. The price of a kilo of rice has more than doubled, rising from $0.75 to $2, while three litres of cooking oil has gone from $4.50 to $9.50, making it impossible for people in one of the world’s poorest countries—it’s GDP is just $7 billion, and more than 70 percent of the population live on less than $1.90 a day—to feed themselves and their families.
Mawla said that some 7.1 million of the country’s 16 million population face catastrophic levels of food insecurity and disease. Nearly one third of the country’s population are hungry. About 1.5 million children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition. At least 448 children have died since January. Many more are malnourished, with scaly skin and hair that has lost its natural colour, while others are sick with illnesses such as measles and cholera.
These appalling numbers are nearly three times the levels expected just two months ago, according to a joint statement issued by the various UN humanitarian agencies: the World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Young girls line up at a feeding centre in Mogadishu (UN Photo/Tobin Jones) [Photo by UN Photo/Tobin Jones / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0]
This latest disaster to affect the war-torn country comes 11 years after the famine of 2011 fueled by soaring food prices in 2008 that killed around 250,000 people in Somalia, half of whom were children under the age of six. Now once again, the Somali people are the collateral damage of the crisis of the global economic system.
Skyrocketing food, fertiliser and fuel prices have been driven by the billions of dollars poured into the world’s stock markets, the failure of governments around the world to pursue a coronavirus elimination policy and thereby prolonging the pandemic and disrupting food supply chains, and the US/NATO sanctions on Russia that have included banning the country from the SWIFT money transfer system.
As the US Federal Reserve and other central banks raise interest rates to choke off inflation and increase the value of their currencies, investors are moving funds away from the world’s low and middle-income countries, in turn pushing down the value of their currencies and making their imports more expensive, while tighter credit is increasing borrowing costs for heavily indebted governments.
At the same time, financial speculation is driving food prices ever higher, with a Lighthouse Reports investigation, The Hunger Profiteers, concluding that in April speculators were responsible for 72 percent of the buying activity on the Paris wheat market, up from 25 percent before the pandemic.
These external pressures have exacerbated the impact of the Horn of Africa’s extreme weather events, some linked to climate change, that have brought flash floods, cyclones, rising temperatures, a devastating locust infestation and now the worst drought in 40 years. Up to 20 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia face the risk of starvation by the end of this year, according to the World Food Programme. Somalia, which like 14 other African countries imports over half of its food, has been particularly badly affected.
Four consecutive rainy seasons have been dry, amid unprecedentedly high temperatures. When the rains did come—October to December 2019 saw the wettest period—they were torrential and short-lived, causing flooding and breeding swarms of locusts. The drought drove 3.4 million people from their homes in Somalia in search of food as their crops failed and around three million livestock—up to 30 percent according to the FAO—perished, nothing short of a disaster in a largely pastoral country where families rely on their herds for meat, milk and trade.
A further 850,000 people have been driven from their homes since the beginning of the year, with increasingly desperate families fleeing the drought-stricken areas and making their way on foot or on donkeys to emergency centres, healthcare facilities and camps in towns and cities, including the largest on the outskirts of the capital, Mogadishu, that likewise struggle to afford food.
Somalia’s 2,400 settlement camps for internal migrants, now home to around one fifth of Somalia’s population, are overcrowded and chronically short of resources, with many residents living in makeshift shelters consisting of just plastic sheeting and poles. More than a few are on the point of death.
Climate experts expect that this October to December’s rainy season may well fail, pushing the drought into 2023. It means that with supply routes cut and local harvests wiped out by the drought, there is simply no prospect of affordable food and other basic commodities.
The drought follows decades of conflict that started in 1992 after the overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre when the US intervened, under the pretext of protecting United Nations aid workers, to establish US control over the region after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Somalia occupies a strategic position straddling both the Indian Ocean and the entrance to the Red Sea through which around $700 billion in maritime shipping passes every year, encompassing nearly all trade between Europe and Asia, including from Washington’s arch-rival China. While the US was forced to withdraw after the “Black Hawk Down” incident in 1993, it continued its operations covertly through proxies.
In 2007, Washington resumed its military operations after the emergence of the Al-Shabab movement that now controls much of the southern part of the country, and since then has launched repeated airstrikes, including targeted drone strikes and missiles launched from naval ships, alongside special forces raids. Last month, President Biden approved the deployment of nearly 500 US troops in Somalia.
US operations have served only to intensify the conflict, compound the suffering of the Somali people and decimate the financial resources of its barely functioning, corrupt government. The newly installed regime, headed by Washington’s man in Mogadishu President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, has no political or popular legitimacy. Heavily indebted and beholden to the International Monetary Fund, it struggles to pay its workers on time and has no plans to manage the crisis.
Despite the gravity of the crisis, the US, other major powers and financial institutions have ignored the UN’s humanitarian appeal as they turn their attention and resources to the war in Ukraine. They have pledged only about 18 percent of the $1.46 billion needed for the Somali people, forcing the UN to cut its rations to those in dire need of aid. The amount needed pales into insignificance beside the imperialists’ expenditure on war and militarism that they like to justify in the name of humanitarianism. The US Pentagon alone spends more in one week than the amount sought by the UN agencies for Somalia.
So great is the threat of hunger, not just in Somalia and the Horn but across Africa, that President Macky Sall of Senegal, the head of the African Union, called for the lifting of restrictions on exports of Russian wheat and fertilizer. Speaking at a joint press conference in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Sall said that Western sanctions on Russia had compounded Africa’s lack of access to grain.
While the UN’s General Assembly voted in March to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the African continent was far less supportive of the US/NATO position: only 28 of Africa’s 54 countries supported the resolution, while 17 abstained, eight failed to vote and one voted against the resolution, reflecting Russia’s longstanding ties to many African countries, its position as Africa’s largest supplier of arms and their efforts to evade the suffocating clutches of the imperialist powers.
The Johnson government has pledged to enforce its brutal policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda after being prevented from launching its first flight on Tuesday evening.
After a legal challenge, seven people sat on the runway of Boscombe Down Air Base in Wiltshire in a Boeing 767 were told they would not be deported and to leave the plane.
The flight was stopped by an intervention by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over legal issues surrounding one of the people on board—a 54-year-old Iraqi man, K.N., who was a victim of torture, and who arrived in the UK by boat in May. The court ruled “that the applicant should not be removed until the expiry of a period of three weeks following the delivery of the final domestic decision in the ongoing judicial review proceedings.”
K.N. had been served a removal notice on June 6 and had his appeals denied by the UK High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. The ECHR decision provided a legal basis for the remaining six to appeal for their removal orders to be discarded, leading to two further injunctions by the ECHR and three successful challenges at the UK Court of Appeal.
Protesters stand outside the High Court where a ruling on Rwanda deportation flights took place, in London. June 13, 2022. [AP Photo/Alastair Grant]
The judicial review specified in the ECHR ruling was granted by the High Court in London last Friday and will take place in late July. It was brought by the Care4Calais migrant advocacy group, organisations including the Public and Commercial Services Union and Detention Action, and four asylum seekers scheduled to be on Tuesday’s flight.
They argue the Rwanda policy is illegal on multiple grounds. Care4Calais explained, “These… include, but are not limited to: the vires or legal authority of the Home Secretary to carry out the removals; the rationality of the Secretary of State’s conclusion that Rwanda is generally a ‘safe third country’; the adequacy of provision for malaria prevention; and compliance with the Human Rights Act.”
The ECHR is overseen by the European Convention on Human Rights, of which the UK is a founding member. Britain’s departure from the European Union (EU) did not affect its membership of this body, separate from the EU and its own European Court of Justice.
Johnson’s Conservative Party MPs responded to Tuesday’s ruling with frothing hostility. The prime minister warned that night that Britain may withdraw from European Convention on Human Rights. A Downing Street press spokesperson confirmed Wednesday, “We are keeping all options on the table including any further legal reforms that may be necessary.”
That this is considered is a milestone in the British ruling class’s rapid dispensing of democratic norms and repudiation of international law. The European Convention on Human Rights was set-up after the Second World War on the initiative of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who envisaged a “Charter of Human Rights”. Established by the Council of Europe—a body founded in London—it was drafted mainly by British lawyers, with the Financial Times noting this week that they “based it on the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
Signed in Rome on November 4, 1950, Britain was the first signatory to the Convention, which came into force on September 3, 1953. Its governing court was established January 21, 1959.
After announcing the Rwanda deportation policy in April, Johnson told the Daily Mail in May—in an intervention designed to throw “red meat” policies to his right-wing base and shore up his leadership—that 50 people had been given “notices of intent” to be flown to the East African country within two weeks. Johnson pledged then that the government would “dig in for the fight… We’ve got a huge flowchart of things we have to do to deal with… the Leftie lawyers.”
As it became clear on Monday that a number of those served with notices had successfully challenged their removal orders, leading Tory Brexiteer Peter Bone said in Parliament, “We hear that a number of the people who were to be on the flight to Rwanda tomorrow have somehow—miraculously—got some leftie lawyer to intervene and stop it. May I suggest… that instead of booking 50 people on to each flight to Rwanda, he books 250 people so that, when half the people are stopped from travelling, we would still have a full flight? Come on—get on and send them.”
The response to the ruling has been even more demented. On the WhatsApp group of “Common Sense Conservatives”, which represents at least 72 backbench right-wingers, one message immediately following the ECHR intervention read, “It’s time we kicked these bastards into touch. For once I won’t apologise for my French.”
Speaking in Parliament Wednesday, Home Secretary Priti Patel said the next flight to Rwanda was already being planned and that the government “will not be put off by the inevitable last-minute legal challenges, and nor will we allow mobs to block removals.” She attacked the “opaque nature” of the ECHR ruling made by an “out-of-hours judge in… Strasbourg”. Patel proclaimed the ECHR had not declared the Rwanda policy illegal, concealing the fact it has required to the government to prove the legality of its policy before any flights can be allowed.
A swathe of Tory MPs are calling for the government to just ignore the ruling with one telling the Mail that “ECHR decisions, unlike the European Court of Justice, do not have direct effect so can simply be overridden.
“When our own courts accept something is legal we should not allow an oddly constituted international court to overrule the democratic process. We should assert Parliamentary sovereignty.”
Among those making this demand is the Tory’s Daily Telegraph house organ. It warned in Wednesday’s editorial that “Boris Johnson’s flagship migration policy risks becoming a fiasco”, concluding “It is all very well blaming the lawyers, but if there are legal impediments to the proper operation of ministers’ desired approach, including the role of overseas courts, the Government has it within its power to address them. Perhaps it ought to do so…”
Johnson is already planning to ditch the 1998 Human Rights Act, which requires UK courts to “take account” of ECHR rulings and case law. It would be replaced by a Bill of Rights scrapping this requirement.
Johnson and Patel can carry out their agenda because its faces no opposition in principle in parliament. The initial response of Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper to the ECHR ruling was a complaint that the government’s policy “isn’t workable” and “won’t tackle criminal gangs”—a line that Patel herself has used to justify the policy. The policy was also too expensive, she said, as “they still paid Rwanda £120m and hired a jet that hasn’t taken off”. Cooper told MPs on Wednesday that the Rwanda flight “shambles” was “putting our country to shame”.
Even such carefully limited opposition is raised only to gloss over the fact that Labour has no real differences with the Tories’ anti-immigration agenda. The Mail trumpeted that “while Ms Cooper was on her feet, a spokesman for [Labour leader] Sir Keir Starmer repeatedly refused to confirm it would scrap the hardline policy if the party won the next election.”
In the population, however, there is massive opposition to the Rwanda policy and scapegoating of immigrants and asylum seekers generally. Patel’s denunciation of “mobs” who “block removals” was an angry reference to the hundreds of people who protested in Peckham, south London only last Saturday, gathering in the street to block a police van attempting to take away a man arrested in an immigration raid. This is the third such spontaneous event in the space of a year after another in Hackney, London last month and an earlier popular intervention in Glasgow.
On Wednesday, Germany’s Supreme Court handed down a ruling in favour of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) that amounts to a carte blanche for future government participation by the far-right party.
The AfD had sued then-Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU, Christian Democratic Union) for publicly criticising the election of Liberal Democratic Party (FDP) politician Thomas Kemmerich as Thuringia’s state premier with the help of the AfD’s votes in February 2020.
Kemmerich, whose party had only five seats in the state parliament, was elected state premier of the eastern German state on February 5, 2020 by a three-party alliance of AfD, CDU and FDP in a surprise coup. Of the 45 votes for Kemmerich, 22 came from the AfD, which is led in Thuringia by neo-Nazi Björn Höcke.
Scene from the Thuringia parliament: Thomas Kemmerich (FDP) front left); behind him, Björn Höcke of the neo-Nazi AfD; on the far right, Left Party leader Bodo Ramelow. (Source Sandro Halank/Wikimedia)
For the first time since the end of the Third Reich, a prime minister was thus elected in a German state with the votes of a right-wing, fascist party. This triggered a storm of indignation nationwide and internationally. Merkel, who was on a foreign trip to South Africa, felt compelled to react publicly.
At a press conference with the South African president, she condemned Kemmerich’s election in a “preliminary remark for domestic political reasons.” She spoke of a “unique event” that had broken with the basic convictions of the CDU and of herself “that no majorities are to be won with the help of the AfD.” This was “unforgivable” and had to be “reversed.” His election was “a bad day for democracy.”
Three days later, Kemmerich resigned after the Thuringia CDU and the federal FDP, which had originally supported his election, withdrew their support.
Now, at the request of the AfD, the Supreme Court has ruled that Merkel’s public statement and its publication on the Chancellery’s official website violated the “right to equal opportunities for political parties” enshrined in Article 21 of the constitution. It ordered the state to reimburse the AfD for its legal costs.
Formally, the court justified its ruling in favour of the AfD on the grounds that Merkel had made her statements “in an official capacity” and not as a CDU politician or private individual. State organs—and thus also ministers and chancellors—were obliged to observe “neutrality in the political battle of opinions” and may not use “the means and opportunities associated with the office of government” for political purposes.
“Accordingly, a statement by a federal minister taking sides in the political battle of opinions violates the principle of equal opportunity of the parties and violates the integrity of the free and open process of the formation of political objectives from the people to the organs of the state,” reads the official press release explaining the ruling.
But this is legal hair-splitting, as is evident from a minority opinion by Judge Astrid Wallrabenstein. Wallrabenstein is one of three members of the eight-member Second Senate of the Supreme Court who did not support the ruling—a conflict of opinion that is rather unusual in the history of the court.
Wallrabenstein points out that government work in a party democracy is always shaped by party politics. The danger that the process of forming political objectives could be undermined is “justified precisely by the appearance of neutrality of government action.” A duty of neutrality existed only in the use of state resources, but not “in the self-representation of government activity.”
If one reads the reasoning of the judgement more closely, it becomes clear that the majority of the court meant to give carte blanche to the AfD. The ruling explicitly accuses Merkel of ruling out government alliances with the far-right party—at least for the time being.
Thus, the official press release on the ruling states that Merkel’s statement contains “negative qualifications” of the AfD. It was “not limited to an assessment of the election of the Thuringia state premier and the behaviour of the CDU members of the state parliament in this regard,” but also contained “a fundamental statement on how to deal with the applicant [the AfD] and on its position in the democratic spectrum.”
“The statement that the prime ministerial election broke with the ‘basic conviction’ that no majorities could be formed with ‘the AfD,’” the court said, “qualifies the applicant overall as a party with which any (parliamentary) cooperation is ruled out from the outset.” This assessment is reinforced by the fact that Merkel “described the process as ‘unforgivable’ and demanded that its outcome be reversed.”
And further: “By finally stating that the prime ministerial election in Thuringia was ‘a bad day for democracy,’ she made it clear that she considers the applicant’s [the AfD’s] participation in the formation of parliamentary majorities to be generally detrimental to democracy, and implicitly made an overall negative value judgement about the applicant’s ability to form coalitions and cooperate in the democratic polity.”
This was an “encroachment on the right to equal participation in the process of political decision-making.” Merkel had thus “exceeded the substantive limits of her authority to express herself, as stipulated by the neutrality requirement.” She had “taken sides against the AfD by excluding it from the circle of parties capable of forming coalitions and cooperating in the democratic spectrum.”
These words leave nothing to be desired in terms of clarity. A politician who, in an official capacity, speaks out against cooperation with a party that trivialises the Nazi dictatorship, stirs up xenophobia and is linked to a dense network of violent neo-Nazis is violating the constitution!
The Supreme Court goes even further. It concedes that in certain cases—if the “ability to act and stability of the federal government” or the “reputation of and confidence in the Federal Republic of Germany in the community of states” were threatened—the neutrality requirement does not apply. The Court added, this was not the case when Kemmerich was elected with the votes of the AfD.
The stability of the federal government, at that time a grand coalition of the CDU/CSU and SPD, had not been threatened because the Thuringian CDU’s closing of ranks with the right-wing extremists had already been condemned by other CDU politicians, such as the then party leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the ruling found. And “that the election of the Minister President in Thuringia was capable of shaking the reputation of or confidence in the Federal Republic of Germany to a relevant extent, limiting its ability to act in foreign policy, was not evident,” the court states succinctly.
The WSWS has shown for years that the AfD owed its rise primarily to the policies of the other establishment parties and support from the state apparatus. It was the policy of social cuts and anti-immigration clamp-downs, pursued by all parties from the FDP to the Left Party, that made the AfD strong in the first place. The then head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (as Germany’s secret service is called), Hans-Georg Maassen, advised the AfD in private talks on how to avoid coming under surveillance by the agency.
When the AfD entered the Bundestag (federal parliament) in autumn 2017 with 92 deputies, all the other parties worked with it. By joining the grand coalition, the SPD made the AfD leader of the opposition for a legislative period. It was represented in all parliamentary committees and in this way was systematically integrated into the work of government.
After Kemmerich’s election as Minister President of Thuringia, the WSWS wrote, “The decision of the two parties [CDU and FDP] to form a ruling majority with the aid of the AfD is a historic turning point. It confirms that the ruling class in Germany is once again resorting to fascistic and authoritarian methods to implement its policies of social inequality and militarism in the face of broad popular opposition.”
Meanwhile, the AfD is in deep crisis. It has massively lost votes in the last three state elections. In Schleswig-Holstein, it has even been kicked out of a state parliament for the first time. Thousands of members have left, including long-time co-chair Jörg Meuthen. The fascist wing around Björn Höcke increasingly dominates the party.
Against this background, the ruling by the Supreme Court is an attempt to give the neo-Nazi party a new boost. AfD leader Tino Chrupalla, himself a representative of its far-right wing, cheered, “It’s a good day for democracy.” Merkel, he said, had blatantly violated the AfD’s rights and the constitution with her remarks.
The AfD is needed by the ruling class to counter the growing radicalisation of workers and young people against militarism, war and the consequences of inflation and social cuts, and to intimidate the working class.
