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Originally posted by Jelly:
At this point it is far to late for it to matter Germany is so screwed. Same with many other EU nations.

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Originally posted by Jelly:
At this point it is far to late for it to matter Germany is so screwed. Same with many other EU nations.

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Originally posted by PASig:
Will the Teutonic Tac aka Banshee be by shortly to tell us all how wrong we are to be celebrating this collapse?

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Unfortunately I don't think any European government would have the moral fortitude to send migrants back except for some of the eastern European ones.

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Originally posted by PASig:
Will the Teutonic Tac aka Banshee be by shortly to tell us all how wrong we are to be celebrating this collapse?

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Originally posted by BansheeOne:

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Originally posted by PASig:
Will the Teutonic Tac aka Banshee be by shortly to tell us all how wrong we are to be celebrating this collapse?

Since my service record is nowhere near as impressive as tacfoley's, I can't accept that honorific.

For background on the topic, as noted in the linked report the disagreement is between Merkel and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, previously minister president (think governor) of the state of Bavaria, and still party head of the Bavarian CSU. This is the "sister party" to Merkel's CDU, which means it appears on the ballot instead of the latter in Bavaria; in the national parliament, they have however always caucused together. The CSU is generally a bit more conservative than the CDU, but its chief aim has always been to secure its own majority in Bavaria, where it has ruled since the state was reinstituted after WW II.

There are upcoming state elections in Bavaria this October, and the CSU is trying to shore up its right flank against the new anti-establishment AfD. At the same time, the opposition both on the left and right in national parliament has been trying to somehow tie Seehofer to a current scandal in the Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), where the former head of the Bremen field office illegally granted asylum to mostly Yazidi Kurds from Iraq in a four-digit number of cases over several years - either out of sympathy with the Yazidis, due to personal involvement with a lawyer representing them, or a mix. This is of course nonsense since it happened years ago, and has been investigated for some time before Seehofer even took his current office as the responsible minister three months ago, but everybody is trying to play political games ahead of elections in an important state.

As for the national CDU/CSU-SPD government breaking apart over it, it is possible, but not too likely. CDU and CSU members of the Bundestag had seperate sessions on the issue today, which is a first in their joint history. But arguably they had a greater rift when the CSU actually voted to leave the joint caucus over disagreements between then-heads Franz-Josef Strauß and Helmuth Kohl after the Conservatives lost the 1976 national election. There have been repeated suggestions ever since then about the CSU competing with the CDU on the national level, like during the 2015/16 quarreling over refugee policy between Merkel and Seehofer, when the latter tried to rally his troops against being suceeded as Bavarian minister president by his inner-party rival Markus Söder (which still happened). It has never been followed through with though, for the same reason the 1976 split was rescinded before it was even implemented: on the flip side, the CDU would also compete in Bavaria, and the CSU is projected to lose a fifth of their current voters to them if that would happen IIRC. That would cost them their holy cow of absolute majority in the state, so probably never gonna happen.

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Originally posted by downtownv:
Would it be possible for you to illustrate this? I tried and it still is difficult to follow the alphabet soup.