By centring the discourse on immigration, MPs have handed support to the far right \u2013 and hidden a ticking economic timebomb from voters<\/p>\n
The candidates to lead Germany\u2019s next government are avoiding telling voters painful truths before Sunday\u2019s crucial general election about Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, the coming disengagement of the US from Europe<\/a> and the huge defence funding that is needed. Instead, the debate has largely focused on how to revive the ailing German economy after two years of recession and how to control migration, which has fuelled support for the far-right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland.<\/p>\n The conservative CDU\/CSU leader, Friedrich Merz, has swerved speaking about the need for massive borrowing to pay for a surge in defence spending because many of his supporters oppose extra debt. The Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is dodging discussion<\/a> of sending German troops to Ukraine as part of a possible European security force if a ceasefire agreement is reached because part of his political base is either anti-militarist or Russia-friendly. After an emergency European summit<\/a> on Ukraine in Paris on Monday, an irritable Scholz said talk of boots on the ground was \u201chighly inappropriate<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By centring the discourse on immigration, MPs have handed support to the far right \u2013 and hidden a ticking economic timebomb from voters The candidates to lead Germany\u2019s next government are avoiding telling voters painful truths before Sunday\u2019s crucial general election about Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, the coming disengagement of the US from Europe and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}