78
Because that's the normal way round for criminal standard of proof?
America has the civil forfeiture system on "balance of probabilities", which has become a license for police corruption.
74
Outside a small fringe group, there is a broad consensus in Germany that starting WW2 was wrong.
That is not incompatible with the idolization of German soldiers who fought in the war, though. For a long time (I would say roughly after the war until the 80s), many Germans blamed the political leadership (i.e. Hitler and the other Nazi leaders) essentially ...
66
The market was somewhat more free before the rent freeze (it was not completely free, see antipattern's excellent answer), and this had effects that some Berliners considered undesirable. The article describes what some of those effects were:
...in recent years, rents have skyrocketed...pushing middle-class families from Berlin's central residential ...
63
The 2% goal for defense spending of all NATO countries originates from the Wales Summit of 2014. However, the people who made that commitment are heads of governments, many of which don't actually have the authority to make budgeting decisions. This includes the German Chancellor. The Bundestag (German parliament) which actually has that authority never ...
52
It's hard to provide an objective answer since this is a question mostly about emotions and everyone has his anecdotes. Since pretty much all answers here do not have any citations or references, it's likely that they are all colored by subjective perception.
I'll try to provide some objective data, though it will undoubtedly still be colored by my personal ...
52
Yes, in September 2009, at an occasion to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII, then-President Lech Kaczyński gave the following speech:
Two generations have passed but the Second World War still requires
reflection; Poland’s participation in the reduction of territory of
Czechoslovakia was not only a mistake – it was a sin, and Poland ...
51
Very good question and I am surprised that I as German needed to dig deeper into the stuff than anticipated. I tried to consult the German Wikipedia and the normal Google results, but got essentially nothing at first. I suppose it was self-evident schoolboy knowledge at their time and they did not bother to remark the function for following generations.
...
48
Rent for new buildings isn't capped (at least not by this new law), so the cap shouldn't interfere with new buildings. Rent may also be increased up to a point when a building is modernized.
The cap was implemented because the market didn't work for a lot of people who needed to spend more and more of their income on rent or be driven out of Berlin. The ...
48
Absolute and relative amounts
Germany has come much closer to the 2% goal due to the COVID crisis -- the GDP went down, the defense budget stayed the same, so the percentage went up. Similarly, good years reduced the percentage without any defense cuts.
Rejection of war as a means of policy.
Germany has spent 40 years at the frontline of the Cold War, a war ...
45
In 2014, the European Union adopted Directive 2014/42/EU on the freezing and confiscation of instrumentalities and proceeds of crime, and this directive was implemented in Germany on 2017-07-01. As a consequence, likely proceeds of crime can now be confiscated even in cases where it is unclear what exactly the crime was or who committed it.
According to § ...
44
The planned size of the Bundestag is 598 members: One directly elected member from each of the 299 electoral districts plus equally many members chosen from party lists in order to achieve a total allocation of seats that is proportional to the party votes (Zweitstimmen). As a simplified example, assume that party X got 10% of the party votes and that their ...
44
The debate over e-mobility comes in the context of an ongoing debate in Germany how public spaces for transportation are to be divided between the different modes of transportation.
In the last century, many German cities were designed to optimize the use of private cars. Many urban populations are rising (and average cars are getting larger ...), and both ...
43
No.
As long as the original credit of 330 billion euros is not paid back, you can hardly argue that the interest should be considered as a profit. In fact, the starting time for interest payback has just been suspended by ten years, to 2033 - according to the German Department of Finance, this amounts to 34 billion dollars of unpaid interest.
Additionally, ...
39
The holocaust took place to some extent within Germany, and German Jews/gypsies/homosexuals were taken to extermination camps. There was no equivalent within Japan itself. Japanese war crimes took place in China and Korea, a long distance geographically and cognitively from people in Japan.
The holocaust was separate from war. The Nazis wanted to exterminate ...
37
The difference between a fee and a tax is that while a fee can be designated to be spent for one specific purpose, a tax is not. All taxes go into the state coffers and parliament decides how that tax money is then redistributed to all the government activities. History is full of taxes which were promised to be leveraged for very specific purposes but then ...
37
Many Germans who have friends and family really enjoy the fact that there is one "common day off" in the week which is the same for all family members. Going to church together has become rather uncommon, but the benefit for the family remains.
Of course one cannot go shopping together on this "common day off," but that's where the golden rule comes in -- ...
33
The unopportunistic and unattractive truth (I'm not afraid of saying it) is that Berlin is a red-red-green governed city and rents are one of their most important lighthouse projects. Also, the market does not, and cannot work because the market is actively prevented from working.
The market is driven by offer and demand. Demand has been going up, so ...
29
The reason is largely historical, the office of President was first introduced in the Weimar Republic of Germany, with significant political powers according to its constitution.
Article 25 of the Weimar Constitution the President had the power to unilaterally dissolve the Reichstag
Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution the President had the power to ...
29
Yes, this is normal for the German media. The German justice system uses the concept of presumption of innocence. A suspect is just that - a suspect. They are not considered guilty until a court of law has made a guilty verdict. Until then everyone should assume that the person might be innocent, no matter how clear the evidence against them seems to be at ...
28
According to this newspaper article, it was for procedural reasons only. The motion was brought forward jointly by the Conservative (CDU/CSU), Social Democrat (SPD), Liberal (FDP) and Green groups. The Left group would have liked to formally co-sponsor the motion, too, but was excluded upon the Conservatives’ request. This due to the Conservatives’ policy of ...
26
The idea is to actually reduce bartering and strange deals by making a coalition agreement.
Let's assume this isn't done and instead, everyone is free to vote on every decision. What would happen? A lot of horse trading, all the time. "If you vote for our coal permission law now, I will vote against capping refugee numbers."
This sort of weird deals would ...
26
You are completely misjudging the intention of these memorials.
In one of the articles you linked, a politician talks about the placement of one of these memorials:
Es mache Sinn, dass Passanten das Denkmal sehen könnten. "Es soll ja ein Mahnmal sein, damit die Leute sich Gedanken machen."
Translates to (see PS notes about "Mahnmal".)
It makes sense ...
25
This is of course hardly detailed, but dislike for Trump abroad is well correlated to disliking his foreign policies. Germany polls pretty low on the latter too.
Pew has actually asked more detailed questions regarding specific policies, but they have only posted a graph with world-aggregate numbers on those questions. They do have per-country data in a ...
25
The main factor has to be the fear of public debt and symbolic importance of balanced budgets (schwarze Null) in the German political discourse. The notion that the state should avoid building up debt and strive towards a balanced budget every single year plays an oversize role in the way the German media and public judge many issues. That's not the case in ...
24
German legislation isn't the fastest in general. There is no powerful president, the parties in the governing coalition have to agree to assure a majority in the Bundestag, and acquiring a majority in the states representation can be difficult too.
I don't feel able to represent the complex legal process. The project changed course more than once. There ...
24
I'll add here from the critics' perspective, i.e. of Yanis Varoufakis, who was a finance minister of Greece...
Belatedly, but correctly, they [Italy etc.] demanded a so-called “eurobond”: a common debt instrument that allows total long-term debt to shrink by transferring a portion of it from member states, which have a lot of debt, to the eurozone, which ...
23
I'm not familiar with Germany but there's a similar law in France, and I guess in a few other countries. The law is amended from time to time and there are quite a lot of exemptions, but the general case is still that most businesses must close every Sunday, and in particular that employees cannot be asked to work on a Sunday.
In France at least the debate ...
22
First of all, it is quite unlikely that Germany would want to do that. They just intentionally downsized their military to 180,000 soldiers in the past decades when they first reduced and then completely suspended conscription. And now that the Bundeswehr was reformed into a pure volunteer army, it has trouble getting onto its current nominal manpower, ...
22
Many decision in the EU are pre-arranged by the German-French axis, which in practice means that the smaller countries don't have much influence.
The New Hanseatic League aims to give the smaller countries with similar views more influence. Therefore, it is a counter-balance against the German-French axis.
It would be strange if Germany were on both sides.
...
21
Obvious answer: the sanctions don't cover everything. And they probably don't have enough signalling effect on what they don't cover. However, that it took 5 years to reach 2014 levels again, is also not negligible, i.e. the sanctions were not entirely toothless either.
There is probably more to be said about the world economic context in which this ...
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