Dozens of police teams across Germany raided homes before dawn in a coordinated crackdown on a recent Tuesday. The state police weren’t looking for drugs or guns, they were looking for people suspected of posting hate speech online. As prosecutors explain it, the German constitution protects free speech, but not …
On Thursday morning, an Afghan refugee deliberately plowed a car into a crowd in Munich, motivated by what the police called an “Islamist orientation.” A 2-year-old girl and her mother were killed, and nearly 40 others were injured. A day later — in a country where migration has been a …
Many critical issues were left uncertain — including the fate of Ukraine — at the end of Europe’s first encounter with an angry and impatient Trump administration. But one thing was clear: An epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance. After three years of war that forged …
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s imminent elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis 80 years ago. A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling …
The great collision has begun. As President Trump’s national security team arrived in Europe this week, very little about their hard-line message came as a surprise. But to the political and diplomatic leaders arriving in Munich on Friday for an annual security conference where fault lines in the Western alliance …
A chorus of criticism greeted Friedrich Merz, the favorite to become Germany’s chancellor, last month when he broke a taboo against working with a hard-right party to pass legislation. But it was a lone voice of dissent that rocked the country’s political scene: Angela Merkel, the once-beloved former chancellor, who …
Standing in the rotunda, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy was a privileged guest at President Trump’s inauguration. The only European leader to attend the event last month, Ms. Meloni shares many of Mr. Trump’s conservative, nationalist impulses. She is friendly with his billionaire adviser Elon Musk. Many of her …
We always overhype our vacations. After a long morning’s climb the weather is clearing up, and we are peering into the distance, into the fog gathered beneath this craggy outcropping — high above Germany, or what is not yet Germany, where only little tufts of grass push from the bare …
Since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, Tetiana Martyniuk-Bahrii, a violinist in the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, has lived the life of a refugee, moving from apartment to apartment with her husband and 14-year-old daughter, Olesia. She has watched the war unfold from a distance, fearing for the safety of …
The man who has been heavily favored to become Germany’s next chancellor took an extraordinary gamble this week, both for his political future and his country’s longstanding firewall against political extremism. It did not go as he hoped. In an effort to portray himself and his party as tough on …