Angela Merkel calls to celebrate Christmas on Skype, s …

Angela Merkel urged Germans to avoid visiting relatives during the Christmas and called to use video call instead. Germany is battling a spike in coronavirus infections and deaths as celebrations of the country’s rapid recovery from the first wave turn to anger at the lives lost in the second.
“Women and men, stationed far from home to ensure our safety, know what it means to have limited contact with those close to them,” the German Chancellor said in her weekly video podcast. “They know what it means to be able to use Skype for a long time. period of time instead of being together, ”he said.

Germany recorded more than 31 thousand new infections and 702 deaths on Saturdaysaid the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases, which represents an increase in cases of nearly 60 percent.

Merkel had previously resorted to emotionally sounding messages in an attempt to stop escalating infections at a time of the year that is crucial for asking for distance.

“If by Christmas we have many contacts and it is finally the last Christmas that we celebrate with our grandparents, we will have failed in something, and that cannot happen, Ladies and Gentlemen, ”he declared on Wednesday 9 December in the Bundestag.

Germany is carrying out lockdown like the one it had only at the start of the pandemic, which does not include any minor decisions for this time of year in the case of the German people, as it does some of its most common customs. rooted such as the closure of Christmas markets and the ban on the sale of fireworks and Glühwein, spiced mulled wine, in the streets.

The country entered a severe lockdown on December 16, closing all non-essential stores and imposing curfews in some areas, with measures expected to last until at least January 10.

“What awaits many of us at Christmas is normal for people on missions abroad,” he said.

On December 27, Germany is expected to start implementing the COVID-19 vaccine developed by BioNTech and the American company Pfizer.

Merkel’s last battle

Many define it as Merkel’s last battleSince then the chancellor has taken the pandemic very seriously from the start, arguing with the prime ministers of the federated states responsible for their respective territories. Too, forced to set aside no lesser reward from his government, the zero deficit of the German budget, which this year, said Ralf Brinkhaus, leader of his parliamentary group, has become the “coronavirus budget”.

The German federal state will be able to spend nearly half a trillion euros next year and go back into debt in the fight against the coronavirus crisis. The Bundestag approved next year’s budget with votes from the ruling coalition. All in all, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz intends to spend a little less than the current year. More than a third of spending at the federal state level will be financed by new debt of nearly 180,000 million euros. Subsidies of around 39,500 million euros are planned for companies affected by the current crisis.

The virus used by right-wing extremists and anti-vaccines

But that’s not all. The virus has been a great breeding ground for far-right groups busy attracting new followers to every anti-quarantine or anti-vaccine demonstration. and after each new announcement by the Chancellor (just remember the steps of the historic Reichstag building in Berlin which were the scene of an unprecedented image in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany on August 29 with a few hundred demonstrators, among those who had “Reichsbürger” (Citizens of the Reich) that the police had difficulty in controlling at first).

The authors of Epidemic Ultra, a blog and podcast that informs and alerts about what they understand is “a virus that grows, the hate virus of the radical right” is dedicated to explaining, among other things, as in Germany , this party has reinstated a xenophobic, revisionist and even racist discourse in public debate, favored by external circumstances such as the coronavirus.

“They have managed to exploit fear and disappointment in many sectors of the population. With this, they have managed to position themselves as the most voted force after the majority parties at the federal level. And at the same time, they endangered the fundamental values ​​of democracy in this country, ”says Franco Delle Donne, one of the founding journalists. To which Andreu Jerez adds that: “The global crisis generated by the pandemic also offers a golden opportunity for this far-right tradition now led by movements such as the Identity Movement (IB, in its German acronym), publications like the magazine Compact or even parties like Alternative for Germany (AfD, third force in the Bundestag at the head of the parliamentary opposition): on the one hand, to fuel the discourse on the need to close the borders in order, in this case, to close the passage to the virus, a logic perfectly applicable to immigration; on the other, it gives ammunition to those who brandish the discourse according to which the closure of social and economic life is nothing other than the attempt of the globalist elites to put an end to the peoples of Europe, in the occurrence with the Germans – and with its homogeneity and ethnocultural continuity, one of the pillars of the narrative of the new German far right, ”explains Jerez.