The Local: Could Merkel’s Christian Democrats really work with the far-right AfD?

But on Monday an open letter signed by 17 local CDU officials and reported on by the Ostthüringer Zeitung, urges the party to start "open-ended talks" with the AfD. They consider it unthinkable that "almost a quarter of the voters" in Thuringia "should remain outside the talks". [...]

The AfD surged into second place with 23.4 percent, more than doubling its share of the vote since the last state election in 2014, while the CDU tumbled down to 21.8 percent, from 33.5 percent in 2014. [...]

The CDU previously ruled out working with the Left, but Thuringia CDU leader Mohring said he was open to talks with the party's local leader Ramelow.

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The Local: The winners and losers: Six things to know about the EU elections in Germany

Meanwhile, voter turnout in Germany was significantly higher than in the previous European election, reaching 61.4% compared to 48.1% during the 2014 ballot, according to preliminary results shared by the German government. [...]

And she's right. Young people voted overwhelmingly for the Greens: about 30 percent of the under 30s voted for the environmental party. [...]

Dr Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin previously told the Local that the Greens' message was optimism and that was one of the reasons that the party has become so desirable to voters in recent months. [...]

Yet in Saxony, the AfD was the biggest force with 25.3 percent of the vote, followed by the CDU (23 percent) and The Left (Die Linke), with 11.7 percent.

In Brandenburg, the AfD was also top with 19.9 percent of the vote, followed by the CDU (18 percent). The AfD also performed well in Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania although the CDU came out on top in these states.

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The Local: How EU elections could lead yet another Italian government to collapse Inbox x

But the fact that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from France, Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom from the Netherlands, the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the Danish People’s party and others have all agreed to join suggests that Salvini is now recognised as a successful leader well beyond Italy’s borders. [...]

In April, the League was expected to win 37 percent of the Italian vote, but support for the party has been shrinking in recent weeks. It has now dropped to around 30 percent, according to some polls. Nevertheless, after securing just 6.2 percent in the last European election, that would still be an extremely strong performance by the League. [...]

The forced departure from government of the League’s undersecretary for transport, Armando Siri, as he faces an investigation into alleged corruption, has taken a toll, too. M5S used to let Salvini dominate the agenda, but is now asserting itself as the dominant coalition partner, and very much lobbied the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, to get rid of Siri. [...]

Then there is the question of whether fresh elections could even be held as quickly as Salvini would like. After all, the executive could simply end up being replaced by another, supported by a different governing majority, as, if this government collapses, parliamentary arithmetic means that no single party, or leader, would be in control of what happens next.

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The Local: The ambitious plan to turn Berlin’s central canal into a giant swimming pool

Despite its reputation, the Spree isn’t actually all that dirty - at least most of the time. When the river enters the capital its waters are so clean that you can go for a dip without worrying about your health, Edler's organization, Flussbad Berlin, claims.

The problems start inside the city, or more specifically, when it starts to rain in the city. Around 15 times a year, heavy rainfall overloads the city’s 19th century “mixed” drainage system. The sewage and rainwater which normally head towards sewage facilities overflow into the river, spewing faeces, detergents and tampons into the river. [...]

To this end, the city is generously backing the Flussbad Berlin project with €4 million to help it realize its aim. Berlin politicians are taking the project so seriously that it was written into the coalition treaty when a new city government was formed in 2016. [...]

Agreeing on access points to the water has been one major sticking point. At first the plan foresaw a wide set of steps at the Lustgarten park. But this plan was nixed by the city’s Monuments Authority which raised objections including that the swimming area would lead to overcrowding in the historical 19th century park.

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The Local: Here are the main things Italian PM Giuseppe Conte said in his first speech

"One of our objectives is to eliminate the growth gap between Italy and the European Union [...] In Europe, these issues will be strongly put forward with the aim of changing its governance, a change already under reflection and discussion in all EU member states. [...]

"Europe is our home. As a founding member we have every right to demand a stronger, fairer Europe in which the economic and monetary union is geared towards protecting the needs of its citizens, to balance the principles of responsibility and solidarity more effectively." [...]

"We will call strongly for the Dublin Regulation to be overhauled in order to ensure that the principle of fair distribution of responsibilities is respected, and to achieve an automatic system of obligatory resettlement of asylum seekers. [...]

"We defend and will defend immigrants who arrive legally in our country, who work and integrate themselves in our community while respecting the law and making a positive contribution to development. But to guarantee this indispensable integration, we must not only combat the most vile forms of exploitation linked to human trafficking [...] but also reorganize and streamline our reception system, assuring transparency on the use of public funds and wiping out all infiltration by organized crime groups."

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The Local: How the League's Matteo Salvini played his cards right amid Italy's political chaos

In the months of political horsetrading that ensued to form a government, the nationalist Salvini has seen his hand strengthened and is experiencing a meteoric rise in the opinion polls. From 17 percent on election day, surveys now put the League at over 20 percent – it scored 22 percent in a recent IndexResearch poll – while other parties' ratings have largely stayed the same as in March or declined. [...]

After the Five Star-League alliance collapsed, fresh polls looked to be the most likely outcome of the political saga. But while Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio is scrambling to put the coalition back on track, Salvini says he welcomes a return to the polls, confident that his party would emerge stronger than ever. [...]

Analysts also suggest that his unflinching stance on the party's core issues at a time of great uncertainty appeals to voters. The League appears "as the political group with the greatest consistency... this consistency makes them more clearly identifiable," said Marc Lazar, political science professor at Rome's Luiss University.

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The Local: Profile: Italian president Sergio Mattarella, the country's 'political referee'

Mattarella is a well-respected figure in Italian politics, though he was relatively little known by the public and press before he was sworn in in 2015. The 75-year-old was born in the Sicilian capital of Palermo (he's the first Italian president from the region), and studied law in Rome.

After qualifying, he taught law in his hometown, with a focus on constitutional law and Sicily's regional government. His elder brother Piersanti was elected regional president of Sicily, and it was his brutal murder in 1980 at the hands of a local mafia group that persuaded the younger Mattarella to enter the political arena. [...]

In 2008, Mattarella chose not to run in parliamentary elections, and in 2011 was elected a Constitutional Judge. Four years later, he was elected president, and vowed to prioritize tackling corruption and organized crime while in office, as well as getting the country back on track after a crippling recession. [...]

Mattarella is a centre-left-leaning politcian who started his career as a member of the now-defunct Christian Democrats, which his father Bernardo helped create. Later he was one of the founders of the Democratic Party (PD) and that party, led at the time by Matteo Renzi, endorsed him in the 2015 presidential vote, which he won with a comfortable majority.  

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The Local: Immigration in Itay: Myths and reality ahead of election

Italy's national statistics institute Istat says that there are five million foreign nationals legally residing in Italy. That is 8.3 percent of the country's population of 60.5 million.

The biggest proportion, 23 percent, are from Romania followed by Albanians (9 percent), Moroccans (8 percent), Chinese (5.5 percent) and Ukrainians (4.5 percent) and many of them are employed in retail, farming or domestic work.

More than 690,000 migrants, most from Sub-Saharan Africa, have arrived by boat from Libya since 2013. Migration study foundation ISMU estimates that around 500,000 are living in the country illegally -- equivalent to 0.9 percent of the population. [...]

However Italy's interior ministry says the crime rate has dropped by 8.3 percent in the last 10 years, despite the fact that the number of foreigners in the country has increased from three to five million over the same period.

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The Local: Is Italy’s League a ‘far-right’ party?

The League was founded 27 years ago on the pipe dream of separating northern Italy from “Roma ladrona” (“thieving Rome”) and southern Italians, whom it characterized as layabouts and criminals. But under Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader of just over four years, the party has dropped references to secession from its programme, aiming instead at national power. Its anger has been redirected at Brussels and most especially, immigrants. [...]

“If today many people confuse it with the far right, it’s essentially because it fiercely opposes immigration and demands national sovereignty as regards the European Union and its policies. But it’s a question of specific convergences, not a deep affinity.” [...]

In its former life, the Northern League converged with the centre and the left, counting former communists, socialists, anti-fascists, federalists, libertarians and others among its ranks. Throughout its first decade it talked about teaming up with centrist and leftist movements, and in some cases did so; one left-wing prime minister described the League as a “rib” of Italy’s left. [...]

“Its programme has aspects that put it mainly near the right (for example, defending small and medium businesses, criticizing the tax system) and others that place it less far from the left (policies that favour working people and those at the lower end of society – provided they’re Italian by birth),” says Tarchi.

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The Local: Italy is 'steeped in hate', Amnesty warns amid toxic election campaign

Against this background, the campaign for Italy's election on March 4th has only aggravated the problem, Amnesty said. The group has been monitoring comments made on social media by political leaders and candidates nationwide and in the past two weeks alone has identified more than 200 that it flagged as hateful or discriminatory on grounds of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. 

Virtually all were made by members of the centre-right alliance that the latest polls show leading, comprised of Forza Italia centrists, the populist League and far-right Brothers of Italy. [...]

Meanwhile the Brothers of Italy, while making fewer discriminatory statements about migrants, refugees and Roma people, made the highest number of negative comments about women and LGBTI people. While the party has a high-profile female leader, Giorgia Meloni, it promotes "traditional family values" that tend to exclude orientations other than heterosexual.  [...]

Amnesty's Rufini warned that Italy is more polarized than ever before, saying that part of the public believes itself to be "great, pure, Italian while the rest don't deserve to share the country [...] creating an impossible climate in this country and killing all chance of debate". 

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The Local: For first time ever, Paris counts its homeless

Charities estimate the homeless population of Paris to be about 3,000. Many are foreign, often from Eastern Europe. But there's no official data -- an issue that city hall, under pressure to tackle one of the capital's most visible problems, is now trying to fix.

After two blazing rows sparked by politicians' offhand remarks about homelessness, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo carried out the city's first-ever homeless census on Thursday night.

Some 2,000 volunteers and officials fanned out until 1am, counting the bodies huddled in doorways and surveying those awake about their housing and health problems. Rail workers counted those sheltering at metro stations. [...]

An estimate by statistics agency INSEE put France's national homeless count at 143,000 in 2012, but charities say this has likely rocketed due to a housing crunch and the migrant crisis.

Macron's centrist government opened 13,000 extra places in emergency winter shelters. But two ruling party members have landed themselves in hot water over homelessness in the space of just days.  Urban affairs minister Julien Denormandie prompted an uproar by asserting only 50 men were sleeping rough in the Paris region -- a stunning underestimate, according to charities. And days later, Paris lawmaker Sylvain Maillard, a member of Macron's party, added fuel to the fire by insisting that some stay on the streets, even in the snow, "by choice".  

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The Local: Is Italy's Five Star Movement still an 'anti-establishment' party?

There are other reasons for voter dissatisfaction with the status quo, from a stagnant economy to mafia infiltration in politics, to a younger generation left disproportionately affected by unemployment and unstable work, after successive governments courted the elderly. The M5S started out with one message to voters: this is not the only option. [...]

Part of the M5S's ideology is that politics should not be a career, so it imposes a two-term limit on its own representatives, after which they are expected to return to work in civil society. While the main parties are often accused of cronyism, the M5S excludes those who already hold public office from their list. [...]

Grillo was fiercely eurosceptic and had long supported a referendum on euro membership, something which rattled markets and Italian business-owners. But in the months leading up to the 2018 election this was downgraded to a "plan B" and Grillo's replacement Di Maio has been more positive about the EU in general, recently saying he "would not contemplate" a referendum on the euro even as a last resort. [...]

For now, it is clinging on to its anti-establishment label through a combination of vagueness around its policies and the fact it has not yet made it into government, but if this changes after March, it would likely lose this label once and for all.

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