Free Republic

Europe “must take its fate into its own hands” faced with a western alliance divided by Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday. “The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days,” Merkel told a crowd at an election rally in Munich, southern Germany. “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands,” she added. While Germany and Europe would strive to remain on good terms with America and Britain, “we have to fight for our own destiny,” Merkel...

Core EU powers France and Germany vowed Monday to accelerate eurozone integration, with a new bilateral panel to work out ways to kickstart the reform process. “We’ve been talking about progress in eurozone integration for years, but things are not moving fast enough,” said France’s new Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire in Berlin after talks with his German counterpart Wolfgang Schäuble. “We have now decided to get things going more quickly and further in a very concrete manner,” he said. Schäuble agreed that “we are convinced that Germany and France must take a leading role” in strengthening the European Union...

Despite the turbulence of the Weimar years, Germany has followed a steady capitalist economic model since the end of the Second World War. But that doesn’t mean people like the idea, a new study shows. Contrary to the US, where belief in capitalism is as entrenched as hot dogs and baseball, Germany has always had a more complicated relationship to the philosophy of competitive markets. This is, after all, the country that gave us the founding communist thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And a study published by Statista and YouGov on Tuesday shows that only 16 percent of Germans...

With Germany raking in more taxes due to strong economic performance, the leader of its liberal party has suggested state officials are enriching themselves at the cost of the taxpayer. “The greed of the state has taken on kleptocratic characteristics,” Christian Lindner, head of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) told Handelsblatt on Wednesday. A kleptocracy is a form of government in which officials corruptly use public funds for personal gain. “The yearly tax intake of the state is set to be €100 billion higher in 2020 than this year, if we don’t act. For the FDP, it is clear that...