Deutschland Update # 14
Topics this week:
New criminality survey results
Climate activism
Opposition to social welfare reform
New survey looks at the experience of criminality in Germany
The results of the first national survey on the experience of criminality in Germany was released by the Federal Criminal Police Office on Tuesday. The results, compiled from the responses of 50,000 participants, provide a representative view of the German population over 16-years-old on issues such as sexual violence, cyber criminality, and physical violence predicated on ethnicity or sexual identity.
Many of the results of the survey will not surprise those of us who live and breathe and eat and sleep in the modern world. However, the survey seeks to shine a light on the lived experience of criminality - something that is not generally represented in the national crime statistics that Germany has been collecting since the early days of the Bundesrepublik. While those statistics can reasonably be characterized as record of the work of police (x number of people were arrested for y crime in z location) this survey seeks instead to collect the population’s perception of their own risk in the places they live.
A summary of the most interesting takeaways below:
- Less than half of the population (46%) feels safe on public transportation at night. The percentage is higher for women (60%) than men (33%).
- Men are more likely than women to be the victims of violent crime overall, but women are more likely to be victims of sexual violence or of abuse within a relationship.
- The internet is the most significant source of criminality that people experience in their daily lives; 8% have experienced fraud, 6% have had their information or identity misused, and 5% have experienced verbal abuse online. Many people in Germany still avoid online payments: 27% report avoiding online financial transactions for fear of fraud.
- Sexual crimes and cyber criminality are rarely reported to the authorities. According to the survey only 18% of cyber crimes and 1% of sexual crimes are reported. In contrast, 92% of car thefts are reported.
- Nienty percent of the population reports a positive association with the police. However, 44% of people of non-German origin (mit Migrationshintergrund) feel that the police has an empathy deficit.
Historical comparisons of these statistics are not possible, given that this is the first instance of the survey. Going forward it will be conducted every two years, and should over time provide a valuable resource that allows the law enforcement authorities to better understand the needs of the communities they serve.
Climate activism is heating back up
The activist group “Letzte Generation” (Last Generation) is making waves again. The group, which first began to grab headlines earlier this year by organizing blockades of highways in Berlin that caused major traffic jams, is back after a summer hiatus which it said was meant to recruit and train new members. The group is now active throughout Germany and they have expanded their repertoire beyond blocking roads to chaotic effect (though they certainly haven’t given up on this method).
“We will take out protest to every area that will be effected by the climate catastrophe,” Carla Rochel of Letzte Generation said in an interview with the TV channel RTL. Here are a few examples of some of the actions that the group has taken in the last weeks:
- On Wednesday this week (the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall) activists climbed on top of the Brandenburg Gate and unfurled a banner that read: “We wish that everyone survives – On the day of solidarity – We are all the Last Generation.”
- Two activists threw a can of mashed potatoes on a Monet painting hanging in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, and then proceeded to glue themselves to the wall underneath the painting. The impressionist work of art is luckily displayed behind a glass frame and therefore protected from any real damage.
#Kartoffelbrei auf #Monet: Was ist mehr wert #FürAlle – Kunst oder Leben? Monet liebte die Natur und hielt ihre fragile Schönheit in seinen Werken fest. Warum haben viele mehr Angst davor, dass eines dieser Abbilder Schaden nimmt, als vor der Zerstörung unserer Welt selbst?- In Munich last week a group of activists blockaded traffic in the city center. After the police initially cleared the protesters, the same group was able to go back to the same location a few hours later and again snarl traffic. The protesters were then arrested and placed in administrative detention for 30 days.
- Last week activists simultaneously sprayed the headquarters of the parties in the current governing coalition (SPD, Green, and FDP) with orange paint. Some members of the group subsequently glued themselves to the outside of the buildings.
This is by no means a complete list of all the actions the group has taken. While the consequences of most have been benign, the knock-on effects of a recent action in Berlin have led to a change in the tenor of the political debate surrounding the protests.
In Berlin on Monday last week a 44-year-old woman was tragically run over by a cement truck while riding her bike in the borough of Wilmersdorf during the morning rush hour. Activists from Letzte Generation had at the same time blockaded the A100 highway, creating a significant traffic jam in the area in which the special vehicle that was needed on the scene of the accident in order to move the cement truck was stuck. The woman was declared brain dead that day in the hospital and later died.
The emergency doctor who treated the woman on the scene told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in an interview later in the week that the inability of the heavy-lifting vehicle to reach the scene did not play a role in the treatment that the victim received. However, in its official report released on Wednesday, the Berlin Fire Department contradicted the account of the emergency doctor. The report states that the heavy-lifting vehicle, needed to free the woman from underneath the cement mixer, would have arrived at the scene eight minutes earlier if it had not been stuck in the traffic jam caused by the activists.
According to reporting by the Tagesspiegel, the Berlin Fire Department has recorded seventeen instances since June when their work was impeded by climate activists causing traffic jams. Of these cases, 13 involved ambulances that arrived late on the scene of an emergency; two instances where ambulances became entirely stuck in traffic and never made it to their patient; and two instances where ambulances became stuck in traffic while transporting emergency patients to hospital.
In the last week a loud public debate regarding the appropriateness of such actions and their potential knock-on effects has gained momentum. Wolfgang Büchner, deputy press secretary for the Chancellery, warned that the border of acceptable protest was breached when the lives of others are put in danger. “The form of protest that we are seeing, right now this week, is neither expedient nor constructive. It cannot be that human lives are put in danger, which is why we do not accept this form of protest,” Büchner told the Tagesschau.
The opposition parties are now calling for stricter sentencing laws regarding such protest actions. According to reporting in the “Bild am Sonntag”, the opposition CDU/CSU intends on introducing draft legislation that would enact minimum jail sentences for any action that results in the hinderance of police or ambulances on city streets, and for any action of vandalism against cultural artifacts. The governing coalition has already signaled their opposition to any change to the law in response to the protest actions, with the argument that the current legal code provides enough prosecutorial options against activists.
Context:
It is easy to understand the frustration of those who have been directly affected by the group’s actions. Traffic jams are the worst. Many of the people stuck in those caused by the group will have been people made late to the jobs they work for low wages in order to keep a roof over the heads of themselves and their families. They have indeed hindered ambulances transporting people in need of medical care. The activists clearly know this and have decide to accept these potentialities. It would seem that in their view, bringing attention to government inaction in the face of the climate crisis outweighs those risks.
“Our purpose is not to be liked, but rather that society will become aware that we are racing towards a climate catastrophe,” Rochel said in her interview with RTL.
Their method of civil disobedience also has a long tradition in democratic and non-democratic societies alike. Prof. Dr. Martina Schäfer, who studies sustainability and protest movements at the TU Berlin, told the Tagesschau that the purpose of such protests is to disrupt the routines of daily life and draw attention to a democratic deficit. “Young people often have the impression that they have no other way of exerting influence, as for example lobby groups do every day,” she said.
If the group doesn’t change their tactics, then they run the risk of delegitimizing themselves. They must take steps to ensure that their actions do not endanger others. It is important that they do so, because what they are attempting to draw attention to is fundamentally important. Germany, along with every other major economy in the world, is not doing enough to prevent the worst effects of the climate crisis. The world is not meeting the goals it committed to in Paris in 2015, and the current set of crises we are facing now is pushing us even further away from achieving them.
“The clock is ticking,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told gathered dignitaries at the opening of the COP27 Climate Conference in Egypt on Monday. “We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing. Greenhous gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching a tipping point that will make climate chaos irreversible.” His message, and that of activists glued to the walls of museums and on the asphalt of our city streets, is the same.
Opposition to welfare reform offers a lesson in German parliamentary democracy
The largest opposition block in the German Parliament, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union (CSU) (commonly referred to collectively as “the Union”) have said that they intends to block the planned reform to the country’s ailing basic social welfare program known as Hartz IV. The package of reforms, first presented by Federal Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil in late July, is scheduled to be voted on in the lower house of parliament (Bundestag) on Thursday this week. The Union has decided to take a strong stand against the plan in the days before the vote and has threatened to derail the bill in the upper house of parliament (Bundesrat) if the governing coalition does not concede.
Reforming Hartz IV, which was first implemented in 2003, is a central tenant of the governing contract of the current coalition. The program functions as the safety net at the bottom of the social welfare system in Germany. It provides those who cannot work, for any number of reasons, a monthly stipend to cover the most basic cost of living expenses. The proposed reforms would raise the monthly stipend by €53, and ease rules regarding the amount of savings one can have and still qualify and reduce the administrative burden of recipients. (A much more detailed accounting of the reforms is available in DU #5 if you are interested in the details).
According to the Union, the reduced administrative burdens and higher savings allowance “send the wrong signal” to recipients. What they mean is that if the program is too lax, as they claim the reform would make it, then those enrolled in the program would have little incentive to re-join the workforce. The want these aspects reformed, and have said that they will hold up the legislative process in Bundesrat in order to achieve that. The reforms are supposed to go into effect on January 1, 2023; any hold-up in the legislative process would delay that implementation, and with it the stipend increase that, in the context of 10% year-on-year inflation, is sorely needed.
I don’t want to dwell on the political back and forth here, so I will say my peace. In my opinion, this line of argumentation is at best disingenuous. According to the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Federal Unemployment Office), 3.7 million people are currently enrolled in the program, and I would wager that few if any of them wish to be there. A single person on Hartz IV currently receives €449 per month to live on. It is hard to imagine anyone settling comfortably into covering their cost of living anywhere in this country on that level of income. The program is meant to catch those who fall through the cracks; it prevents homelessness and depravation. It may in some cases be abused, but that risk cannot possibly outweigh its societal benefit. By centering their criticism on the assumption that such abuse is widespread, the Union reduces their argumentation to petty partisan rhetoric.
Context:
This episode does, however, give us an opportunity to gain a better understanding of how the parliamentary system in Germany functions. The governing coalition has a majority in the Bundestag, which means that laws that are only required to be approved there cannot be blocked by the opposition.
However, the legislature in Germany is made up of two bodies. The Bundestag operates on the principle of proportional representation – seats are allocated to members of individual political parties based on the outcome of elections within their legislative districts. The Bundesrat is made up of representatives of the governments of the individual states. Each state has at least two representatives in the Bundesrat. States with a population of more that two million have four seats, those with a population over six million get five seats, and states with over seven million residents get six seats. Today there are a total of sixty nine representatives in the Bundesrat, which means thirty five votes make an absolute majority.
- Legislation that would amend the federal constitution
- Legislation that affects state finances
- Legislation that would impose organizational or bureaucratic changes on state-level administration
The social welfare reforms discussed here fall into the last category, and therefore the legislative package must also be approved by a majority of the thirty five voting members of the Bundesrat. This is the reason why the Union has the ability to disrupt the process. The absolute majority that the three parties in the governing coalition have in the Bundestag does not exist in the Bundesrat. The three coalition parties (SPD, Green, FDP) collectively only hold thirty seats in the Bundesrat. Nine of the sixteen German states are governed at least in part by the Union, and these happen to be some of the most populous states in the country.
This advantage of the opposition in the Bundesrat means that they do have the ability to, at the very least, complicate the legislative process for the governing coalition. If the Union does move to block the package of social welfare reforms as it has indicated it intends to, it would not spell the end of the coalition’s legislative project. The bill would then be sent to a committee within the Bundesrat for revision before being brought back for another vote. It would, however, mean that the January 1, 2023 implementation deadline the coalition has set for itself would be almost impossible to uphold.