Chancellor Olaf Scholz calls for “pan-European” unity and recognizes a “challenging” moment for the country due to the collapse of the government coalition
Germany commemorates this Saturday the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the event that marked the end of the post-war separation between the east and west of the country, at a time of political crisis due to the collapse of the government coalition led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has asked the population to exercise unity in a “challenging” political moment for both the country and the world.
“The message of the 1989 revolution is more relevant than ever: courage, trust and solidarity bear fruit. We achieve nothing against each other, we are only strong together,” said the chancellor in a message posted on his social networks.
“Our shared history in the autumn of 1989 shows us how we achieved our goals: by standing together, for peace and freedom, for security and prosperity, for the rule of law and democracy,” the chancellor said in a video message in which he described the fall of the Wall as the “happy culmination of a pan-European development.”
Along these lines, Scholz called for international solidarity in general and European solidarity in particular, recalling how Germany’s “neighbours” contributed to this historic event in the same message, picked up by the German television channel Deutsche Welle.
COLLAPSE OF THE COALITION
Last Wednesday, Scholz announced the withdrawal of the liberals from the government coalition, while assuring that he would submit to a vote of confidence on 15 January, which would imply new elections in March. Although the German chancellor initially ruled out changing the calendar, this Friday at the end of the informal European Council held in Budapest, he was not so adamant.
The fracture of the coalition formed by Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the liberal FDP is due to disagreements over the 1,000 million euro hole in the Budgets and the economic crisis in the country, the response to which has caused a split within the alliance.
Thus, the main opposition leader, Friedrich Merz, is already the official candidate of the conservative bloc for the Chancellery and appears as the favourite in voting intention, while the current Minister of Economy, Robert Habeck, announced this Friday his intention to run as a candidate for the Greens party, a member of the current government coalition.
WEEKEND OF COMMEMORATIONS
This weekend, the city of Berlin will be covered with thousands of posters along four kilometers of the former wall and on Sunday, in particular, the capital of the country will be the scene of a macro concert starring a group of “hundreds” of popular musicians, as explained by the City Council on its website.
The Wall divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989 into two halves, east and west, belonging respectively to the socialist state of the German Democratic Republic, in the territory under Soviet occupation after the end of the Second World War, and to the Federal Republic of Germany, aligned with the United States and its Western allies.
The structure was an expression of the so-called Iron Curtain, the historic competition between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War period, and its lifting ended up closing the only space left between East and West, after the East German authorities closed most of the border with West Germany, from the Baltic Sea to the former Czechoslovakia, in 1952.
The fall of the Wall ended up culminating a wave of protests that, a month earlier, had motivated the split of the president of the German Democratic Republic, Erich Honecker. Mass demonstrations demanded for the country a reform similar to that implemented by the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Finally, in a momentous night press conference on November 9, 1989, the information secretary of the governing Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Gunter Schabowski, announced that the country’s citizens would be allowed to legally travel abroad, until then the privilege of a few.
Schabowski, with a hesitant air and to the surprise of all the media present, indicated that this measure would come into effect immediately, when in fact its execution was scheduled for 4:00 a.m. the following day, but the die was already cast: his declaration provoked the immediate mobilization of tens of thousands of people shortly before midnight, at which point the border guards decided to open the crossings and the citizens began to tear down the historic structure, already transformed into a relic.
