Oh boy a new giant cursed gemstone was just found
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Yeah, very, very bad optics, but Putin should keep the Krimsekt in the fridge for now.
This won’t affect the federal budget until 2026.
The next federal elections will be in September 2025.
Odds are the FDP won’t be part of the next administration, or even in parliament. Lindner’s shtick has always been “only we are the party of fiscal responsibility” - which translates as “neoliberal austerity nonsense” and what I like to call the cult of the balanced budget. And by now even the FDP’s core demographic is quite fed up with it because it has also blocked subsidiaries for small-ish and medium-sized industries. Which make up quite a lot of the German economy. Like specialist companies with a handful of niche products that rely heavily on exports. A discrete way of subsidising those is to have the ministry for development aid - which the FDP wants to dissolve - financially support projects abroad that then will buy technology and whatnot from said specialist companies.
My bet is that November 2025 there will be yet another coalition government, this time including the CDU but probably not the FDP.
The CDU is very outspoken about the need to support Ukraine. There is already quite a lot of money in the defense budget that can’t be spent soon because the defense industries are still in the process of ramping up production; there will be ways to re-route this without a FDP-run ministry of finance if needs be.
Of course, the best thing to hope for is that the war is over by 2026.
Two years ago when it became evident that the"special operation" would last longer than a couple of weeks my guess was that fighting off the invasion would turn into some sort of proxy war (from the US/EU perspective) and might well last anything between 5 to 10 years. But then I’m a perennial optimist.
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“Safe” “haven”.
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As predicted by most here: the “centrists” have failed to step up to the plate as always.
Remember the headlines after the election? Things like “far left victory plunges France into chaos”?
https://www.ft.com/content/0a644ea2-924c-45a5-be37-c7020a8c16f9
Your grouping didn’t win. Talk to and with the left. Compromise and actually allow change to be enacted or France will be fascist.
The Centrists!
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As far as I know it’s basically posturing, trying to push the eventual government rightwards, rather than an actual coup or anything like that.
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Yeah, still… that kind of thing can and does have consequences (as you know)… I wish some of this centrists would pick up a fucking history book now and again… 
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