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Saarland’s state election: Oskar Lafontaine once governed here as an SPD politician. Now he wants to regain power as a candidate for the Left Party. The CDU’s Peter Müller, the current state premier, is at risk of losing his absolute majority. The race is wide open …
Three states go to the polls on August 30 - Thüringen, Saxony and the Saarland. Long-time state premier of the latter was then Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine and he's now hoping to be re-elected, this time as head of the Left Party.
It's set to be an exciting race - will the SPD return to power with the help of the Left party and the Greens, or will the current CDU government remain in office? If CDU State Premier Peter Müller is ousted, the upcoming parliamentary elections will likely be overshadowed by fresh debate about the threat from the left
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has been Germany's economics minister for six months and he's already ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel in the popularity ratings. A surprising development, considering his policies aren't always so popular, such as his opposition to government rescue packages for ailing companies.
But depending on how the Christian Democrats and his own party the Christian Social Union of Bavaria fare in the federal elections in September, he looks set to become an even more prominent player on Germany's political landscape.
When she was 16, Halina Wawzyniak joined the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor party to the former ruling communist party in East Germany.
She played a key role in the merging the PDS and WASG (Western Germany's Labor and Social Justice Party) into the Left Party. Now 36, she's the party deputy chairwoman and she's hoping to become a member of parliament. But her election campaign has raised a few eyebrows.
Known as the boat people, Vietnamese refugees emigrates en masse in rickety boats from Communist-controlled Vietnam in the late 1970s.
One of three died attempting to flee--the boats were overcrowded and often attacked by pirates. In Germany, Rupert Neudeck was horrified by the images of the boat people he saw on TV. With the help of donations, he chartered the freighter Cap Anamur and over the years, helped rescue over 10,000 people. Many of them still live in Germany.
