Friedrich Merz

He has always been there. No one has been in German politics as long as Wolfgang Schäuble. He looked back on 50 years as a member of the German Bundestag. Schäuble was a man who helped shape the fate of the Republic for decades. He shaped politics - as the manager of German unity, for example. In 1990, he was the victim of an assassination attempt and fought his way back to life. He died in December 2023.

Does Germany still have control over its asylum policy? Michael Kyrath disagrees. State failure and loss of control must end. Kyrath lost his 17-year-old daughter Ann-Marie to a Palestinian asylum seeker who stabbed her and her boyfriend multiple times on a train in Brokstedt two years ago. Since his daughter's death, Michael Kyrath has been lobbying the media and politicians for more control and more removals. In Stuttgart, the reporters are on the road with a police patrol policing a knife-free zone, and the Danish Minister of Migration explains how the Danes have adapted their asylum policy. Presenter Julia Ruhs is also in Aschaffenburg, where a child and a 41-year-old man died in a knife attack in January 2025. She visits the daycare group and speaks with the association's chairman. The documentary report under the new banner KLAR explores the question of what needs to be changed in Germany's asylum policy.

For decades Germany was allergic to debt. But new chancellor Friedrich Merz has - unexpectedly - loosened the country’s constitutional debt brake, injecting hundreds of billions of euros into the armed forces and infrastructure. The move, he hopes, will revive Europe’s largest economy and build up its military as Donald Trump’s US administration dismantles the transatlantic relations that underpinned Germany’s postwar recovery. The FT travels to Frankfurt and Berlin to examine why investment in crumbling schools, roads and rail infrastructure - and defence - is needed and to ask if the spending gamble will kickstart Germany's economic engine.

In November 2023, right-wing thought leaders, politicians from the AfD, CDU and Werteunion, as well as numerous entrepreneurs, met behind closed doors at the Landhaus Adlon in Potsdam. The topics discussed at the meeting were never intended to be made public. But weeks later, the media company Correctiv published the explosive contents of this conference, as investigative journalists were also present undercover. The revelations caused a stir and triggered the largest protest rallies against right-wing radicalism in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, with more than three million people nationwide. Suddenly, Germans were discussing a word that hardly anyone had known until then: "remigration." Award-winning documentary filmmaker Volker Heise tells the story in a fact-rich, gripping, and unpretentious way, like a political thriller, bringing together the voices of those who were part of the meeting and those who exposed it to create an illuminating overall picture.

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