Germany news: Far-right AfD polls 37% ahead of state vote

Women's football in Germany generated more income in 2024/25, with the 12 clubs of the Bundesliga reaching revenue of more than €43 million ($51 million).

The figures came in the German Football Federation's (DFB) report published on Thursday.

The average income per club was thus €3.6 million, but expenditure reached €5.8 million. The clubs' books are balanced by the men's teams. Only SGS Essen is a women-only club.

Women's football has garnered increased interest in recent years, but Bundesliga attendance has dropped to less than 2,700 spectators per match.

Streaming platforms DAZN and MagentaSport have said that the audience for women's football has increased by 7%. 

Some 5,700 fighters from the so-called "Islamic State" (IS)group were moved from Syria to Iraq last week by US forces.

Among the thousands of fighters, around two dozen were connected to Germany — either being German citizens or foreign nationals who lived in Germany before joining the Islamist group.

The reporting came from the German dpa news agency.

The transfer of IS fighters and their relatives came after Syrian government forces took control of the Kurdish-run camps that had been holding them for years.

The news came at the same time the German military said it was withdrawing more forces from the Kurdish region of Iraq.

A small number of German soldiers will remain on the ground at the multinational camp in Erbil.

Ski Aggu, a Berlin-based Deutschrap artist, has cancelled his planned show in New York, citing "democratic values."

The 28-year-old rapper had been planning to perform in April, but his management confirmed the cancellation on Thursday in a statement to Berlin's public broadcaster RBB.

The musician cited the need to defend "democratic values" and warned against history repeating itself.

He said the situation in the US in the past months had got to the point that he could no longer just show up and perform "as if everything was normal."

President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has expressed his opposition to Germany applying to host the 2036 Summer Olympic Games, according to German magazine Der Spiegel.

Steinmeier reportedly cited the historical significance of the date as it would fall exactly 100 years after the 1936 games that were hosted by Nazi Germany and used as a propaganda tool on the international stage.

The president instead said Germany should be a candidate for the 2040 or 2046 games, a spokesperson told Spiegel.

Thursday marked six years since the racist attack that resulted in the deaths of 10 people in the central German city of Hanau.

On February 19, 2020, a 43-year-old white man opened fire at two locations, killing eight men and one woman on the spot. A 70-year-old died last month from injuries sustained that night. All the victims had migrant backgrounds.

The attacker also shot his own mother before killing himself.

This year's commemoration saw wreaths being laid in Hanau, with events also planned for Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich.

Hanau Mayor Claus Kaminsky described the 2020 attack as "the most terrible day this city has suffered in peacetime."

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu spoke on the phone on Wednesday, Tinubu's office said on Thursday.

The two leaders discussed several issues, including a stalled electricity project.

German conglomerate Siemens was part of a 2019 agreement to upgrade Nigeria's electricity transmission lines and distribution substations. It aimed to reach 7,000 MW of reliable power by 2021 and 11,000 MW by 2023. But the project has faced regulatory and logistical setbacks.

Merz told Tinubu that Siemens would complete the project with financing from Deutsche Bank.

The pair also discussed instability in Nigeria's Sahel region.

"The Sahel corridor is bad and needs our support. Intelligence support reconnaissance is needed," the Nigerian president said.

Tinubu requested German helicopters to help with reconnaissance and intelligence operations against the insurgency.

Merz also backed plans for a Museum of African Arts, Tinubu's office said.

Germany's Defense Ministry has responding cautiously to reports about a possible additional order of US-made stealth fighter jets.

"There are currently no concrete plans and no political decision for the procurement of further F-35s,” a spokeswoman for the ministry said.

Germany has so far ordered 35 F-35 jets from the United States to replace the Luftwaffe’s aging Tornado fleet, which is used to maintain Germany’s role in NATO nuclear sharing. Under the deterrence concept, NATO allies would have access to US nuclear weapons in a defense scenario.

The expanded F-35 purchase is seen as one option to ensure short-term readiness with current technology if the future Franco-German air combat system FCAS is scaled back or fails.

France’s Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad told DW that Paris had spoken German counterparts about moving forward on the FCAS, and that he believed this would happen.

"I'm confident that we can put the different actors around the table, continue to move forward and implement this project because once again," said Haddad.

There are security and industrial policy concerns about increasing Germany's dependence on the United States, including rumors of an F-35 kill switch that would limit what customers could do with the planes.

Firefighters have been investigating after a gas detector in the Reichstag building in Berlin triggered an alarm, prompting a large-scale response from the fire department.

A small amount of a hazardous substance most likely leaked, a fire department spokesperson told Germany’s DPA news agency.

The automatic alarm was received by the fire department around 5:15 a.m. Approximately 80 emergency personnel are currently on site assessing the situation.

A spokesperson said that emergency crews had already reached the room from which the alarm originated. A decontamination area has been set up on-site for the safety of the emergency personnel.

A cleaning concentrate has already been identified as the possible cause, according to the spokesperson.

"It's possible that an excessively high concentration of cleaning agent triggered the alarm," the spokesperson said. However, this has not yet been definitively determined.

The operation led to traffic restrictions and the rerouting of bus routes that run past the Reichstag building this morning.

The Reichstag, home to Germany's lower house of parliament the Bundestag, was the site of a 1933 fire that the Nazis used in a move to consolidate power.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz is calling for a shift toward greater willingness to work hard, saying Germany needs renewed effort to move the country forward.

Speaking at the Political Ash Wednesday event in Trier, Merz said lifestyles and a four-day week may be appealing, but warned that preserving prosperity requires a strong work ethic.

"Lifestyle and a four-day week. All nice, you can do all that," Merz said at the Political Ash Wednesday event in Trier. "But if we want to maintain our prosperity, then we all have to pitch in together now and make sure that really good work is being done in this country again."

Germany would not have today's prosperity, Merz said, "if our parents had gone to work with this mindset that we partly see today."

"And that is what I want to get away from. I want to motivate us, all of you, all of us together, to undertake a new collective effort here," the chancellor said. "Not with coercion, not with pressure, not with new laws, but simply with cheerfulness at work."

Merz's Christian Democrats (CDU) are meeting for a party congress on Friday, where the debate over performance and work culture is expected to be central.

A proposal from the CDU's business wing to limit the legal right to part-time work had sparked controversy, originally titled "No legal right to lifestyle part-time." The motion has since been revised, now speaking of "organizing" part-time entitlements, with the term "lifestyle part-time" removed.

A new poll shows the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) leading clearly in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, seven months before an election there.

The Forsa survey for the Ostsee-Zeitung put the AfD at 37%, ahead of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) of state premier Manuela Schwesig on 23% and the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) on 13%. The socialist Left Party, which currently governs in coalition with the SPD, was measured at 11%.

The state election is scheduled for September 20.

The business-focused Free Democrats (FDP) on 2% and the Greens on 4% would miss the 5% threshold and drop out of the state parliament, while the  populist left BSW was at 5%, right on the edge.

Forsa surveyed 1,003 eligible voters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern between February 9 and February 16.

Compared with an Infratest dimap poll for NDR published in late January, the AfD gained 2 points while the SPD lost 2, with the CDU unchanged at 13%.

Polling institutes note that surveys reflect opinion at the time of questioning and are not forecasts, with the reported margin of error in the Forsa poll at plus or minus 3 percentage points.

While the AfD would emerge as the largest force in the state parliament under the current figures, all major political parties have said they will not work with it.

In the 2021 state election, the SPD won 39.6%, while the AfD took 16.7%, the CDU 13.3%, the Left Party 9.9%, the Greens 6.3%, and the FDP 5.8%.

Guten Tag from DW's newsroom in Bonn.

You join us as polling in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania puts the far-rigth Alternative for Germany (AfD) at 37%.

State elections are planned there later this year and the AfD will be hoping for a strong showing.

It is one of five states to elect new regional governments in 2026.

However, all major parties have ruled out cooperating with the AfD, potentially leaving the states where the party does well likely to end up with fragile and fragmented coalitions.

Stay with us here for the latest headlines out of Germany.