Germany commemorates this Saturday the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wallthe event which 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 asked the population to exercise unity in a “difficult” 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,” declared the chancellor in a message published on his social networks.
“Our shared history in the fall of 1989 shows us how we achieved our goals: by remaining united, for peace and freedom, for security and prosperity, for the rule of law and democracy,” declared the chancellor in a video message. described the fall of the Wall as “the happy culmination of pan-European development”.
In this sense, Scholz called for international solidarity in general and European solidarity in particular, recalling how Germany’s “neighbors” contributed to this historic event in the same message, taken up by the German television channel Deutsche Welle.
Collapse of the coalition
Last Wednesday, Scholz announced the departure of the liberals from the government coalitionwhile ensuring that he would submit to a vote of confidence on January 15, which would imply new elections in March. Even if the German Chancellor had initially ruled out changing the timetable, this Friday, following the informal European Council held in Budapest, he was not so categorical.
The fracturing of the coalition formed by Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the liberal FDP occurs due to disagreements over the 1 billion euro hole in the budgets and the country’s economic crisis, 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 to be the favorite in terms of voting intentions, while the current Minister of the Economy, Robert Habeck, announced this Friday his intention to run as a candidate. candidate of the Los Verdes party, member of the current government coalition.
Commemoration weekend
This weekend, the city of Berlin will be covered with thousands of posters along four kilometers of the route of the old wall and On Sunday in particular, the country’s capital will be the scene of a macro-concert bringing together a group of “hundreds” of popular musiciansas the town hall explains on its website.
The wall divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989 into two halves, the east and the west, belonging respectively to the socialist state of the German Democratic Republic, in the territory under Soviet occupation after the end of World War II, 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, and its lifting eventually closed the only remaining space between East and West , after the closure of the East German authorities. most of the border with West Germany, from the Baltic Sea to the former Czechoslovakia, in 1952.
The fall of the Wall ultimately culminated a wave of protests which, a month earlier, had motivated the division of the President of the German Democratic Republic, Erich Honecker. Massive protests demanded reform for the country similar to that carried out by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Finally, at a memorable evening press conference on November 9, 1989, the information secretary of the Socialist United Party of Germany, Gunter Schabowski, announced that the country’s citizens would be allowed to travel legally abroad, until then the privilege of a few.
Schabowski indicated, with a dubious air and to the surprise of all the media present, that this measure would come into force immediately when in reality its execution was scheduled for 4:00 a.m. the next day, but the die has already been cast: his statement provoked the immediate mobilization of tens of thousands of people shortly before midnight, when border guards decided to open the crossings and citizens began to demolish the historic structure, now transformed into a relic.
