Berlin leftists seek to pave way for coalition

 NATO is to be awarded with international Westphalian Peace Prize, worth €100,000 ($113,350), on Thursday afternoon, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz set to give the laudatory address.

The prize, which is expected to be received by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the ceremony in Münster, honors the military alliance for its contribution to the European peace order.

The award is being presented to NATO at a time when its role as guarantor of Europe’s security has been cast into some uncertainty by US ambivalence under the Trump administration.

The Westphalian Peace Price, which commemorates the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, is awarded every two years by the Economic Society for Westphalia and Lippe.

The 1648 peace agreement, concluded in the city halls of Münster and Osnabrück, ended the Thirty Years’ War and is considered by many as a milestone in establishing the principle of national sovereignty.

The populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) has officially dropped its founder’s name from its title to become the Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason.

However, it will retain the abbreviation BSW.

 Secretary general Oliver Ruhnert said Wagenknecht’s name had initially been used because of her popularity but that the party had now succeeded in establishing itself as a brand in its own right.

Wagenknecht, a former parliamentary leader of the Left Party, founded the BSW in 2024, stepping down as its leader in November 2025.

Although the BSW advocates economic policies that are left-wing, it also has a nationalist and anti-migration stance that are more typical of the right-wing political spectrum, making it hard to classify in conventional terms.

It also favors closer ties with Russia.

Federal police arrested a suspected member of the “Islamic State” (IS) terrorist group in central Germany on Wednesday morning. 

Prosecutors allege that the man joined the group in Iraq at the latest by early 2016, fighting in its ranks until early 2017.

He was detained in the Waldeck-Frankenberg district, north of Frankfurt, and is now being held in pre-trial detention after appearing at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe.

Politicians from the socialist Left Party, the environmentalist Greens and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) in Berlin are set to meet on Thursday to talk through several contentious issues before embarking on possible coalition negotiations.

Among other things, the talks will focus on accusations of antisemitism leveled at the Left Party, which won recent elections.

The party has also been accused of cultivating links to organized crime.

The accusations were fueled by the attendance by the head of an Arab clan with alleged criminal ties  and a controversial pro-Palestinian activists at an election night event held by the Left Party in the Neukölln district of the city on September 20.

The Greens and the Left Party have said reaching agreement on these contentious issues is a “basic prerequisite” if formal exploratory talks on a coalition are to begin.

If the Left Party were to end up leading a coalition in the German capital, its lead candidate and parliamentary group co-leader, Elif Eralp, could become the first female governing mayor of Berlin.

A hearty guten Tag from the DW newsroom in Bonn as the new month gets underway!

We will be looking at the pre-preliminary talks between the Left Party, the Greens and the Social Democrats (SPD) on possibly forming a coalition in the capital, Berlin.

The parties are approaching the matter with great caution amid accusations that the Left Party, which won recent elections, is antisemitic and maintains contacts with organized criminality.

This comes as another party, the populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), changes its name to the catchy “Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason”, while retaining the BSW abbreviation.   

Meanwhile, motorists should be seeing prices at gas stations take a sudden fall as a fuel tax cut goes into effect.

Read on to find out more about these and other German stories.