BERLIN – The next decade will be hopeful if the people of Germany come together to fight climate change, support development in Africa and thwart hatred and anti-Semitism at home, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday in his nation in its fifteenth edition Speech of the Year.
“The 20s can be good years,” he said. “Let’s be amazed once again at what we can do.”
It is a high order.
While many in the country saw a strong youth protest movement as a hopeful sign and a slowdown in the arrival of new refugees in the country as a deactivation of a crisis, 2020 was a difficult year for Germany. It led to the emergence of far-right extremism, a sluggish economy, and an increasingly strained relationship with major trading partners, including the United States.
And all this is the threat of climate change, as Germany has experienced record temperatures and extreme droughts, floods and snowstorms in the last decade.
“I, 65, will not personally experience all the consequences that climate change will entail if politicians do not act,” Ms. Merkel in her five-minute speech, added that future generations “will live with the consequences of what we do or fail to do today.”
Many of these young people have skipped school to organize mass protests in Berlin and other German cities since 2018, calling for action against climate change.
In her speech, the Chancellor referred to the recently passed laws, designed to help reduce Germany’s carbon emissions, regulations that many have criticized for being too weak, but which Ms. Merkel says they set the framework needed to take effective environmental action.
“We need, now more than ever, the courage to think in new ways, the strength to leave well-trodden paths, the willingness to enter a new territory and the will to act faster,” he said, adding that it was essential to do so “if a good life on this planet is possible for today’s youth and for those who follow them.”
It is unclear how many spectators tune in to watch the chancellor’s New Year’s speech and receive New Year’s wishes, which was once a tradition in many homes, given the traditions of the competition on a celebrated day of lush way by the Germans. Last year, three million households watched the first television version on the main station.
Mrs. Merkel’s Tuesday New Year’s address may be the last. Although he has repeatedly promised to remain in office until the next scheduled elections, in 2021, his coalition government is unpopular and experts have been discussing his early departure since he announced in 2018 that he would not run for office. re-election.
He used the speech as an opportunity to emphasize the importance of public safety and security for local politicians, at a time when far-right and hate crimes have shaken Germany. In June, a state politician was assassinated on his porch by a far-right extremist. And in October, a gunman attempted to enter a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle, in an anti-Semitic, racial attack in which he killed two people.
“Protecting them, like all the people of our country, against hatred, hostility and violence, against racism and anti-Semitism, is the duty of the state and it is a duty with which the federal government has a particular commitment, ”Ms. Said Merkel.
Merkel also said it was crucial to work with African nations where people suffer hardships and turmoil, so that they can thrive there instead of traversing desperate European shores.
“Cooperation with Africa lies in our own interests,” he said, “because only when people have the opportunity to live in peace and security will escape and migration be reduced.”
These public addresses of German leaders, comparable to those of the State of the Union address in the United States or the talks on fire by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, have their roots in the Kaiser era at the turn of the twentieth century. they were first televised in the 1950s.
In its post-war history, New Year’s speech has not always passed without a hitch. On December 31, 1986, the public station accidentally reproduced the speech of Chancellor Helmut Kohl of the previous year, in an apparent case of human error, although supporters of Mr. Kohl accused it of being an act of political sabotage.