Merkel’s Balancing Act
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The German Chancellor is widely respected as good at crisis management, but public confidence in her government's pandemic policies is ebbing away. How will her party, the CDU, campaign during this autumn's general election - is it possible the next Chancellor could be a Green? Jenny Hill reports from Berlin on power struggles and shifting opinions.
While the Christian Democrats confront their future, the German state is still carrying on talks with the government of Namibia about its colonial past. Land rights, official apologies and reparations have all been discussed . So has the treatment of the Herero and Nama peoples in the early 1900s, which some historians now consider "the first genocide of the 20th century". Tim Whewell met black and white Namibians still viewing their heritage though very different lenses.
In Armenia the public mood is mutinous, in the aftermath of the most recent round of conflict over Nagorno Karabakh. A ceasefire agreement is holding, but there's grief and anger on the streets of Yerevan. Mark Stratton has friends in the disputed territory and hoped to revisit them, to see how they had survived the fighting.
Millions of people in Iranian and Kurdish communities around the world recently celebrated Nowruz - the Persian New Year, a joyful festival full of the symbolism of rebirth. But it's enjoyed particularly passionately in the ancient town of Akre in the Zagros mountains in northern Iraq. Leila Molana Allen climbed its stone ramparts and steep hillsides to witness the spectacle.
In eastern Romania, there's a village like no other: Tichilesti, home to Europe's last leprosarium - a facility where people with Hansen’s disease, better known as leprosy, were once sent for life. Nick Thorpe shares some of the stories he heard there.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts |
| 0:05.1 | Today, whose version of history? |
| 0:07.7 | In Namibia, in South West Africa, white and black citizens are adorns over events both |
| 0:13.4 | forgotten and remembered. |
| 0:15.9 | The consequences of defeat over Nagorno-Karabakh resound in Armenia with grief and rage out |
| 0:22.2 | on the streets of the capital Yerevan. |
| 0:25.4 | We're in the Kurdish region of Iraq for the celebration of Nauru's, the joyful festival |
| 0:30.9 | of the Persian New Year, and we have stories from the banks of the River Danube of lifetime |
| 0:37.4 | spent in the last leper colony in Europe. |
| 0:42.0 | First to Germany, where politics is as entwined with the pandemic as anywhere, Angela Merkel's |
| 0:48.8 | government is facing a disillusioned public, where last year six out of ten people believed |
| 0:54.4 | its pandemic strategy was good, the figures now half that. |
| 0:59.2 | Her party, the Christian Democrats, are facing criticism from all sides over the slow and |
| 1:04.8 | inconsistent vaccine rollout, described as paper bureaucracy straight out of the 1950s. |
| 1:11.7 | Now, there are 16,000 new cases each day and rising. |
| 1:17.2 | Mrs. Merkel is due to step down later this year, her party's leadership up for grabs. |
| 1:23.0 | Jenny Hill in Berlin says the old certainties are shifting. |
| 1:27.8 | The Prime Minister just wouldn't stop talking. |
| 1:31.0 | Our interview was over, his press officers were clearing their throats and glaring meaningfully |
| 1:35.8 | at their watches, but Armin Laschet, a short, cheerful barrel of a man, and the state |
| 1:40.9 | Prime Minister of the North Rhine Westphalia region, was in a garulous mood. |
| 1:45.6 | Sunlight poured into his vast, airy office as he proudly showed off the artwork on the |
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