Global News Podcast - Merz: Germany faces a "tectonic shift" after AfD victory

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

Friedrich Merz says the decisive win in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt by the far-right Alternative for Germany, AfD, signals the need for a major reckoning. The AfD's national co-leader, Alice Weidel, says it's aiming to win at least forty per cent in the next general election. Also: the funeral of the Bosnian Serb war criminal, General Ratko Mladić, has gone ahead in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, where some people consider him a national hero. The Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun, has warned of a "dangerous escalation" by Israel after women and children were killed in an air strike on a residential building in southern Lebanon. A new film about the most important weather forecast in British history, which gave the go-ahead for D-Day on the sixth June 1944, is released in the UK. And the BBC speaks to the 13-year-old who has written a symphony warning about the challenges posed by artificial intelligence.The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight. Get the news that matters, delivered twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends, plus special bonus episodes reacting to urgent breaking stories. Follow or subscribe now and never miss a moment. Get in touch: [e-mail]: Description: German Chancellor and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party leader Friedrich Merz attends a press conference the day after the Saxony-Anhalt state elections in Berlin, Germany, September 7, 2026. Credit: REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, good luck. Odu brings your business together on a single platform, from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing. Visit Odu.com to book a demo. It's ODbolo.com.

Get more with BBC podcasts, wherever you listen. Be the first to listen to your favorite shows, like Evil Genius. good, bad billionaire and You're Dead to Me, with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad-free with an Amazon music subscription. This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson and at 15 hours GMT on Monday the 7th of September, these are our main stories. The German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz expresses shock after the far-right AFD's decisive victory.

in state elections in the east of the country. Thousands attend the funeral of the convicted Serbian war criminal General Ratko Mladic in Belgrade. After talks with President Trump's envoys, President Zelensky says it's important to keep diplomacy going. Also in this podcast. Thousands of lives. Pinge on this. A film about the weather on D-Day in the Second World War.

The German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz has said He is shocked by the victory of the far-right party alternative for Germany, the AFD. It won its biggest victory yet in elections in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, taking 44% of the vote, while Mr Mertz's Conservative-CDU party came way behind with around 18%. The AFD, which has tapped into growing disillusionment with centrist parties, wants to, among other policies, ban LGBTQ rainbow flags in schools and have the children of refugees taught in segregated classes. Mr Mertz said the country is facing a huge political shift.

His words were spoken by a translator. That's an election result which doesn't make it possible to continue with business as usual and we don't. It has an impact on us, even on myself personally. And I also have to accept that this is the worst electoral defeat that the CDU has suffered in years, if not decades. Obviously, there will have to be consequences. The AFD's candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Segment,

said that his party's victory was a wake-up call for Germany. We have achieved exactly what we wanted. We have written history. People gave a clear political signal in this state. We need a fundamentally different political approach, putting our own interests, our own country first. But the AFD is short of an absolute majority and other parties have ruled out governing with it.

I asked our Berlin correspondent Jessica Parker, who's in Saxony-Anhealtz capital Magdeburg, what happens next? So alternative for Deutsche Land is claiming it's in talks with some CDU members in terms of whether it can go on to form a state government. CDU as a party, Chancellor Friedrich Mercer's party, has categorically denied that they will work with the AFD, but I think it's fair to say that some in the party are very unhappy at the idea of an alternative option, which is maybe trying to pile in with the far left Delinca party, which they also say they wouldn't work with. So I think a lot is up in the air at the moment.

Another possibility that's been mooted is the idea that another small party, the BSV or BSW, could they give tacit support to Alternativa for Deutsche Land to allow them to form a minority government? Eurigman, the lead candidate, has always spoken about wanting to govern with a stable majority. He doesn't have that at the moment. So it looks like we are in the world of maybe deal-making, but options are rather limited because most parties will not work with Alternative for Deutschland as part of what is known as the firewall, the Brandemauer, even though that Brandemauer is coming under ever-growing pressure? Chancellor Mertz is expected to hold talks with the top ranks of the CDU.

How worried do you think he now is about the AFD in the run-up to national elections? Well, national elections are, as things stand, some years away. But I'd flip that a little bit around. I'd say how worried are people in the CDU about Friedrich Mertz and his leadership? He is suffering from very poor poll ratings. he's not popular in Germany. And one of his stated missions was to try and bring the political centre together and his coalition he has in Berlin with the SPD

and deliver the reforms Germany needs to kickstart its economy. He's tried to take a harder line on immigration. And the idea was that that would see off Alternativa for Deutschland and cut into their support. But those reforms have dragged out. There are worries that they aren't very popular with people. So I think, yes, he is going to be worried. This is a destabilising moment for his already embattled government.

And there are over the course of this year, and it's always a little bit difficult to judge how seriously to take them, but whispers over whether he can really see out his term in office. And the rest of Europe and the EU in particular watching this very closely. Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, people might wonder, okay, how on earth can one state-level election in a region with around 2 million people kind of send repercussions across Europe?

But as you've been pointing out, I think it's a marker that Alternativa for Deutscheand, which of course was founded back in the day as an anti-Euro, Eurosceptic party, that is growing in popularity, not just in Eastern Germany, but it's also leading the polls nationwide. So I think the EU will be watching this very carefully. there are some, of course, who are more aligned to the AFD's politics, who are seeing this as a great moment for Germany and for Europe. But of course, we've got to make the point,

what happens in Germany really matters because it is the EU's largest economy, the powerhouse of the European Union. And so that, of course, means that people are always watching the politics of what happens here. Jessica Parker. The funeral of the former Bosnian Serb commander Ratcombe Ladich has been taking place in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Following his death at the end of last month, his body has been transported from the Hague

where he had been serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. To most of the world, General Maditch was known as the butcher of Bosnia. He was convicted for the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces killed around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. But in his home country, he remained a national hero. The BBC's special correspondent Alan Little covered the conflict in the Balkans extensively in the 1990s. Well, Sir Popper Opper opinion walked hand in hand with Racklandage,

where he was committing the crimes for which he was later indicted. Remember, at the heart of the Bosnian War, was a huge criminal enterprise to dispossess by force of military arms. Hundreds of thousands of people burn their towns down so that they wouldn't come back. And this was the campaign that came to be known as ethnic cleansing, that sort of grim euphemous. that the Bosnian War bequeathed to the lexicon of warfare, but to have public opinion continued to revere Mladge, the height of this.

And at the heart of that was a sort of crisis of disbelief, if you'd like. They simply didn't believe the stories that were told about Mladic and the war effort by the international community and by UN peacekeepers and so on. And they still deny it. And my experience is you go into parts of Serbian occupied Bosnia or Serbian inhabited Bosnia. And people will deny the Srevenates a massacre, people will deny the ethnic cleansing and say that Racklem Ladich was simply defending the very doorstep of the Serbian homeland.

One former interior minister of Serbia compared Racklam Ladig to Gavril Prinsip, the man who assassinated the archduke transferdin and Sarajevo in 1914. And his body was later brought back from its prison in Vienna and buried in a Serbian Orthodox shrine in a hill overlooking Sarajevo. So Radcom Ladich now takes his... place, if you like, in a very strongly entrenched tradition of turning men of violence into cherished and revered martyrs in the cause of the Serbian nation. And I think that's something that's very strongly fixed in the Serbian shared imagination. Now, Serbia has applied to become

a member of the EU. It handed Rutlandich over under pressure from the EU. And the EU is now very worried about Serbia's commitment to a transition to the rule of law. It's commitment to the independence of the judiciary. It's commitment to many of the other core values that the EU. One delegation to Brussels has been cancelled already. And now there's a big doubt about whether the next chance of funding for the transition to democracy and the independence of judiciary and so on, 1.5 billion euros. There's no doubt about whether that will now be delivered to Serbia. So this is not a good look. Giving full state and military honours to a man convicted of genocide is very, very problematic for Serbia's accession process.

The BBC's Alan Little. With no sign of an end to the war with Russia and after three rounds of talks with White House envoys, President Zelensky has said the most important thing is to continue working together to keep diplomacy going. At the same time, Kiev is suffering more daily air raid alerts than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. That's according to BBC Verify analysis of government figures.

There was a brief pause in attacks over the weekend, while the US envoys were in the Ukrainian capital. But in recent weeks, Moscow's round-the-clock attacks with new faster drones have forced people to head for shelter up to 13 times a day. Our diplomatic correspondent James Landau reports from Kiev. We've come to the scene of another strike right in the heart of Kiev, and it's a familiar scene. A building, smoking, is the fire caused by what we think was a drone.

lots of security nearby, fire engines trying to put the fire out, crowds forming. But here's the difference. This is broad daylight. This strike has not happened in the middle of the night. It happened shortly before 11 in the morning. This is now part of a pattern that's forming of more and more attacks during the day. We can't stay more than three hours without hair alert. Johann, a humanitarian volunteer, was meters away when the drone struck. It's not just about night, it's about day now. Analysis of official figures by the BBC shows Kiev has suffered more daily air raid alerts than at any time since the full-scale invasion in 2022, as many as 13 on a single day.

And those attacks often now involve new jet-powered drones that are faster and harder to intercept. Yuri Ignat is a spokesman for Ukraine's Air Force. He told me they're shooting. down only 60% of the new drones, and they know that's not enough. Ukraine's key task now is to create an alternative interceptor, cheap weapons that can provide us with protection. We're outside a well-known fast food establishment on Ukraine's Midan Square. The siren's gone again.

People are coming out. Some are heading underground for safety and shelter. The staff are locking the door. They have to close up every time there's an alert, a siren. Some are clutching sleeping bags, some are clutching mats, their own drinks, just in case the raid goes on for a long time. A small snapshot showing just how disruptive these raids are. And it's happening again and again and again.

Many find shelter down in the metro, but there are problems there too. The alerts cause travel chaos across the city. Kiev is city divided by a river. We've come to the eastern side of the suburbs to see just the scale of the chaos that's caused by the air raids. We're surrounded by crowds of people desperately trying to get onto buses. And that's because every time there's an air raid, the metro trains that take all the commuters into the center of the city

have to stop because they cross overland on the bridges. They present very, very... obvious targets. And that means every time there's a raid, train stop and the buses get absolutely packed. For schools and universities, the constant alerts are a nightmare. Most of the day, I need to go to the safety places. Diana is studying to be a teacher. Because Russian attacks every day and sometimes it's all day. Just as we were talking to people, get another siren, out across the sky and all the students now are piling out because this is what they have to do. Every time there's alert, they stop their studying.

I'm a chemistry student. I am not scared after four years of invasion. I'm used to your arms, but it destroys the quality of our education. We cannot study normally. The government is planning a new two-tier alert system to try to limit disruption. What it really needs is a better way of defending the capital, and it hasn't found it yet. James Landale in the Ukrainian capital. A young British composer, just 13 years old, is using music, one of our oldest art forms,

to grapple with the implications of one of our newest challenges. Kerry Tan has written a symphony on AI, symphony number three, the rise and fall of AI humanity, entirely without the use of AI, by the way, which will be performed on Monday night in London by the full harmonium. orchestra. Unfortunately, music industry rules allow us to use the music on the radio, but don't allow us to use the music in this podcast. But we did speak to Kerry, who told us about the meaning of his symphony. That particular bit of music, after the AI society is built, humanity starts to reflect on the past, the true beauty of nature and the universe. And that section, it's kind of

a conclusion of the whole movement. It's the grand climax, just. the final expression that everybody makes, AI can never replace true beauty, the beauty that God gave us, the beauty within our earth and within our souls. After this section, it's kind of the turning point. People start to realize the destruction that AI has caused and tries to reverse back to like a more real society. I don't think if AI is something bad, it's just that if we just become too reliant on it. Like if we sacrifice convenience speed and technology too much, like, for example, we might have less creation, we might have less individuality, and eventually we would forget the beauty of nature. So AI is not a bad thing. It's more how we manage it. That was Kerry

Tan, whose work is being performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Cadogan Hall in London. Still to come in this podcast. Despite calls for him to resign as FIFA boss, Gianni Infantino confirms he will stand for re-election to run football's world governing body. He's an astute politician and he has been travelling around trying to shore up his power base. Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, Good luck. Odu brings your business together on a single platform from a social. sales and accounting to inventory and marketing. Visit Odu.com to book a demo.

It's ODbolo.com. Get more with BBC podcasts, wherever you listen. Be the first to listen to your favorite shows, like evil genius, good, bad billionaire, and You're Dead to Me, with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad-free with an Amazon music subscription. This is the Global News podcast. Despite a ceasefire that came into force in June, the Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun, has warned of a dangerous escalation by Israel.

Now, state media in Lebanon says at least nine people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in the south of the country. Our correspondent in Beirut is Hugo Bishager. So we've had an update from Lebanon's health ministry saying that in one of the attacks, eight people were killed, including a child and two women, when a residential building was. hit by an Israeli air strike in the village of Kifar Raman, then a second strike killed a paramedic also in that part of the country. So according to the country's health authorities, at least nine people killed in those Israeli air strikes.

And we've seen an intensification of these Israeli air strikes in the south of the country with at least 15 people killed in the last three days. And towns and villages near the so-called yellow line have been targeted. This is the part of the country that is under Israeli occupation. We've seen large numbers of residents fleeing those areas because of those attacks. And this happens, as you say, despite the ceasefire that was announced here in June. And the Israeli military says it is targeting the Lebanese militia and political party Hezbollah. But what we've seen repeatedly here in Lebanon as in Gaza is that a significant number of people who were killed in the people who are killed in the

those attacks are civilians, including children and women. Why is Israel carrying out these attacks? So this is very interesting because this, again, escalation happens just days after the Israeli military said it had achieved operational control of the Alitahe Ridge, which is in that part of the country where these attacks have been happening. And this is a strategic location because this is where Hezbollah had built that heavily fortified underground in infrastructure. So there's still questions about the objectives of the Israeli military, what the Israeli authorities are trying to achieve with this wave of attacks. But this morning, the Israeli

foreign ministry said that Hezbollah had repeatedly violated the ceasefire deal. And the Israeli authorities have frequently accused Hezbollah of embedding its military infrastructure in civilian neighborhoods of using the civilian population as human shields. But interestingly, A Lebanese intelligence official told me recently that the Lebanese army had recorded more than 5,000 Israeli violations of the ceasefire, including air strikes, drone attacks and also incursions into Lebanese territory. And again, you mentioned the reaction there from the Lebanese president who said this escalation went beyond alleged military targets and that it was intended to disrupt people's lives. Hugo Bershaga in the Lebanese capital. World football's governing body has confirmed that its president, Gianni Infantino, will stand for re-election in March.

He's been under pressure following his scrapped plan to sell stakes in FIFA competitions to private investment firms. Europe's governing body, UEFA, has led calls for Mr Infantino to resign and has been lobbying for someone to stand against him. Conquercaf president Victor Montagliani is considered a serious option. Here are the thoughts of Football Journal. journalist Henry Winter about Mr Infantino's decision to run for re-election. Not in the least bit surprised because of his lack of self-awareness.

And I also thought the moment that UEFA, the governing body of European football, effectively withdrew their boycott threat to not send European teams to FIFA events, would embolden Infantino. And also the legal action, threatening criminal action against him by UEFA. And FIFA's quick response to that. And as we all know, legal work, particularly in football, can take a long time. I always thought that he would fancy himself to have another run at the office. He's an astute politician, and he has been travelling around trying to shore up his power base.

Obviously, he's got Africa elements of Commonwealth, which is Latin and South America. And I'm sure we'll see in the next few weeks confirmation that the 2030 World Cup, the next Men's World Cup, will have 64 teams, which of course will win him even more support from countries around the world because everyone wants to get on board the World Cup gravy train. You've got a lot of countries in Africa and parts of Asia who are saying, actually, what Infantina was proposing in terms of opening up the sell-off of parts of the World Cup to investors, actually they would benefit from. Montagliani, who is head of the Conquercaf, the North America, Caribbean,

Central American Federation. He is the obvious candidate because you can't put up a European candidate because the rest of the world wouldn't take kindly to that. So the clock is running. So nominations by November the 18th. And then the vote is in Rabatin March the 18th. Henry Winter. Australia was the first country to introduce a ban on social media for under 16s. Now the government is planning to go further. Draft legislation expected this week, would give Australians the option of switching off the algorithms that decide what appears in their social media feeds, while also placing new responsibilities on tech companies

to tackle harmful content. Ministers say it's about giving users more control and creating a digital duty of care. So how would it work in practice and would it make social media any safer? Gary O'Donohue has been speaking to Kate Manel, the Search Fellow in Digital Childhoods, at Deakin University in Melbourne.

He asked her how the new rules were expected to work. We don't have a huge amount of detail yet. Within this digital duty of care, one of the specific mechanisms that the government is saying will be included is this ability to opt out of recommendation algorithms. They haven't said exactly specifically what harms they're trying to target by introducing this, but reading between the lines of their comments and the motivations behind it, it appears that the idea is that you would,

because you're not being recommended content, you might be less likely to be recommended harmful content. So it appears to be part of this ambition to make platforms more responsible for harmful content. And by turning off recommendation algorithms, the idea seems to be that you might be less likely to be recommended harmful content. What if there's a logical problem there? because even if it's random, it could still be harmful, I guess. Yeah, well, so what they're proposing that you would get if you opted out of the recommended content algorithm

is that you would essentially get a feed of content that is chronological and is just content from people who you have chosen to follow. So it wouldn't be promoting content from accounts that you don't follow, which at the moment we get a lot of. and it wouldn't be optimized for engagement. Having said that, yes, your point still stands because, of course, the people you follow might post harmful content. So it's certainly not as simple as perhaps the government is currently making it out to be. This would undermine the companies sort of raison d' debt, wouldn't it? I mean, part of the way they make their money is using these algorithms to recommend other stuff to you and advertising and things like that.

Yeah, absolutely, and particularly the way that they have been optimized for engagement, you know, to try to show you content that is most likely to keep you on the platforms. So in moving away from or giving people an option to opt out of that algorithm, it would really be kind of going to the heart of their current business models. Yes, absolutely. Which means they're going to resist it, right? Presumably, yes, I would say so. I mean, having said that the settlement that they've just agreed to with the lawsuit in the US, apparently as part of the conditions of that settlement, they have agreed to give young users the ability to opt out of recommendation,

personalized feeds. So perhaps there is a kind of writing on the wall around this anyway, and maybe there's a cumulative pressure there. I'm not sure it's hard to say exactly how they'll respond. but there's growing pressure, I guess, around their business models anyway. I guess some people might say, look, you know, algorithms aren't always bad. Sometimes they bring you stuff you want, and it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be harmful, but it does target you and you don't have to waste your time scrolling through stacks of stuff that you're not interested in.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, algorithms help us to find content that we're interested in. people find them really useful a lot of the time. Also, a lot of businesses rely on the visibility that they get through these kinds of recommendation algorithms. So one possibility is that people won't choose to opt out of them because actually they find them really useful. So perhaps it might be more helpful to not just think about a kind of on or off system, but actually asking more questions around, you know, what kinds of algorithms and can people perhaps have more choice around the types of recommendation algorithms on their platforms. Kate Manel from Deakin University in Melbourne.

If there's one thing that unites people all over the world, it's talking about the weather. This week sees a new film about what was the most important weather forecast in British history, the one that gave the go-ahead for D-Day on the 6th of June 1944, when the Allies in the Second World War invaded Nazi-occupied France. The extraordinary story behind that event and the man on whose shoulders it fell, James Stag, has been turned into a film starring Andrew Scott. David Silato went to meet him. Fate of the war, thousands of lives.

Pinge on this. It's a film about D-Day, but more specifically, one man's contribution. The atmosphere was almost unbearably tense, an irrevocable decision had to be made. This is the voice of James Stagg. I had long had at the back of my mind the tactical use of weather. I had hoped that just such a set of circumstances would come about. D-Day should have been on the 5th of June. James Stagg and RAF meteorologist told General Eisenhower to postpone the invasion.

I need a forecast. If you invade tomorrow, they're going to be washed away. There's a reason this film is called pressure. Why should I trust you? We must face the vat. The vats! However frightening they may be. 82 years on, I met Andrew Scott, the man now playing James Stagg.

He appeared to me to be an extraordinarily interesting cinematic character, as well as an unsung hero from history. I really enjoyed the way that he was not interested in ingratiating himself with anybody. He's a bit chilly. He's chilly. He's definitely very chilly and very forthright and very direct and completely obsessed with the weather, and not afraid to speak truth.

to power. It's almost impossible to understand the level of jeopardy one man is under. Oh, absolutely. The stakes were so enormously high. It's wonderful that we can pay tribute

to him in this way all these years later. 80 years later, suddenly he's a movie hero. Exactly. Exactly. I don't think he'd enjoy that very much. I tried not to be afraid

of the fact that perhaps at the beginning of the audience might be like, who is this? guy and hopefully by the end we understand his motivations and his inner workings. What do you make a stagg? Churchill says he's a genius. Men are too fond of that word. James Staggs' warning to the man in charge, General Eisenhower saved the day. But it wasn't what Eisenhower wanted to hear. Speaking truth to power is a big thing in this, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Huge, huge, huge thing. Might be a thing to take on board today. Well, that's a good.

Exactly right. That's exactly right. And a celebration of experts. Yeah. That report by David Silito. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at global podcast at bbc.co.com. You can also now watch our episodes in full. Just search for the Global News podcast on YouTube. This edition was mixed by Chris Cusaris, and the producer was Mozafah Shakir. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Riddh. Ritson. Until next time, goodbye.

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