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Tag: bitter

  • The masses learn only by bitter experience

    The masses learn only by bitter experience

    A few intellectuals may know historical truths and social developments by their study and genuine understanding, but the masses, who are often gullible and can easily be befooled, learn only through their own bitter experience and suffering.

    https://indicanews.com/indians-love-to-follow-a-pied-piper-of-hamelingo

    Thus, the Indian masses have learnt, after being befooled and being kicked around for over 75 years, that the ‘Independence‘ of 1947 was sham, and no real independence and that real independence is independence from poverty, hunger, unemployment, lack of healthcare and good education, etc ( which are still far off ), and that a real freedom struggle from foreign rule could only have been an armed struggle, as pointed out by our real freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Surya Sen ( Masterda ), Bismil, Ashfaqulla, Rajguru, Khudiram Bose, etc and not the fake ‘freedom struggle’ which led to the phoney ‘Independence’ we got in 1947.

    Experience

    https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2020/09/27/which-was-the-correct-path-gandhi-bhagat-singh.html

    The ‘democracy’ we got under our Constitution was a fraud and bogus, to deceive the people that they have become the rulers of the country, though it is only vote bank politics, which is craftily manipulated by our crooked politicians, who seek only power and pelf for themselves, and take advantage of the low intellectual understanding of the masses and tremendous casteism and communalism  prevailing in them, to polarise society and incite hatred among castes and communities, to win elections.

    It is only now that the Indian masses through their bitter experience are gradually learning the truth, and are realizing that real freedom is freedom from poverty, hunger, unemployment, lack of healthcare, etc, and that the solutions to their huge problems lie outside the system, not within it, that is by waging a mighty united people’s struggle to create a modern and just political and social order.

    https://indicanews.com/2023/07/17/justice-markandey-katju-lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-in-india/

    https://indicanews.com/2023/01/25/justice-katju-is-there-anything-to-celebrate-on-republic-day/

    To wage this historical people’s struggle successfully, the Indian masses will have to change their mindsets i.e. rise above casteism and communalism ( something very difficult and painful ), learn who are their real friends and real enemies, and make tremendous sacrifices. The vested interests, both internal and external, in the present order will not easily give up their hold, and will not allow allow great changes in the country, but will seek to retain the status quo, by polarising society, inciting hatred among the people, and putting up fierce resistance.

    https://indicanews.com/the-puppeteer-and-the-puppets/

    https://indicanews.com/justice-katju-indian-subcontinents-current-historical-situation/

    But our goal must be clear. We must attain our objective of creating a highly industrialised, highly modern India, with our people enjoying a high standard of living, whatever the cost, and however great the sacrifices needed to attain it. For this we have to establish a social and political order under which there is rapid industrialisation and modernisation, so that our people enjoy a high standard of living and decent lives, with employment, healthcare, good education, nutritious food, etc for all, and with no social discrimination against women, dalits, minorities, etc. And to create such a political and social order the Indian people will have to wage a mighty, protracted, united, people’s struggle led by modern minded patriotic, selfless leaders, who are determined to transform India into a modern industrial giant, like another China.

    For waging this historical people’s struggle the enlightened sections of our people will have to use all their creativity, and devise the forms of struggle, as were devised in the great British, American, French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions, by the great modern minded, brave and self sacrificing leaders of those countries. Only then can we get real independence and a prosperous India

    https://indicanews.com/justice-markandey-katju-on-bastille-day/

    https://www.firstpost.com/india/indias-moment-of-turbulent-revolution-has-arrived-and-it-is-going-to-be-a-long-and-bloody-one-writes-justice-markandey-katju-7891541.html

  • Inside the bitter GOP ‘undercard’ rivalry between Mike Pence and Nikki Haley

    Inside the bitter GOP ‘undercard’ rivalry between Mike Pence and Nikki Haley

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    united nations general assembly 89593

    “It’s like giving a shit about who wins the NIT tournament,” said Jeff Timmer, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party and senior adviser to the Lincoln Project. “Everybody is watching the NCAA Tournament. To use a boxing metaphor, it’s like an undercard race that no one is even paying attention to. They’re all watching the heavyweight matchup between Trump and DeSantis.”

    In any other political universe, Pence, a former governor and vice president, and Haley, a former governor and U.N. ambassador, might be part of that A-list matchup, too. But in a race that hinges on either Trump or DeSantis faltering, they are both now fully engaged in a high-stakes, low-return battle for what amounts to table scraps in the primary — jostling for third place and a position to lift off from if Trump or DeSantis fades.

    In part, the resentment reflects the continuation of a long-simmering rivalry between Pence and Haley. But it also illustrates a new dynamic in the 2024 primary, in which lower-polling candidates are beginning to go after each other — not Trump or DeSantis — in an effort to gain even minimal traction in the campaign.

    Inside Pence’s operation, one senior Pence adviser granted anonymity to speak frankly about the dynamics of the race said “people don’t view [Haley] as a serious candidate.” This person also accused her of “chasing polls.”

    “Her campaign is floundering,” the adviser said, “and by all accounts is failing its own competency test.”

    For Haley’s part, while an adviser to the former South Carolina governor suggested that Pence’s likely entry into the presidential primary is “not that concerning,” they didn’t skip the opportunity to point out that Pence’s unfavorable ratings are significantly higher than other Republicans in the field. Haley herself, in an implicit jab at Pence and other likely candidates, described in blunt terms the trepidation of Republicans who have yet to announce their campaigns.

    “They need to put their big boy pants on,” she said in a recent interview, adding that “you need a decisive person to be president.”

    Publicly, aides to Pence and Haley describe them as friendly longtime associates, two Trump administration lieutenants and former GOP governors who called each other to swap advice and encouragement during their respective administrations.

    “Nikki Haley has always had a high regard for Mike Pence,” said Haley’s communications director, Nachama Soloveichik. “Any notions to the contrary come from people who have too much time on their hands.”

    But Pence and Haley have long been on a collision course — which their rivalry in the 2024 primary has only accelerated. They are the only two former Trump administration officials and GOP governors whose administrations overlapped one another in the early 2010s. Pence picked her as a member of the Cabinet during the transition, and Trump signed off.

    Both, too, have sought to project a Reaganesque vibe to voters — hawkish on national security and upbeat about America’s future. In national polls, Pence and Haley register within about 2 percentage points of each other, trading off third and fourth places. A Harvard-Harris poll released on March 24, for example, found Pence at 7 percentage points to Haley’s 5, with both trailing Trump and DeSantis by double digits.

    The strife between the two camps dates back to their service in the Trump administration and simmers primarily between their staffs, which have intertwined and overlapped at times. The Georgia-based Republican operative Nick Ayers has worked for Pence and also informally advised Haley. And the Republican pollster Jon Lerner, who has been one of Haley’s top consultants since her run for governor in 2010, briefly worked with Pence during the Trump administration.

    Most recently, Tim Chapman, the erstwhile executive director of Haley’s political nonprofit, jumped ship to become senior adviser to Pence’s nonprofit, Advancing American Freedom. The Pence adviser characterized the move as Chapman coming back home to a campaign-in-waiting that more closely matched his long-held movement conservatism. Two people from the Haley camp, meanwhile, acknowledged he was always closer with the Pence team and had not been an integral part of Haley’s political operation.

    “I think the principals are fine,” a second person close to Pence told POLITICO, a sentiment echoed by Haley allies. “There’s some staff feistiness. Can’t imagine poaching Tim Chapman helped.”

    Tensions also flared in 2019 amid reports that Haley could replace Pence on the GOP ticket in 2020. During that swirl of speculation, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short said in a statement to POLITICO that Haley “was an excellent ambassador for the Trump-Pence agenda during her one year at the UN.” Haley served in the role for nearly two years.

    The Pence adviser speculated, without elaborating, that Haley may have been insulted by Short’s comments, describing the former ambassador and governor as “thin-skinned.”

    “There was and is a feeling that Nikki Haley did not do enough to tamp down those rumors, or to distance herself from those rumors,” a third person close to Pence who also worked for the vice president in the White House said. “And that’s rightfully left a bad taste in the Pence operation’s mouth. But rivalry is not the right term for it. Maybe that she’s viewed with some skepticism, and not just palace-intrigue skepticism, it’s policy skepticism, as well.”

    Pence mentioned Haley six times in his 2022 political memoir So Help Me God. He called her an “old friend” and singled her out as one of four governors who were “quick to return a call and offer wisdom and support.”

    In her own 2019 memoir, Haley also spoke favorably of Pence. “I considered him a friend,” Haley wrote. “Donald Trump and I had had our differences, but his choice of Mike was something I supported and was comforted by.”

    Rob Godfrey, a former aide to Haley while she was governor, said he has no doubt that she and Pence still consider one another a friend, and will continue to do so in the future.

    “But when you both end up on a potential collision course in the same campaign for the Republican nomination for president, that can make things a little bit stickier,” Godfrey said. “It can exacerbate differences in personality and in policy, and ultimately it can bring some ego from both sides to the top, because at the end of the day campaigns are about competition, and both of them are competitors.

    “If they weren’t fierce competitors, they wouldn’t be where they are now.”



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    #bitter #GOP #undercard #rivalry #Mike #Pence #Nikki #Haley
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Bank failures revive bitter Senate Democratic infighting

    Bank failures revive bitter Senate Democratic infighting

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    The current Senate Democratic discord is especially acute because the caucus had the numbers to block the 2018 effort — but under heavy pressure to cut a deal to help community banks in an election year, 17 of them supported it. The collapse of two banks with roughly $300 billion in total assets over the past week has animated those internal divisions among Democratic senators, who usually pride themselves on policy unity. And it starkly contrasts with Senate Republicans, who uniformly supported the last big banking bill.

    Asked whether he regretted his vote, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) told reporters: “No. I voted for a bill that was a bipartisan compromise.”

    “Sometimes members choose policy positions and wait to see if history serves them,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who opposed the legislation. “Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”

    In case it was unclear, he added: “I was on the right side of it.”

    Republicans instantly ruled out passing new bank regulations on Tuesday, arguing federal regulators are already empowered to increase scrutiny of those banks. So Democrats will have to decide whether it’s worth taking their internal fight to the Senate floor again.

    Several Democrats said they want to see either repeal of the 2018 legislation or other tougher laws. But at the moment there is no apparent solution that would get 51 Democratic votes, much less the 60 senators needed to vault a filibuster.

    “We’re going to try,” Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told reporters. But he added that “I don’t know how we do a legislative fix.”

    Exacerbating the internal fight: Democrats don’t agree whether the rollback was actually to blame for the present bank failures. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who cut that 2018 deal with Republican Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho.), said in an interview Tuesday that he stands by his vote and disagrees with those blaming his legislation: “I don’t see it the same way. If you read the bill, you’ll know that it doesn’t let them off.”

    “Would I vote the same way [today]? Yes,” said Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats and voted in favor of the 2018 legislation. “Because of the important help to smaller banks and community banks; that was my mission.”

    The 2018 law peeled back parts of Dodd-Frank to exempt smaller banks from federally administered “stress tests” that weighed their ability to weather economic downturns. Its enactment meant Dodd-Frank’s stricter federal oversights only applied to a handful of bigger banks.

    And the issue is already becoming a cudgel in Senate races. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who is running for the Arizona Senate seat, went after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) for her vote in support of the 2018 law, calling the votes the “most salient example of how we’re different.” Of the most vulnerable Democratic senators up for reelection next fall, Brown, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania opposed the 2018 law, while Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Tester and Sinema supported it.

    “It was obviously a mistake,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), another incumbent senator, who missed the 2018 vote but criticized the bill then. “It was ill-advised, these are big banks … and they need to have some backstops.”

    Asked whether he sensed a divide among Senate Democrats, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) replied: “That question answers itself. Because there were some in 2018 who thought it was a good idea … and I put myself in that category; I was listening to my community banks.”

    Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, both of which qualified for the 2018 exemption, had lobbied hard for the measure by assuring lawmakers they were not big enough to pose systemic risk. Yet federal authorities cited that exact problem on Sunday when they announced they would backstop all of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposits after it collapsed thanks to a large-scale run.

    “Working together, a good job — a miraculous job — has been done to stem the possibility of systemic risk,” Rep. Maxine Waters said in an interview. The Californian is the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and opposed the 2018 law.

    She also warned against jumping to conclusions on whether congressional action had prompted the bank failures: “I don’t know what could be said about what has happened here with this; the collapse of Silicon Valley as it relates to Dodd-Frank.”

    As it stands, the toughest regulations apply only to banks with more than $250 billion in assets. Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank held around $209 billion and $110 billion, respectively, when regulators took over. Summing up the back and forth, Warren said midsize banks were acting like “little community banks, and should be only lightly regulated. That was laughable on its face.”

    It’s made a painful issue for Democrats for years now, ever since a group of party centrists went around Brown, then the top Democrat on the Banking Committee, to cut a deal with Republicans. Brown said on Bloomberg Radio on Tuesday that some Democrats “don’t fight hard enough,” but then he went into peacemaking mode.

    “I think that it’s been illuminating to a lot of people,” Brown told reporters later. “I think all the Democrats [now] realize we need stronger rules.”

    Even with their entrenched positions, Democratic senators are trying to avoid a replay of the backbiting five years ago when Warren called out her colleagues that supported deregulation in a fundraising email. That move prompted a contentious meeting among Democratic chiefs of staff in which Dan Geldon, then Warren’s top aide, cited nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warnings that more bank failures could result from rolling back Dodd-Frank, according to three people familiar with the meeting.

    Geldon argued at the time that Warren was fighting on principle and not just to target other senators, while aides to senators that supported the bank bill blanched at her tactics and said they were merely reacting to banks back in their states, according to those three people.

    Now Democrats can at least face that dispute from the majority, when they’re able to choose what comes to the floor. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been careful about how he characterizes a potential congressional response, saying Capitol Hill will “look closely” at next steps. He opposed the bank bill five years ago.

    New Hampshire Democratic Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen both said they’d be willing to reexamine the 2018 law, which both supported, if investigations find that was the cause of the failures. But they evinced no regrets about their position.

    “The reality is, it was very bad management at SVB. And you can’t fix that with any regulation,” Shaheen said.

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    #Bank #failures #revive #bitter #Senate #Democratic #infighting
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Chicago’s bitter election is now a nasty runoff

    Chicago’s bitter election is now a nasty runoff

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    “It’s going to be nasty,” Democratic state Rep. Kam Buckner, who also ran for mayor, said in an interview. “People will pick sides — people with a history when it comes to racial sensitivity. There will be a lot of talk about race and class and schools and crime.”

    Although Washington made history as the city’s first Black mayor, it was a hard-fought campaign of rising Black leadership met with political tribalism, freewheeling racism and a sense on both sides that failure had winner-take-all consequences. It won’t be as toxic in 2023 as it was in 1983 but there’s a general sense of the city’s potential to stumble backward.

    “It’s a different turn. I wouldn’t say we’ve moved beyond it,” said Larry Luster, a consultant who has worked on campaigns for Democrats Sen. Dick Durbin and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. “It’s not as aggressive and outward as it was during the Harold Washington era. People try to say things in a more civil way but a lot of times those undertones are still there.”

    There are also forces that see an opportunity for proxy conflict since the differences are so stark.

    Voters didn’t pit Lightfoot into a runoff against former public schools chief Paul Vallas from her right, nor did they set her against Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson from her left. Instead, the two Democratic men facing off are as diametrically opposed on policy as any of Lightfoot’s challengers can be — a reflection itself of how divided the city is.

    Vallas, who is white, ran for mayor in 2019 and believes in school choice, has been chastised by his rivals throughout this cycle for claiming years ago he was a Republican, despite his many statements since of being a lifelong Democrat. Running a campaign almost singularly focused on public safety and winning the endorsement of Chicago’s conservative police union only cemented the views of his critics.

    Johnson, who is Black, is a Cook County commissioner, a former schoolteacher and has been a paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, which has funded a large part of his campaign. He’s been on the record saying he supports the “defund the police” movement, too.

    “This isn’t a six month campaign. So things will be fast and furious on TV, digital, mail and field,” said political consultant Becky Carroll, who has worked on national and state-level campaigns, including for former President Barack Obama and Gov. JB Pritzker. “Will things get ratcheted up? I can’t imagine they won’t because a lot is at stake.”

    The weeks leading up to the Feb. 28 election were pretty messy but what’s so jarring is how different the 2019 campaign played out — an open race after two-term Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel didn’t seek reelection.

    There were 14 candidates in the general election then and Lightfoot was the top vote-getter before she swept all 50 of the city’s wards in the runoff against Cook County Board Chair Toni Preckwinkle.

    “We had two strong, accomplished women who appealed to much of the same electorate,” Carroll said.

    That is not the case this time.

    Neither Vallas nor Johnson are soft spoken and Johnson was quick to take a swing Tuesday.

    “We’re going to finally retire this tale of two cities,” he told his supporters on election night, evoking Chicago’s longstanding racial and economic divisions. “Paul Vallas is the author of the tale of two cities.”

    He also used the speech to accuse Vallas of being supported by “January 6 insurrectionists” — a move Ald. Raymond Lopez, who made an early bid for mayor before dropping out weeks ago, called “outrageous” and an indication of where the race is going.

    Vallas and Johnson have powerful bases, which is why they made it into the runoff. But they’re separated by less than 70,000 votes after an election where tens of thousands of people fueled Lightfoot’s third-place finish, and nearly 149,000 Chicagoans backed one of the other six candidates.

    More broadly, for a city where demographics split fairly evenly between white, Black and Latino residents, it’s also not clear how groups of Latino voters shift in the runoff.

    Johnson will try to win over voters in majority Black wards that overwhelmingly supported Lightfoot. And he’ll also be looking to progressives — the Lakefront liberals — on the city’s North Side who backed Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s ill-fated campaign in the first round of voting.

    Vallas, meanwhile, spent the days before the Feb. 28 election calling fellow candidates asking for their support ahead of the runoff. He hopes to land supporters of Willie Wilson, a Black businessman and perennial candidate for office who, like Vallas, has courted conservative voters.

    “You’ve got folks who are going to bring out the charter, school-choice reform contingent versus public sector unions and neighborhood schools sectors,” said Buckner, the state lawmaker. “They’ll put a lot of money in this space. We have a Gen-Xer versus a Baby Boomer, and that will bring out another group of folks in this race.”

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    #Chicagos #bitter #election #nasty #runoff
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Berlin’s plan for a car-free city prompts bitter war of words

    Berlin’s plan for a car-free city prompts bitter war of words

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    Many visitors to Graefekiez, a lively cobbled-road neighbourhood just south of Berlin’s centre, come in search of something new: a tattoo from an authentic Japanese parlour, a rare print from an off-grid gallery, a dive-bar encounter over a 4am beer.

    This summer, they can brace themselves for another novelty: for at least three months, local authorities are planning to scrap almost all of the neighbourhood’s parking spaces as part of a social experiment designed to chart the waters of the German capital’s car-free future.

    Exactly how long the trial will last, how many of the neighbourhood’s roads it will include, and whether the vacant parking spaces will be filled with ping-pong tables, plant pots or dining tables instead, the council will not reveal until after Sunday’s Berlin state elections, a repeat of the September 2021 vote that was marred by delays and logistical errors.

    The decision to hold back information may well be politically motivated: the business of getting from A to B has become the subject of a bitter culture war between car lovers and car haters in the runup to the vote. And Berlin’s experimental approach to ushering out the age of the automobile isn’t only alienating petrolheads.

    The metropolis on the river Spree used to be feted for its public transport links, its densely woven web of underground and overground trains, trams, buses and ferries guaranteeing that getting from one corner of the city to the next usually took less than an hour. Wide roads make cycling popular and relatively safe.

    “Berlin has lots of space and barely any commuters – a lot of people live close to where they work,” said Prof Andreas Knie, a mobility researcher at the WZB Social Science Center that will supervise the Graefekiez project. “In theory, it has all the right conditions in place to become a model ‘city of short distances’,” he added, citing the concept of compact living spaces that urban planners have championed for more than a decade.

    Berlin car-free section of Friedrichstrasse
    Only cyclists can ride bicycles in the Berlin car-free section of Friedrichstrasse – a significant culture and shopping hotspot. Photograph: Michael Kuenne/PRESSCOV/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock

    Yet recently Berlin has struggled to convert its advantages into real change. In inner London and Paris, car ownership is in decline. Berlin may still have the lowest car ownership rate in Germany, with 337 vehicles registered per 1,000 inhabitants in 2022, but the number of automobiles on its roads has been rising steadily.

    “Five years ago, we were top of the pops,” said Knie. “Now London and Paris have overtaken us.”

    The means that German cities have at their disposal to shape movement on their roads is limited by federal laws that prioritise free flow of vehicles. Municipalities can’t impose 30 km/h zones on main roads unless they can prove a high risk of accidents. The liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), in charge of the ministry at federal level, has shown no signs of willingness to rewrite the all-powerful road traffic act.

    While their hands remain tied, Green councillors in Berlin have resorted to guerrilla tactics aimed at nudging cars out of the city centre. During the first coronavirus lockdown in 2020, several Berlin districts redrew road markings to create “pop-up” cycle lanes, supposedly to help cyclists physically distance on their commutes to work. Many of the new lanes have become popular permanent fixtures.

    At the start of the year, the senate went further: as of 2023, two-wheeled vehicles – including bikes, motorbikes and electric scooters – are allowed free use of parking spaces previously reserved exclusively for cars across the city.

    But this experimental approach has also left parts of Berlin in a what locals perceive as a state of permanent flux. A section of the Bergmannstrasse thoroughfare in Kreuzberg has undergone two attempts at a cycle-friendly redesign in the last four years, first with psychedelic-looking polka-dot road markings and then with a two-way cycle lane pushing cars on to a one-way single lane.

    Further north, cars were banished from a 500-metre stretch of the Friedrichstrasse boulevard for two years until a local wine dealer last November won a court case to let automobiles back in. At the end of January, Berlin’s Green party senator for mobility and climate protection, Bettina Jarasch, shut cars out again, against the will of the incumbent city mayor Franziska Giffey, of the centre-left Social Democratic Party.

    The hypothesis behind the latest experiment in Graefekiez is that most residents who leave their Autos on the side of its tree-lined streets don’t actually need them to get around town. A summer of seeing spaces previously hogged by boxes of steel used by playing children and al-fresco diners, the thinking goes, may encourage them to ditch them for good.

    “The idea we are pursuing is whether public spaces can be experienced and used in more efficient ways than keeping them reserved for parked cars,” said Annika Gerold, Kreuzberg’s Green district councillor in charge of transport affairs.

    But with the details of the car-free experiment kept under wraps, scepticism in the neighbourhood is tangible. Florian Eicker, who runs a small lunchtime eatery serving Hawaiian poké bowls on Graefestrasse, says he would welcome additional space for tables outside his restaurant, and could imagine switching to a car-sharing scheme to buy and deliver his ingredients.

    But a lack of information about another temporary state that could be rolled back again by the autumn has left him frustrated: “What’s the point if we merely push the problems three months into the future?” The attitude among his neighbours and guests was broadly negative, Eicker said. “I’d say it’s 30% in favour to 70% against. And those people aren’t especially wedded to car ownership on principle.”

    The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a conservative party whose core voters could not be further from the bohemian crowd on the Graefekiez’s streets, has been making hay of local frustration, collecting 1,450 signatures in favour of scrapping the trial in the neighbourhood of approximately 18,000.

    Instead of banishing parking spaces altogether, local CDU candidate Timur Husein advocates charging car owners to use them like they do in other cities – because for now, parking in the Graefekiez remains mostly free. If polls are anything to go by, his party’s pitch is proving surprisingly resonant in a city usually famed for its countercultural ways.

    The most recent surveys show the Christian Democrats in the lead on 26% of the vote, and within a realistic chance of unseating the incumbent left-green senate as long as it can sway one of the coalition parties to switch sides.

    “Adding a few bollards here and there is absolutely fine,” Husein said. “But an entire neighbourhood without cars – that’s even too much for Green voters.”

    This article was amended on 13 February 2023 to correct the spelling of Graefekiez.

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    #Berlins #plan #carfree #city #prompts #bitter #war #words
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )