It’s stupid posturing for his base. Like the asylum and immigration resolutions he didn’t really wanted approved in the Bundestag early this year. He knows that arresting Netanyahu is up to the justice system and Netanyahu knows that too so he’s not going to test Merz’s empty promise.
The executive does have quite some influence over the justice system. Prosecutors are subject to directives from the Ministry of Justice, and judges who go against the ministry’s explicit wishes will hit a very definitive dead end in their further career, as they can forget future promotions.
Thanks to federalism, we might get lucky anyway, because every state runs its own justice system, but it’s still highly doubtful this will happen, as pretty much all major German parties subscribe to the same ideological stance towards Israel.
The window for arresting a suspected war criminal on a short visit isn’t very long, courts against which the government loses cases tend to decide very slowly. So a suspect who hasn’t been arrested in the first place, or has been released due to government interference, will have left the country long before the government loses its case.
It’s stupid posturing for his base. Like the asylum and immigration resolutions he didn’t really wanted approved in the Bundestag early this year. He knows that arresting Netanyahu is up to the justice system and Netanyahu knows that too so he’s not going to test Merz’s empty promise.
The executive does have quite some influence over the justice system. Prosecutors are subject to directives from the Ministry of Justice, and judges who go against the ministry’s explicit wishes will hit a very definitive dead end in their further career, as they can forget future promotions.
Thanks to federalism, we might get lucky anyway, because every state runs its own justice system, but it’s still highly doubtful this will happen, as pretty much all major German parties subscribe to the same ideological stance towards Israel.
And yet the government loses cases all the time.
The window for arresting a suspected war criminal on a short visit isn’t very long, courts against which the government loses cases tend to decide very slowly. So a suspect who hasn’t been arrested in the first place, or has been released due to government interference, will have left the country long before the government loses its case.