Germany

Former Chancellor Merkel presented the painting for the official portrait gallery of Germany's postwar heads of government; the portrait will be displayed at Bode Museum in Berlin from 1 July before being added to the Federal Chancellery gallery

A 33-point plan to reform the pension system has drawn praise and criticism in equal measure, as centrist politicians consider it a good compromise and opposition parties on both the left and the right don't find it satisfactory

Tennis player Alexander Zverev shed his unfortunate spell as the best player never to win a major as, at 29, he claimed his maiden Grand Slam title by winning the Roland-Garros, or French Open, Paris

Alevis make up around 13% of Muslims living in Germany today; this religious community, now the fourth largest in the country, once predominantly lived in rural Turkey, passing on their spiritual beliefs and rites orally

Marie-Louise Eta became the first woman to coach a match in the top five European men's leagues: her Union Berlin's defeat 2-1 gave way to misogynistic reaction online, condemned by German Football Association as contrary to values of fairness, equality

Gerd Faltings, a number theorist at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, has won the 2026 Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, for his work on proving that Diophantine equations can have a finite set of solutions

State elections in Baden-Württemberg, Germany's third-most populous state, ended with a win by the center-left Greens in contrast with Berlin's coalition government, that downplayed the defeat

Director Ilker Catak, German with Turkish origins, won the Golden Bear in Berlin's film festival for his "Yellow Letters", a drama set in Turkey about creeping authoritarianism, in an event overshadowed by a row over politics in cinema

Germany defied Schengen spirit with the extension of random checks at the border with Belgium, that will continue until September 2026 if latest decisions aren't revised

Siemens Energy is planning to invest $1 billion (€850 million) in the US energy production sector amid a surge in electricity demand driven by AI data centers; It will also build a new factory in Mississippi and recruit over 1500 highly skilled workers

A record 1,4 million affordable apartments are currently lacking in Germany, according to latest study by the Pestel Institute; to correct this deficit by 2030, 400.000 units are needed to be built per year while 200.000 are likely to be built annually