Photo: DPA Few countries in the developed world have as high a tax burden as Germany. As the state coffers continue to grow, pressure is increasing on the government to relieve the taxpayer.

Advertisement "These past four years have been incredibly stressful and we're ready to start a new chapter," Candice Kerestan, Munich-based head of Democrats Abroad Germany, told The Local last Wednesday as votes were still being counted.?To get a sense of how the elections impacted our American readers, The Local published the survey “Americans in Germany: How do you feel about the US elections?” to which we received 202 responses.?

Out of the respondents, 94 percent said they voted, and seven percent said they didn’t - in some cases due to not yet turning 18.A total of 82.9 percent of respondents said that they voted for Joe Biden, while 14.5 percent indicated they voted for Donald Trump. A further 2.6 percent marked “other”, such as third party libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen.?Here’s what our readers, who ranged in age from 17 to 88, and lived all around Germany, had to say.?

Proud of both countriesSeveral Democrats in Germany told us they again felt appreciative of both their adopted home in Germany and Heimat in the US.

“I’m appreciative to live in Germany, proud again to call the USA my country of origin,” said Carla Mortensen, 66, an English-language instructor in Berlin following the result.?

“We can stop being the joke of the world and hopefully things and attitudes will begin changing. Science will become important once again,” said Lisa, 45, a nurse in Stuttgart.?He was arrested in July 2016 but declined to testify during the trial - "out of fear", according to his lawyer.

Worshippers in a Ditib mosque in Stuttgart. Photo: DPA. German prosecutors on Wednesday said they were dropping a case against several Muslim clerics suspected of spying for Turkeydue to insufficient evidence and as some were out of reach of law enforcers.Advertisement The probe had inflamed tensions with Ankara, at a time when ties were frayed over Berlin's criticisms of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's human rights record.

The Muslim clerics targeted by the German investigation belonged to Ditib, an organisation controlled by Ankara that manages some 900 mosques and religious centres in Germany.They were suspected of spying for Erdogan's government on the movement of US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for a coup bid last year.