Merkel's Weak New Coalition Will Lead Europe into a Center-Left No Man's Land

THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS ABOUT THE GERMAN ELECTION. Chancellor Angela Merkel won the German parliamentary election on Sunday, giving her conservative Christian Democrat Union and its Bavarian partner Christian Social Union led by Horst Seehofer (CDU/CSU) the right to try to form a new government. This will be Mrs. Merkel's fourth term as Chancellor. She has already been in power for 12 years. But, her win came at a cost and has been called a "nationalist earthquake." It was the CDU/CSU's worst showing in parliamentary elections since 1949, and down 7% from its 41.5% showing in the last parliamentary election in 2013. Merkel's rivals, the Social Democrats and their candidate Martin Schulz, came in a distant second, with a post-war record low of 21%, their worst showing since 1933. The bombshell for the German establishment was the showing of the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), an anti-Islam, anti-immigration newcomer to German politics that captured 13% of the vote, making it the country's third biggest political force. The official election results were : CDU/CSU (Angela Merkel, Horst Seehofer) 246 seats and 34.7% of the vote; SPD (Martin Schulz)153 seats and 21.6% of the vote; AfD (Jörg Meuthen, Frauke Petry) 94 seats and 13.3% of the vote. • • • A WATERSHED MOMENT IN GERMAN POST-WWII POLITICS. Commentators called the AfD's strong performance a "watershed moment" in the history of the German republic. The top-selling Bild daily spoke of a "political earthquake." Reuters reported that AfD supporters gathered at a Berlin club, cheering as public television reported the outcome, many joining in a chorus of the German national anthem, while hundreds of anti-AfD protesters rallied outside, shouting "Nazis out!" Smaller AfD demonstrations were held in other cities across the country, according to Reuters. • The four-year-old AfD nationalist populist party, often compared to the far-right French National Front and Britain's UKIP, has been shunned by Germany's mainstream but built a following with particularly strong support in ex-Communist eastern Germany. It is now headed for the opposition benches of the Bundestag lower house of the German national parliament, dramatically boosting its visibility and state financing. Alarmed by the prospect of what Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel of the SPD, which was in the "Grand Coalition" with Merkel's conservatives in the exiting German government, branded the result as putting "real Nazis" in the parliament. Both the CDU/CSU and the SPD had campaigned hard in the last few days to try to keep the AfD from breaking through the 5% vote that would give them a place in the Bundestag and government funding. It obviously didn't work, as the AfD got 13.3% of the vote and 94 seats in the Bundestag. • Turnout was notably higher than four years ago, at around 76%, up from 71.5%. • French President Emmanuel Macron was among the first to congratulate Merkel, promising that the two key European partners would keep up their "essential cooperation." • • • MERKEL TO FIGHT THE AfD AND ITS ANTI-MIGRATION POSITION. Merkel told the media that she had fallen far short of the 40% goal her party had set : "There's a big new challenge for us, and that is the entry of the AfD in the Bundestag. We want to win back AfD voters." Germans elected a splintered parliament, reflecting a nation torn between a relatively high degree of satisfaction with Merkel -- except for her migration stance, which the AfD strategy maximized -- and a desire for change after more than a decade of her leadership. Another three parties cleared the 5% hurdle and will be represented in parliament : the liberal Free Democrats at 10% and the anti-capitalist Left and ecologist Greens, both at about 9%. • Because Merkel failed to secure a ruling majority on her own and because the SPD ruled out another right-left "Grand Coalition" with her in order to renew its "fighting spirit," the process of forming a viable government is shaping up to be a difficult, long process. Merkel, 63, often called the most powerful woman in the world, ran on her record as a steady pair of hands in a turbulent world, warning voters not to indulge in "experiments." Analysts said Merkel's reassuring message of stability and prosperity resonated in greying Germany, where more than half of the 61 million voters are aged 52 or older. Her popularity has largely recovered -- at least in public -- from the influx since 2015 of more than one million mostly Moslem migrants and refugees, half of them from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But the AfD was able to capitalize on anger over the asylum issue and the reverberating examples of non-integration during a dull campaign with no real policy clashes among the main parties. • Meanwhile, leading AfD candidate Alexander Gauland has called for Germans to shed their guilt over two world wars and the Holocaust and to take pride in their veterans. He also suggested that Germany's integration commissioner Aydan Ozoguz, who has Turkish roots, should be "disposed of in Anatolia." The AfD says immigration threatens German culture, but denies that it is racist. AfD co-leader Joerg Meuthen says : “We will neither tolerate xenophobia nor racist positions. But we simply don’t have them either.” • • • THE JAMAICA COALITION. When Merkel takes on the AfD, she will be essentially alone -- in what Germans are calling her "Jamaica Coalition" because the colors of the CDU/CSU (black) and the probable coalition partners (yellow and green) are the same as the colors of the Jamaican flag. Chancellor Merkel will be alone because if the SPD actually refuses to enter into another Grand Coalition with the CDU/CSU, mathematically the most likely coalition would be with the pro-business Free Democrats, who staged a comeback after crashing out of parliament four years ago, and the left-leaning Greens -- a risky proposition, given the differences between the parties on issues ranging from climate policy to tax, energy, the European Union and migrants. So, Europe’s most powerful leader will have to govern with a far less stable coalition in a fractured parliament after her conservatives bled support to a surging populist right. • Two years after Merkel left German borders open to more than 1 million migrants, the election night shock was not only that the anti-immigration AfD became the first far-right party to enter parliament in more than a half century. The real shock was that the AfD won its 13.2% of the vote by taking votes away from the CDU/CSU, primarily in Bavaria, which has since 2105 continually demanded that Merkel change her immigration policy, and in her home region of former-Communist East Germany, which has argued against Merkel's immigration policy because migrants take their jobs in what remains the regional weak link in the German economy. • The election result makes kingmakers of the FDP and the Greens, both of which have played the role in the recent past but neither of which now has enough support alone to give Merkel a majority. FDP leader Christian Lindner, 38, an ambitious politician who preaches an ultra-hard line on Europe and has unsettled the German political establishment, said he was open to coalition talks with Merkel but that Germany needed a change of course. The Greens’ Katrin Goering-Eckardt said : “We will see if there can be cooperation.” The big problem for Merkel, if she manages to put the Jamaica Coalition together, is that the Greens, who favor regulation, and the business-friendly FDP are at opposite ends of the political spectrum and a clash of policies seems inevitable. • The election also exposed rifts in Merkel’s conservatives, with her allies the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), who face a regional election next year, demanding a shift to the right to win back voters lost to the AfD. Janis Emmanouilidis from the European Policy Centre says : “They will try their best to recover lost ground on the right side of the political spectrum. Going into a coalition in Berlin with the Greens and the FDP will make this more difficult.” • Leading AfD candidate Alexander Gauland vowed his party would “hunt” the new government, whatever its make-up, adding: “We’ll get our country and our people back.” And that is indeed the battle cry of the AfD. After shock election results last year -- from Britain’s vote to leave the EU to the election of US President Donald Trump -- leaders of Europe’s establishment have looked to Merkel to rally the liberal West. But, populist nationalism on the right and on the left is on the rise in Europe, and in France, populist leader Marine Le Pen congratulated the AfD, tweeting : “Bravo to our AfD allies for this historic showing!” As voters flocked to the anti- immigration AfD, it hardly had time to savor its third-place showing before it fell into internal bickering and rumors floated that co-leader Frauke Petry, one of its most prominent voices, has said she would not sit in parliament with AfD members. It was not immediately clear why she was making such a move. • Merkel’s CDU/CSU nonetheless remains the biggest parliamentary bloc and Europe’s most powerful leader kept her coalition options open on Monday, saying she would start talks with the Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens as well as the SPD, despite SPD leader Martin Schulz having said earlier his party had no choice but to go into opposition “to defend democracy against those who question it and attack it.” In a reaction characteristic of Merkel's governing style -- in which she listens and often seems to agree with every position before deciding what outcome she wants -- the Chancellor said : “I heard the SPD’s words, nevertheless we should remain in contact. I think all parties have a responsibility to ensure that there will be a stable government.” Merkel made clear she still intends to serve a full four years as Chancellor. But her next coalition could be her toughest yet. • ING Economist Carsten Brzeski told Reuters : “The weak result could make Angela Merkel a lame duck much faster than international observers and financial markets think.” Josef Joffe, publisher-editor of Germany weekly Die Zeit, said the vote marked a “tectonic shift in German politics” and that the three-way coalition Merkel looks likely to try to forge will be “highly unstable.” Klaus Wohlrabe, economist at the Munich-based Ifo economic institute, said new elections could not be excluded and the result could produce uncertainty as German business confidence deteriorated unexpectedly in the weeks before the election. Matthias Mueller, chief executive of Volkswagen, said he was “shocked” by the AfD’s double-digit showing and said the success of Europe’s largest economy hinged on its tolerance and openness to the world : “For Germany’s biggest industrial company, I say [that] in the globalized economy, national egoism and protectionism lead to a dead end -- and in the end a loss of jobs.” Investors were unsettled by the prospect of a weaker Merkel at the head of a potentially unstable Jamaica Coalition and also worried that months of coalition talks could distract from talks with Britain over its separation from the European Union. The European Jewish Congress expressed alarm at the AfD’s success, adding in a statement : “We trust that centrist parties in the Bundestag will ensure that the AfD has no representation in the coming governing coalition.” • • • MERKEL'S TWO BIG POLITICAL PROBLEMS. The Chancellor will finally put together a Jamaica or Grand Coalition, but the AfD and her own Bavarian CSU will be Merkel's greatest challenges. • THE AfD. The AfD has pledged to fight an “invasion of foreigners” with its new MPs. Speaking in Berlin the morning after the election results, lead candidate Alexander Gauland said his party would “uncompromisingly address” immigration, on which it has campaigned relentlessly since the refugee crisis began. Angela Merkel says she will listen to far-right AfD voters concerns. Gualand says : “One million people -- foreigners -- being brought into this country are taking away a piece of this country and we as AfD don’t want that. We say we don’t want to lose Germany to an invasion of foreigners from a different culture. Very simple.” Angela Merkel says she will listen to AfD voter concerns, as pollsters and political analysts in Berlin warn against allowing the AfD party -- which says Islam is “not a part of Germany” and routinely demonizes foreigners -- to hog the spotlight. Matthias Jung of pollsters Forschungsgruppe Wahlen told reporters in Berlin : “Of course we have to stand up against their views, but if the media all focus on the AfD, exclusively pushing them into the Nazi corner, then it creates a certain effect : everyone who sympathizes with the AfD in a more general way is also being pushed into that corner, and they feel treated in an unjust manner. Amongst the voters who support the AfD, you don’t have a coherent radical right ideology : they are dissatisfied with things that happened, but not necessarily just the refugee crisis." Dr. Peter Matuschek, of polling company Forsa, said the AfD deliberately attracted media attention by making provocative statements : “They pursued an agenda of targeted provocation, as did President Trump. Once a provocative statement was made, a politician could rely on being quoted in the media the day after.” He said that this approach “in a way reactivated” the immigration and refugee crisis as an issue during the election campaign, despite the fact that it was mostly out of the news in months leading up to the election -- we can reply that, as in the US, the European media tend to downplay citizen unrest over migrants, but the issue is far from disappearing in the EU and Cahncellor Merkel will find her maneuvering room reduced by the presence of a vocal AfD in her Bundestag. • THE CSU. Conservatives in Bavaria, distraught over heavy losses on Sunday, are shaping up as a big obstacle to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bid to forge a new three-way coalition in Germany. While the FDP and Greens have signalled some willingness to compromise, the Bavarian Christian Social Union that forms a parliamentary bloc with Merkel’s Christian Democrats, struck a far harsher tone on Tuesday. The prospect of losing more support to the AfD in a state election next year is making the CSU, traditionally an awkward CDU partner, dig in its heels on its biggest demand -- a cap on refugee numbers. CSU General Secretary Andreas Scheuer told the media : “The CSU has given voters guarantees and one of those is an upper limit on refugees. We must limit migration.” His comments were echoed by other CSU leaders. Bavaria was the main entry point for migrants to Germany in 2015 and the CSU wants to limit the number of migrants to 200,000 a year. Merkel has consistently ruled out setting a cap and the pressure on her has eased as the migrant flow has slowed since hitting a high of 1 million people in 2015. The Greens have a far more liberal approach and flatly repudiate limits. Bavarian state interior minister Joachim Herrmann reiterated the CSU’s demand, but he struck a slightly more positive note about the prospects of a Jamaica Coalition : “With goodwill on all sides, it is possible. But it is not easy." CSU support plunged on Sunday to 6.2% -- measured nationally -- from 7.4% in the last election in 2013, and many CSU lawmakers feel they are fighting for survival in the Bavarian assembly next year, where the CSU has governed for all but three years since its foundation in 1945. The AfD, already present in 13 of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments, took 12.5% of the Bavarian vote on Sunday, and the CSU fears its control of the Bavarian assembly could be challenged just as Merkel’s has been in Berlin. Those fears are adding to the pressure on the CSU’s leader, Horst Seehofer, who has spent much of the last two years berating the CDU for its migration policy. Apart from the CSU’s migrant red line, agreement with the eco-friendly Greens looks difficult because of emissions policy. Bavaria is home to the German industrial giant carmakers BMW and Audi, and the CSU is strongly resisting any prospect of bans on diesel and other combustion engines after an industry emissions scandal. • • • DEAR READERS, pundits say all politics is local. Angela Merkel may well be the exception to that rule. She is the European Union. Without her leadership, the EU would become an even less productive engine for the citizens of its member states. So, while Germans are not happy with her immigrantion policies, they were afraid to eliminate her from the German and EU political stages on Sunday. I suspect that, although she is not liked in most of the EU, if all EU citizens were asked to vote on a leader, she would squeak through, because there simply is nobody else. Not only do Europeans see Merkel as the leader of the free world and the wall standing firm against populism, she is the Anti-Trump -- the EU leader who will finally prove the superiority of Europe's model over Trump's. That the European socio-political model is doomed is of little consequence in the EU. Like their vision of Merkel as their leader, they envision no other socio-political model than socialist welfarism. • And, it didn't matter a bit that the day before the elections, jurists of the German parliament issued a Gutachten (expert opinion) accusing Merkel of never having provided legal arguments for opening the borders in 2015 and doing so without parliamentary approval as required by law -- she broke the law, and not just German law, because she opened not just Germany's borders, but those of the EU as well. She then told the lapdog unelected European Commission to force reluctant eastern EO nations to take migrants in what was seen as a German diktat. • Merkel's migrant policies are wreaking havoc in German society. Migrant crime, often sexual in nature, spiked by 52.7% in 2016 compared to 2015, despite efforts by the government to hide it. Worse, in the first six months of 2017 alone, Berlin issued 230,000 visas for family members of the migrants, and another 390,000 are expected. A recent Pew Foundation study shows that no more than 3% of the migrants are ever sent back, while European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker claims that 720,000, or nearly 75% have received asylum even though few of them were persecuted in their home countries. Official German figures show that by 2020, the government will have spent 93.6 billion Euros on migrant welfare, but cost may not be the real issue. The counter-terrorism coordinator of the EU, Gilles de Kerchove, stated in a recent interview that 50,000 jihadists have entered Europe under the guise of migrants. • Why do German voters continue to vote for her? During her 12 years as chancellor, Merkel has moved the CDU sharply to the left and has run the country in a way barely distinguishable from her socialist SPD coalition partners, undoubtedly explaining the rise of the populist right-wing party AfD. The legendary Bavarian politician Franz-Joseph Strauss once said that the conservatives should never allow a legitimate party to the right of themselves if they want to stay in power. Merkel has now done that and will sooner or later suffer the consequences. In addition, German politics is full of parties (SPD, Greens, Die Linke) that are openly pro-Russian and anti-American, in stark contrast to Eastern Europe. German media are so stridently anti-American that it has been compared to Nazi propaganda. Merkel herself has sided with Putin on the key issue of European energy independence from Russia. This new and growing fault line between Germany and eastern Europe may be a real threat to NATO, in addition ot the fact that Germany refuses to seriously boost its defense capabilities. But, Germany is prosperous and enjoys a huge surplus with all its partners in the EU. This one-sided relationship was created by the Euro, and it will not change until Germany's Eurozone partners realize it and demand change. Until then, "fat and happy" Germans will continue to vote for Chancellor Merkel. • UNLESS, that AfD "party to the right" of the CDU continues to tell the German voters the truth about Chnacellor Merkel. Despite mounting establishment efforts to tar as racist and Nazi anyone or any group who protest the flood of Moslem immigrants transforming life in Germany, enough Germans voted AfD to give the party a prominent role going forward. And, similar to the reaction to the election of President Trump -- ongoing harassment by Progressives is underway, although there is no evidence that the AfD is either racist or Nazi. Reuters has reported : "Ronald Lauder, president of the New York-based World Jewish Congress, called Chancellor Angela Merkel a 'true friend of Israel and the Jewish people' and decried the AfD's gains at a time when anti-Semitism was increasing across the globe." Really?? Merkel, by bringing a million people into Germany who have been nurtured on the vilest anti-Semitism imaginable, is fanning the flames of anti-Semitism in a real and tangible way. Public opinion surveys in Arab Moslem communities consistently reveal that Jew-hatred is embraced by majorities of around 80%. Tolerating the influx of people from a background steeped in anti-Jewish sentiment is the equivalent of promoting violence against Jews. • One Geman voter told the Guardian : "Yes, I voted for the AfD. The last three elections I voted for the SPD. The coalition of CDU-SPD lost the feeling of what the so-called working class is really about. Merkel said integration won’t need any extra money and it’s good for economy. And it was all forced on the population." The big vote for the new conservative party, the AfD, is almost completely a result of former Christian Democrats leaving their party for AfD in protest of Merkel's disastrous immigration and environmental policies. Before Merkel came along, Germany’s Christian Democrats were the one European party most like Ronald Reagan’s Republicans -- unashamedly pro-market, pro-defense, and pro-life. But Merkel has repeatedly turned her party toward nonsensical leftist policies and a lot of traditional conservatives have left. In 2016, CSU's leader, Horst Seehofer, had to threaten to end the Conservative Christian coalition and run CSU candidates outside Bavaria in order to stop Merkel’s open borders policies. The 2017 results show that German voters overwhelmingly don’t want any more Moslem immigrants, and even the most loyal party bosses now may be thinking about easing Merkel out. Stay tuned.