Merkel and Socialist Open-Door Globalists Are Losing Ground to Trump and Conservative Secure-Border Populists

THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS THAT IMMIGRATION IS AS HOT AN ISSUE IN EUROPE AS IT IS IN AMERICA. Germany's Angela Merkel is feeling the heat of the immigration issue. • • • BUT, FIRST, CONDOLENCES AND PRAYERS FOR THE FAMILY OF THE MURDERED US BORDER PATROL AGENT. For hours, there was no information about how the agents were attacked, and one of thel killed. Now, Fox News has told uw that the attack was by illegal immigrants who reportedly assaulted two US Border Patrol agents with rocks, killing one and seriously injuring another on Sunday near the southern border with Mexico. Details around the attack are still sketchy, but the FBI has taken over the investigation and an FBI spokesperson said Rogelio Martinez and his partner were not shot and a National Border Patrol Council official told KTSM the assailants were "undocumented immigrants" who used likely used rocks to bash the agents. NBPC vice president Art Del Cueto told KTSM : "We strongly believe rocks were what was used." The FBI had taken over the investigation into the death of Martinez, 36, and the injuring of his partner, who was not identified. The two were patrolling the Big Bend Sector of Texas when the attack occurred. Jeannette Harper of the El Paso FBI office said : "They were not fired upon. There are so many different agencies working together that we need to come together and develop a timeline." • Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez was from El Paso and had worked as a border agent since August 2013. He died of injuries sustained while responding to “activity” near Interstate 10 in the Van Horn Station area, according to a news release from US Customs and Border Protection. At some point, Martinez's partner called for help, saying he and Martinez had both been injured, investigators told KFOX14. • President Trump tweeted : "Border Patrol Officer killed at Southern Border, another badly hurt. We will seek out and bring to justice those responsible. We will, and must, build the Wall!" To indicate the popular support for the President's position, his tweet got 17,791 replies; 26,993 retweets; and 105,790 likes. • Elaine Duke, the acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, released a statement Sunday calling Martinez’s death a “tragic event. Earlier this morning, I was notified that Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez died as a result of serious injuries suffered while on patrol in the Big Bend Sector of our southern border in Texas. Agent Martinez was responding to activity while on patrol with another agent, who was also seriously injured.” • Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Repulbican, also released a statement calling the attack a “stark reminder of the ongoing threat that an unsecure border poses to the safety of our communities and those charged with defending them. Our condolences and prayers go out to the family and friends of Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez, who was killed this morning in the line of duty. We are also praying for the full recovery of his partner, who was also attacked." • Fox News said that Big Bend accounted for about 1% of the more than 61,000 apprehensions agents made along the Southwest border between October 2016 and May 2017. The region's mountains and the Rio Grande make it a difficult area for people to cross illegally into the US from Mexico. • The Pew Research Center reports that there were appoximately 5.6 million "unauthorized immigrants" from Mexico in the United States by 2016. The Border Patrol website lists 38 agents who have died since late 2003, some attacked while working along the border, and other fatalities in traffic accidents. It lists one other agent death in the line of duty this year. • Just last week, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost said the Trump administration’s rhetoric regarding protecting America’s borders in the face of illegal immigration has a lot of agents “feeling empowered to actually enforce the laws that are on the books.” Provost, a 23-year veteran in the agency, said “the men and women out there really just want to enforce those laws that they have been trained to enforce, that’ve been – and I think they feel empowered to do their jobs now. “From the Border Patrol perspective right now, having that support and having the ability to go out and do the job that they were hired for is certainly bringing up their morale.” Provost says : "It takes a certain type of person to be a Border Patrol agent. We’re asking people to go out, work night shifts in the desert, by themselves, tracking up groups, not necessarily knowing what they’re coming into....It’s not for everybody.” • Our prayers and condolences go out to the family, loved ones and friends of Agent Martinez, and to the US Border Patrol for its loss and for its heroic work. • • • SOMALI IMMIGRANT THREATS ALREADY EXIST IN THE US. President Trump came back from Asia to an immigration proble, that nobody seems to want to solve. • Liberty Headlines published a WND article a week ago that reported : "For the second time in just over a year, a Somali 'refugee' has stabbed shoppers with a knife at a Minnesota mall. The first case, on September 17, 2016, was a clear act of jihad when Dahir Adan injured 10 people in the Macy’s at the Crossroads Center Mall in St. Cloud after asking his victims, chosen at random, if they were Moslem. But on Sunday night a man identified as Mahad Abdiaziz Abdirahman, 20, of Minneapolis stabbed two men at the Mall of America after they tried to stop him from stealing clothes inside the dressing room at Macy’s." • Bloomington Police Chief Jeff Potts said in a news conference that “the suspect went in and tried to take some property and, when confronted, he produced a knife and stabbed one man. Some family members assisted the victim and a second man sustained another knife wound.” The Bloomington Police press release stated : “A confrontation ensued and the suspect pulled a knife and stabbed the victim. The second victim, who is related to the first, heard the confrontation and intervened and in doing so was also stabbed. The suspect received minor injuries from the victims while they disarmed him...Mahad Abdiaziz Abdirahaman, 20 years old from Minneapolis, is being held on 2 counts of 1st Degree Assault.” • While police identified the latest attacker as Mahad Abdirahman, the local Star-Tribune still was not reporting his name or background on Monday morning, referring to the man arrested only as “the suspect.” • Minnesota has the largest population of Somali refugees in the US, with numbers approaching 100,000, and Governor Mark Dayton has told residents of the state that if they are not comfortable living among the refugees they “should find another state.” Dayton belongs to the unique Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party. • The problem President Trump and his DHS Secretary need to solve is how to keep islamic jihadist-influenced Somalis from entering the US and clumping in groups where they continue to use knives to deal with life issues. Under President Trump, the flow of Somali immigrants has slowed but not stopped. The Refugee Processing Center says : "In the last two months alone, 280 refugees from Somalia have arrived on US shores, with 56 of them going to Minnesota, 29 to Colorado, 19 to Ohio, 15 to Missouri, 14 to Indiana, 13 to Wisconsin, 11 to Nebraska and 12 each to New York and Pennsylvania." Even tiny towns like Noel, Missouri, Dodge City and Garden City, Kansas, and Lexington, Nebraska, continue to get a steady flow of refugees from Somalia and other jihadist hotbeds such as Sudan. • WND says : "It doesn’t seem to matter how bad the Somalis act or how little of an attempt is made at assimilation, they keep coming from the United Nations refugee camps with one-way plane tickets to America." And, Minneapolis is their Mecca. WND tells the story of Abdullah Yusuf : "Just last week, a young Somali man who tried to join the Islamic State in 2015 was released from a 'rehabilitation' program in Minnesota. The program was modeled on a German rehab experiment. Abdullahi Yusuf, one of nine Somali men arrested in an FBI probe of ISIS recruitment in Minnesota, on Thursday became possibly the first American to be allowed back into society after trying to join the Islamic State, the Star-Tribune reported. A federal judge in Minneapolis granted Yusuf, 21, supervised release from the federal halfway house where he has been held since his sentencing in November 2016. Senior US District Judge Michael Davis, who oversaw last year’s landmark ISIS recruitment trial in Minneapolis, granted Yusuf’s release after spending 45 minutes closely questioning both the young man and officials from the US Probation and Pretrial Services office in Minnesota, according to the Star-Tribune. Yusuf will remain on supervised probation for 20 years. Eric Hermes, Yusuf’s probation officer, testified that while in the halfway house, Yusuf earned his high school diploma, underwent counseling and participated in community service." • Such indifference to American security cannot be allowed to continue. It will not only inflict grave harm on American citizens but also weaken the faith of Americans that the US is a country where the rule of law reigns. • • • GERMAN CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL IS FEELING THE BACKLASH OF HER OPEN BORDER POLICIES. The UK Independent reported on Monday that the September national German elections appear to have been inconclusive and that "Angela Merkel backed new elections on Monday after coalition talks between German parties collapsed over the weekend. The CDU leader, who has been Chancellor since 2005, said she would prefer fresh elections to leading an unprecedented minority government after the liberal FDP dropped out of talks." Merkel had hoped to form a "Jamaica Coalition" with the liberals and the Greens after her governing grand coalition failed to gain a majority of the seats in the German national parliament in September's election, but the Independent wrote : "the chasm between the parties willing to do a deal appears to have been too great." After nearly a month of exploratory talks, the conservative CDU of Chancellor Angela Merkel, its Bavarian sister party CSU, the Green Party and the pro-business Free Democrats had to part ways without a deal after passing a deadline they had set themselves for November 16. • Germany’s largely figurehead president Frank-Walter Steinmeier holds the power to start the process of calling fresh elections, because Merkel is not officially Chancellor, but for now, her caretaker government with the Social Democrats (SPD) will remain in place.Steinmeier has called on the parties to “reconsider their attitudes” in order to avert a political crisis in what has long been the most stable country in the EU : “I expect the parties to make the formation of a new government possible in the foreseeable future,” adding that the parties had a responsibility that “cannot be simply given back to the voters.” If no majority coalition can be formed, the president must nominate a candidate for Chancellor. If no government can be formed after three rounds of voting in the Bundestag, fresh elections will be called. • We are now at the seeming end of round one, with no German coalition government formed. Merkel’s center-right CDU/CSU came out on top but lacked a governing majority. A continuation of the previous government, a coalition with the CDU/CSU and the center-left SPD, is out of the question because the SPD has said it wants to return to opposition -- a stance reiterated by its leader Martin Schulz on Monday. After weeks of talks, the FDP -- the pro-business Free Democrats -- dropped out, despite having agreed to moderate its demands for tax cuts. Merkel announced on Monday : "I regret, with all due respect to the FDP, that we could not come to a mutual agreement." Merkel, who said on Monday evening she was “very sceptical” about a minority government and wants to continue as leader of her party, although a leadership challenge to her authority is not thought to be out of the question. • This year’s elections were notable with big gains for the AfD, the first far-right populist party to enter the Bundestag in half a century. Fear that a new election would spell disaster for the country, with the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, having a chance to increase its 13% share of the vote. And Hnadelsblatt, the German business newspaper, says : "With the UK Brexit clock ticking, the refugee crisis smoldering, the Euro crisis bubbling under and populism rising throughout Europe, the last thing Europe needs now is a Germany abdicating from leadership because of domestic politics." • • • WHAT NEXT FOR GERMANY? Many Germans doubt that a “Jamaica Coalition" can last a whole four-year term. The four parties apparently cannot agree on fundamental issues ranging from climate policy to immigration. And, a collapse of the negotiation, if that is what we are now seeing, would have far-reaching consequences. The most likely outcome would be snap elections to try and break the stalemate. But, polls suggest that the outcome of a new election would be fairly similar to that of the vote on September 24, merely prolonging the impasse. • At stake is the political survival of Angela Merkel, who won a fourth term in September and just last week was named the world’s most powerful woman by Forbes for the seventh year running. SPD leader Martin Schulz said on Friday the Social Democrats aren’t going to come to Angela Merkel’s rescue this time. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, thinks that Merkel's partner in the grand coalition, the Bavarian CSU, by giving in now in the coalition talks, could do badly in the Bavarian state election next year. Its likeliest response would be to turn hard-right, even at the cost of blowing up the coalition in the federal government. Merkel’s government would lose its majority. For Schroeder, the consequence is that : "Then in 2019 we’ll have very interesting new elections.” • • • IT'S IMMIGRATION, STUPID! Immigration, one of the most controversial issues in Germany since the influx of refugees in 2015, is one of the stumbling blocks, as the parties’ stances are diametrically opposed. Wolfgang Kubicki, leader of the FDP, says : “We have tried to build bridges but so far we have unfortunately failed.” His FDP categorically opposes family reunification for refugees whose asylum status is pending. And Merkel’s CDU and the Bavarian CSU are in favor of capping the number of asylum seekers entering the country every year. But The Green party staunchly opposes both of these proposals. • Of course, there are other issues that hamper the formation of a new German government. • World leaders gathered this week at the UN climate-change conference in Bonn to commit to phasing out coal in the next decade, but the German negotiators went in the opposite direction. The environmentalist Greens reneged on several of their key proposals on climate policy to accommodate their conservative wing. They gave up on their proposal for Germany to shutter its 20 most polluting coal-fired power plants and compromised on their proposed ban on new fossil-fuel-powered cars after 2030. These painful U-turns make them less likely to bend over backwards on other topics. • And, with the Geman domestic political turmoil raging, Europe is not high on the negotiators’ lists. All four parties, like most Germans, are broadly in favor of further European integration. But, the FDP takes a hawkish stance on Eurozone reforms, opposing deeper fiscal integration of the sort proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron, including a common budget for the 19-country Eurozone bloc, fearing that such steps would transform the Eurozone into a “transfer union.” FDP head Christian Lindner has called a Eurozone budget a “red line.” • After the midnight halt in negotiations, FDP leader Christian Lindner said he saw no hope the parties could break a stalemate that had dogged the discussions for days : “It’s better not to govern, than to govern badly.” He added that despite weeks of talks, leaders of the parties had failed to build “a foundation of trust. But, in the end, the talks became bogged down by differences over refugee and climate policies. And, the refugee policy is one that Chancellor Merkel has staunchly refused ot budgeon -- maintaining that the open door policy for refugees is in Germany's best interest, even while saying that the wide open door in 2015 that brought a million unvetted refugees into the German heart of Europe was a mistake. among other issues. • • • THE JAMAICA COALITION WAS NOT TO BE. The failure to form a new coalition means that Germany is unlikely to have a stable government for months, hobbling Berlin’s ability to make strategic decisions on everything from foreign policy to Eurozone reform. With Europe facing many serious challenges, including disputes over the rule of law in Poland and Hungary and Brexit, the political instability in the EU’s largest country could hardly have come at a worse moment. The greatest uncertainty surrounds Merkel’s own future. Her failure to create a coalition with the liberals and Greens is likely to further weaken her standing in her party. Although she led the Christian Democrats to victory in the September election, they lost a substantial support compared to 2013. Criticism of her within the conservative ranks has been growing louder ever since. Merkel’s personal popularity among Germans has remained high. Yet news of the talks’ failure is bound to unsettle many in a political culture that prizes stability -- Germans still recall and fear the instability of the 1920s an 1930s that led to the Nazi regime. One big worry that feeds on the fear of the Nazi era is that another round of elections and the picture of disarray left by the major parties will only strengthen the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which finished third in September with nearly 13% of the vote. Similar fears can be found in France and other European countries where the populist right has been gaining political support for the past decade,e scalating siginificantly after Merkel's 2015 open door brought untold unvetted refugees, as well as economic migrants hidden among them, into a Europe already struggling with islamic terrorism fed by immigrant imams preaching hatred of the West and with +10% unemployment and stagnating economies stretched to care for citizens, let alone immigrants with cultural and political views vastly different from their own. • Some analysts question whether Merkel is prepared to confront her critics and run what promises to be another bruising campaign. So, it is up to President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to steer Germany out of the impasse. Under Germany’s constitution, the president plays a central role in establishing a new government, a process that is usually straightforward. Steinmeier has a narrow band of options. One would be a minority government with Merkel as chancellor. Under such an arrangement, the conservatives would have to find partners to push through legislation on an ad-hoc basis. That would likely mean Merkel would find herself dependent on the populist AfD in some cases, an outcome she and her party want to avoid at all costs. Even without that complication, minority governments are by definition unstable. Merkel has made no secret of her aversion to the idea. At the same time, Steinmeier has made it clear he’s not a fan of new elections. • If the SPD doesn’t reverse course and agree to re-form the coalition that governed before the September election, a return to the polls is almost inevitable. Even if Steinmeier, a former SPD vice chancellor and foreign minister, tried to force a minority government, Merkel could quickly dissolve it by calling (and losing) a vote of confidence. • The four parties appear ready to play a protracted blame game over who was responsible for the collapse of talks; with Green leader Cem Özdemir saying early on Monday : “A compromise would have been possible. We were ready to reach a compromise up until the last minute.” Green negotiator Jürgen Trittin accused the FDP of effectively sabotaging the talks on Sunday, saying both Merkel’s bloc and his party wanted to continue negotiating : “It was the FDP that was ready to walk out,” he said on German television, adding, “we weren’t really surprised.” Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s CDU, echoed that view, saying a deal was “within reach.” But, it was Seehofer’s insistence that war refugees not be granted the right to bring relatives to Germany that bedeviled the talks more than any other issue. • • • DEAR READERS, it was immigration. It is the issue that's driving European politics more than any other today. And, the centrist, center-left and leftist parties that support a more or less open door are finding their support with voters tanking. • In almost every country in Europe, parties of the center-left struggle to remain politically competitive. Reuters states : "Of the few in power, only the Portuguese socialists presently enjoy strong ratings. The Swedish social democrats regularly poll fewer than 30% and lead a minority government in coalition with the Greens. The Luxembourg Socialist Workers Party is a junior partner in a center-right-led coalition. In Malta, the EU’s smallest state, Labor is in power, but not held in high esteem after Daphne Caruana Galizia, the investigative journalist killed in October, reported extensively on charges of corruption involving Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his allies....In Italy, the only large European state with a center-left government, the Partito Democratico, suffered a bad defeat in the Sicilian regional elections earlier this month, where the right-wing coalition, led by the never-say-dead Silvio Berlusconi, won convincingly. National elections are expected in the spring of next year. In former communist states, the center-leftists frequently shift leaders and make alliances with centrists or even far rightists. The Estonian Social Democrats are junior partners in the ruling center-right coalition. The Romanian Social Democrats fired their own prime minister, Sorin Grindeanu, earlier this year after he tried to decriminalize some forms of corruption, and several other cabinet ministers resigned last month – though the party remains in power. In Slovakia, the social democrats lead a shifting and crisis-prone coalition after losing their parliamentary majority in 2016 elections. Elsewhere, the leftist parties -- the Austrian, Croatian, Cypriot, Czech, Danish, Finnish, German, Latvian and Lithuanian social democrats, the British, Dutch, Irish and Norwegian labor parties, the Bulgarian, French and Hungarian socialists, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party -- find winning ever harder. In the cases of the French socialists, Greek PASOK and Dutch Labour Party, single-figure rankings in the polls make even survival a stretch." But, says Reuters : "Meanwhile, far-right parties are seeing an upsurge in support. The German federal elections drew most comment for the sudden success of the far-right Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD) and the surprising weakness of the governing CDU/CSU center right coalition. But the much greater fragility of Germany’s social democrats, with an historic low of just over 20% of the vote, is at least as momentous. This, apparently the most stable, most powerful, best socially-integrated center-left party in the world, hemorrhaged voters to the populist Linke (Left) Party and even more to the AfD." • Reuters has a reasonable explanation of the collapse of social democrats : "Since the war, social democratic parties offered capitalism a deal. The state would be largely responsible for public welfare and education, and organized labor would -- in varying degrees -- be granted strong bargaining rights, even co-determination in enterprises. The internal, mostly unstated, agreement within the social democratic movements was that the unions would deliver the bulk of their members’ votes to the party. Capitalism would be regulated, but could be successful -- as it usually was....Social democracy, once ambiguous about capitalism, came to work with and depend on it. In Britain, France, Germany and Italy, parties which had once embraced socialism (in Italy’s case, communism) clawed away from commitment to nationalization, ever-higher public expenditure and any form of class struggle. Both the United States under the Democrat president Bill Clinton and Germany under the SPD’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, in the 1990s and after, adopted elements of British New Labour’s “Third Way,” essentially a new form of adaptation to capital in its more globalized form, but with relatively high public spending and liberal social policies as part of the bargain." • BUT, says Reuters, the growth of globalization as the primary principle of social democrats led them to believe that "they must rival governments of the right in attracting investment and encouraging entrepreneurship...the decline of national protections helped eviscerate much of organized labor (except in the public services) and rendered the institutions of the welfare state more fragile because more open to domestic and international competition....Union power was reduced when faced with global corporations; the left lost one of its most powerful cards. Social democrats and liberals also lose out in their response to escalating fear of terrorism, especially in France, and the gathering rejection of immigrants in all European states." • The center-left had tended to be more open to allowing mass immigration to their countries. All now are rowing back to harsher positions, but the damage with electorates is done, and for some time to come. • The issues are the same in the United States and Europe, although Donald Trump's remarkable turnaround of the American economy has brought jobs -- and more importantly hope and self-esteem -- to the large majority of US voters who have always tended to be conservative, unlike Europe's post WWII voters who favored social democrat, i.e., socialist welfare states. Both continents are now facing a future in which conservative electorates are rejecting unbridled immigration and globalism; want border control, and seek jobs and economic security for their citizens, while socialists who cry out for globalism and welcoming immigrants are facing ever-greater electoral defeat. If Angela Merkel is the last of the center-left social democrat globalists, Donald Trump is the first of the center-right conservative nationalist- populists. Merkel is part of a dying breed of politicians. Trump has all the political and electoral cards in his hand. What will happen in Europe? If the latest German "Iron Chancellor" is rusting, so are her center-left political policies. But, do not count Angela Merkel out quite yet. She is a tough, time-tested politician who realizes, as does the rest of Germany and Europe, that there is really nobody in Europe with the savvy and experience to replace her. What will happen? Stay tuned. But, in America, the GOP political elites ought to get busy funding the Wall, if they want to keep their seats in Congress.