CHANGE? Conservative opposition wins German election and the far right is 2nd with strongest postwar result.

Germany’s conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz won a lackluster victory in a national election Sunday, while Alternative for Germany doubled its support in the strongest showing for a far-right party since World War II, projections showed.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz conceded defeat for his center-left Social Democrats after what he called “a bitter election result.” Projections for ARD and ZDF public television showed his party finishing in third place with its worst postwar result in a national parliamentary election.

Merz said he hopes to put a coalition government together by Easter. But that’s likely to be challenging.

AfD won’t be allowed in, regardless.

NO, DOGE IS NOT RADICAL: Lydia Mashburn Newman, writing for The Daily Economy, published by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), lays out in terms even a Washington bureaucrat or career Member of Congress can understand on why what the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is no mystery – it’s introducing to the federal bureaucracy what are in the real world widely accepted “best practices.”

FAIL, BRITANNIA: Apple turns off data protection in the UK rather than comply with backdoor mandate.

In 2024, the UK revamped its UK Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 to give itself the authority to legally — and secretly — compel Apple to break the end-to-end encryption that its security and privacy depends on. Despite bipartisan protests from the US, the UK issued the order and Apple cannot continue to operate its end-to-end encryption without breaking the law.

Instead of allowing the UK backdoor access to encrypted data, however, Apple has announced that it is switching off the encryption. This technically complies with the law, but means Apple does not create a backdoor that the UK or other bad actors could use.

Compliance would have meant giving UK authorities a backdoor into any iPhone or iPad anywhere in the world.

CORN, POPPED:

Bring on the sunlight.

CHANGE: US Agency Reportedly Plans to Shut Down 8,000 EV Chargers, Offload EVs.

The General Services Administration (GSA), an agency that manages the federal government’s buildings, is planning to shut down all 8,000 of its electric vehicle chargers, The Verge reports.

The GSA is also expected to offload its current stock of EVs, though it’s unknown if the vehicles will be sold or put into storage. The agency will reportedly begin instructing employees to remove the chargers—which are used for both federally owned EVs and employees’ personal vehicles—as early as next week.

The agency informed employees at one regional office that, in its efforts “to align with the current administration,” it had received direction stating that all GSA-owned charging stations “are not mission-critical,” according to an email first reported by Colorado Public Radio.

“The GSA is working on the timing of canceling current network contracts that keep the EV chargers operational. Once those contracts are canceled, the stations will be taken out of service and ‘turned off at the breaker,’” the email continued. “Other chargers will be turned off starting next week.”

The web page dedicated to the electrification of the GSA’s fleet has also been taken offline, The Verge notes.

Can’t say I have much pity for EV carmakers whose business model depended on government purchases.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Never Trump Grift Goes On, But It Has a Shelf Life Now. “The Low-T doyens of the Never Trump movement who’ve been turning vitriolic obsession into cash since 2016 are still cashing checks, which may surprise a lot of people. Sadly, there’s still a lot of money to be made when any Republican wants to stab other Republicans in the back. That’s been true for a long time but, as with so many things, it’s gotten more intense since President Trump’s first White House tenancy.”

AMERICANS: “Do you think Democrats learned anything from their historic loss last November?”

Democrats:

Who are the condoms for in pre-school?

YES:

MEGAN MCARDLE: Academia Finally Got Schooled: Universities, colleges took prestige and public support for granted. Now they are paying the price.

The left, not the right, picked this fight. Too many institutions set themselves up as the “Resistance” to Trump and tried to make a lot of mainstream political opinions anathematic, while expecting to be protected from backlash by principles such as academic freedom that they were no longer honoring. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support. . . .

By presenting their expertise as part of a political fight, academics were not only squandering their credibility. They were asking to be treated like political adversaries. And in a real political fight, the ability to get your opponent’s journal article retracted is way less important than his ability to cut off your supply lines.

This danger has been evident for years, yet when I asked academics if this was really wise, most were curiously oblivious to the risks. Though they complained about stingy state legislatures and meddling Republican politicians, many bizarrely took them as evidence that there was little cost to politicizing academia — essentially, “They’re already attacking us, so there’s no point in trying to placate them.” They did not seem to grasp how much worse it could get.

Fundamentally, they took their prestige and public support for granted and seemed unable to imagine a world where the word “education” no longer conjured reverent deference among most of the population. Like children throwing rocks from an overpass, they felt protected by their elevated position, assuming their targets could do little but yell back. They weren’t expecting one of the drivers to get out of the car and grab a baseball bat from the trunk.

It’s not like they weren’t warned.

Plus: “The institutional left can’t control what Republicans do. It can only control its own behavior. And that behavior, however well-intentioned, was reckless in the extreme.” I’m not convinced that the behavior was at all well-intentioned, but sure.

ANDY KESSLER: The You-Do Economy: Self-service may seem inconvenient, but it’s a new frontier of individualism.

Inside View: Columnist Andy Kessler speculates on issues including earnings at Apple, AI at Google, weight loss drugs including Ozempic, the rise of the humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus, and arguably the biggest question of all: Is Snoop Dogg overexposed? Photo: Cfoto/Zuma Press/Chris Pizzello/AP

It started slowly. We dial our own phone numbers instead of an operator. We pump our own gasoline (except in New Jersey). With pensions phasing out, most of us plan for our own retirement and trade our own stocks. I call it the You Do Economy.

Technology, which eats people, replacing low-end jobs, has turned this trend into a runaway train. We use self-checkout lines at grocery stores. Airlines prefer if we check in ourselves and either show or print our own boarding passes. Airline kiosks spit out baggage tags that often take a doctorate to figure out how to attach. Hotels want us to check in and out ourselves (though I always forget to print out the bill so I can expense it). Need customer service? Forget it. Read the FAQ. Or go watch a video on YouTube. Else we’re on hold for 45 minutes, minimum.

We are almost forced to buy clothes and shoes online. Physical stores don’t stock the quantity or variety of Amazon and other sellers. Then, of course, we have to haul ourselves to Whole Foods, Staples or UPS with our returns—lugging with us five boxes of uncomfortable sneakers.

We swipe our own credit card to pay—cash is almost dead. Even worse, restaurants don’t bother with menus (remember when Covid spread via paper?). Instead, we scan QR codes and squint at menus on our phones. We’re asked to tip at counter-service restaurants.

Is that it? Heck no. People used to rely on editors to fact-check or amend the record. Now on X and most recently Facebook, we get “community notes,” which are corrections done by, you guessed it, you and me! Artificial intelligence could do the fact checking, but, no, it hallucinates so bad we’re forced to question everything it comes up with.

We have to install our own updates, and we’re even subject to buggy beta software, so we have to find all the problems instead of quality-assurance teams doing the job. We install a dozen streaming services instead of the old cable feed. Changing shows means almost acrobatic precision presses on our remote.

We do our own taxes, even though the Internal Revenue Service has virtually all our financial information already. We need to be our own health advocates. All this takes more time, and time is money. It’s unpaid work for all of us.

If we abolished the Income Tax, or replaced it with a flat tax or the Fair Tax, that would help with the tax issue. As for the other stuff, some of it brings more choice, but some of it is just a way of exporting costs to customers.

DECOUPLING: Trump tariffs promise chaos, but China’s Xi Jinping may be the biggest threat to the global economy, former Treasury official warns.

Imports of manufactured goods into China have grown by an average of just $15 billion annually over the last six years, essentially unchanged after accounting for inflation. But exports from China have shot up by more than $150 billion.

“When it comes to manufactured goods, trade with China is virtually a one-way street,” Setser said.

That massive disparity is hurting other economies, especially other export-oriented ones like Germany and Japan, he added.

The problem can be traced back to China’s refusal to rebalance its economy after the global financial crash away from its heavy dependence on investment and trade. Rather than shift the economy toward the consumer sector, Beijing fueled a real estate and infrastructure bonanza. But fearing a bubble, Xi clamped down on the boom, setting off a slump that China still hasn’t recovered from.

At the same time, Xi avoided directing massive stimulus to consumers during the pandemic, unlike many other countries that fueled demand for Chinese products. Instead of consumers, China offered support to its manufacturers, resulting in overproduction that only overseas demand couldn’t match.

Now, China alone has the capacity to produce two-thirds of the world’s demand for cars, Setser said. Similarly, China makes more than half the world’s supply of steel, aluminum, and ships. China’s volume of exports is expanding three times faster than global trade, meaning its gains are coming at the expense of others.

“This points to a world economy in which China has no need for the industrial inputs of other countries while leaving those countries dependent on Chinese-made goods—and vulnerable to Beijing’s political and economic pressure,” he predicted.

The West needs to deregulate, hard and fast.

HARSH, BUT FAIR: