As the End of Merkelism Nears, What Next for Germany?

Der Untergang (Bernd von Jutrczenka/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)

The worst German chancellor since you-know-who — and one likely to prove almost as destructive to her own country and Europe as her predecessor — has finally worn out her welcome:

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Angela Merkel’s worries continue as the latest polls reveal the majority of Germans did not want her to run as a candidate for Chancellor again. The survey, carried out in the coalition talks breakdown, makes worrying reading for Angela Merkel. While Mrs Merkel said yesterday she wanted to stand again in any new snap election the German people appear to be turned off by the prospect. Of those polled, 54 per cent said she should not run for office, according to the polling institute Civey for t-online.de. Only 38.5 percent of Germans would welcome a renewed candidacy of the chancellor.

If you’re wondering why Merkel — who just recently “won” her recent re-election — is thinking about running again so soon, here’s the reason: while her “conservative” party, the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union), emerged again as the largest party in the Bundestag, she can’t form a functioning government without some sort of tactical alliance with one or more of the other parties. And that isn’t happening.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany faced the greatest crisis of her career on Monday after negotiations to form a new government collapsed, shaking a country that is Europe’s political and economic anchor. The breakdown abruptly raised the prospect of new elections in Germany. It came less than two months after the last elections seemed to assure that Ms. Merkel, an icon of Western democracy and values, would remain Germany’s leader for a fourth term.

The chancellor said she remained hopeful about forming a majority government. But if forced to choose, Ms. Merkel said, she would prefer to go through new elections rather than try to lead a minority government.

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Of course she would: since allowing into Germany (and thus Europe) more than a million unwashed, unvetted Muslims, largely illiterate in Western languages, ways, and mores, Mutti Merkel and her stock have sunk among the German voting public, which made the anti-invasion fringe party, the AfD (Alternative for Deutschland), the third-largest party in parliament. The chancellor is now toxic, as long-repressed Germans finally cast off the last of their guilt over World War II and come to understand that foreign Muslims are in no way analogous to German Jews during the National Socialist period, and that laws meant to protect Jews and other peoples undergoing actual suffering do not apply to a horde of cultural aliens seeking “a better life” while trying to impose their savagery on the land of Luther.

The collapse of talks reflected the deep reluctance of Ms. Merkel’s conservative bloc and prospective coalition partners — the ecologist-minded Greens and pro-business Free Democrats — to compromise over key positions. The Free Democrats quit the talks late Sunday, citing what they called an atmosphere of insincerity and mistrust.

“There is no coalition of the willing to form a government,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund. “This is uncharted territory since 1949. We’re facing a protracted period of political immobility. Not only is this not going to go away soon, there is no clear path out.”

Welcome to reality, Germany. Since the end of the war — and certainly since reunification — the Germans have lived in a fool’s paradise in which their guilt morphed into a sense of social and moral superiority to the rest of the world, especially regarding their protector, the United States of America. Shielded by American troops and nuclear weapons from the Russian bear for half a century, they spent little or nothing on their own defense, and instead created a social democracy for themselves that worked just fine as long as a) worker productivity stayed sky-high and b) nobody cheated the system.  But as the pernicious doctrine of multi-culturalism — called Multikulti in German — penetrated German society, the system could no longer hold.

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Diversity proved to be its death.

As things turned out, the vaunted German superiority turned out to be helpless in the face of the “progressive” Left (Germany is inordinately fond of socialism — where do you think Marx came from?). Housebroken since the late 1940s to avoid “extremism,” German politics evolved as a revolving door between slightly right of center and a little further left of center — with “center” defined as democratic socialism. Now, in the face of hordes of Syrian doctors, Afghan basket-weavers, African drummers, Arab falafel-shop proprietors, and other cultural enrichers, the postwar political consensus is collapsing. “Wir shaffen das!” was Merkel’s slogan: “We can do it.” In fact, they couldn’t.

Some were quick to link Germany’s disorder to a broader crisis of democracy in the West. “The unthinkable has happened,” said Christiane Hoffmann, deputy head of the Berlin bureau of Der Spiegel, a German magazine. In that sense, she said, “This is Germany’s Brexit moment, its Trump moment.”

The East German Merkel’s reputation was always inordinately high among her fellow travelers in the West, who saw her as both a childless progressive and an unattractive woman, celebrated accordingly, and looked no farther. The media needed a symbol of European “resistance” to both Brexit and Trump, and they thought they had one with her. They relied on German passivity and pre-Muslim invasion social consensus to keep things stable, since it literally made no material difference whether the CDU or its main rival, the SPD (the Social Democratic Party), was in power, first in Bonn and now in Berlin.

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Alas, it may still be that Germany’s version of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party will yet come to her rescue:

The leader of Germany’s Social Democrats came under growing pressure on Thursday to drop his opposition to a new “grand coalition” with Angela Merkel’s conservatives, with senior politicians arguing the party had a duty to promote stability. Merkel is facing the biggest political crisis of her career since efforts to forge a three-way coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens collapsed last weekend. That has raised worries across Europe of a prolonged leadership vacuum in the continent’s economic powerhouse.

The Social Democrats (SPD) have governed in coalition under Merkel since 2013. But leader Martin Schulz said the party must heed the will of voters by going into opposition after achieving its worst result of the postwar period in the Sept. 24 election. Pressure is growing on the party to revisit his decision, either by agreeing to prop up a conservative-led minority government by not voting against it, or by forming a renewed coalition.

As we all know, Leftists abhor a “power vaccum,” and will rush right in to fill it. And don’t underestimate how powerful those forces are: the entire American media will cheer any announcement of a new right-left coalition, and the entire European Union is praying for it. The peasants are revolting, and something simply must be done and quickly, until the next Muslim atrocity strikes and the electorate remembers exactly who visited this plague upon them.

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But the rumblings of the Blond Beast can be heard in the distance, growing louder. From the battle of Teutoburg Forest to Stalingrad, nothing good has ever come of that.

 

 

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