Tea and Vitriol

The right extremist, neo-Nazi Alternativ für Deutschland won 44% of the vote in Sachsen-Anhalt on Sunday. It was both feared AND expected. Sachsen-Anhalt has not fared well since German reunification in 1990. It is, in fact, the poorest of the German Länder. Neither have the other German Länder that comprised the former East Germany, which is where the AfD have made inroads in the past five years. The people there have felt let down by the government of the unified Germany, believing that they had better lives under the Russian puppet state that was Communist East Germany. Several people on German news programs have stated that at least there were jobs then. You might not have liked them, but at least you had them and got paid for them. That is one of the factors behind the AfD's rise in Eastern Germany, and especially on Sunday in Sachsen-Anhalt. Since German reunification, many of Sachsen-Anhalt's outdated factories were closed down. Others were absorbed by bigger companies i...

 The victory of the Christian Union in Germany yesterday was hardly a surprise. It had been expected for months, ever since Socialist Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his finance minister, Christian Lindner of the Free Democratic Party, which effectively dissolved the Coalition consisting of the Socialists, the Greens and the FDP. That coalition had always been on shaky ground from its inception. It took Scholz two months to piece it together in 2021, and this so-called Ample Coalition lost steam from its very beginning. No single party in Germany can win an absolute majority, so the leader of the party with the largest number of votes becomes chancellor and has to piece together a working government by inviting other parties to work with him. That means concessions have to be made with other parties, whose agendas might be radically different from the winning party, usually in the form of ministerial posts. And that means that the various ministers usually work against the common good...