Is Merkel on the way out?
Reports are that it could be as soon as next week, and if so, it will be over immigration. The issue is a bit difficult to understand for those of us who aren’t conversant with the ins and outs of German parties and politics, but it involves how hard-line a stance to take on the so-called “migrants.” The dispute is between Merkel and her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who is also head of the CSU (Christian Social Union) Party:
If on Monday Interior Minister Host Seehofer receives the go-ahead from his party, the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), for his plan to turn back asylum-seekers on the German border, he could implement the policy right there and then. Chancellor Angela Merkel would then have no choice but to force Seehofer to resign. Granted, Seehofer’s CSU is allied with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), but the chancellor cannot succumb to the whims of her junior partner. That would be the tail wagging the dog.
And neither can the CSU dictate what an interior minister should do. Seehofer, who also heads the Bavarian party, could postpone orders to turn back asylum-seekers for two weeks. Even so, he and the CSU will keep insisting on the border policy in order to retain credibility because Seehofer has always demanded a tougher stance on asylum-seekers. He famously criticized the status quo as “the rule of injustice” in 2016 when he still served as Bavaria’s state premier. Seehofer must, therefore, continue opposing Merkel.
A coalition government in a multi-party parliamentary system is something quite different from the way things work here, but this is the sort of crisis that can be expected to occur. Merkely was forced to form a coalition government three months ago, because of her relatively weak showing in the last election, and it sounds like she may have become even weaker since then.
Merkely indeed.
I’ll watch some talk shows tomorrow and see if I can get a gut feeling about what is happening. Germany was very different when there wer only 3 parties (CDU/CSU, SPD, and FDP). Since the Greens made it into parliament under Joschka Fischer, and then the Left (Linke) came in after reunification, things have only become more complicated. Now there is the AfD, which started out as some reasonable people who were resisting leftist changes, but in recent years, it has become an anti-immigration party with some bad apples.
Merkel’s method of compromising rather than really taking hard stands openly simply isn’r working in today’s complicated world.
The important point to keep in mind is that Seehofer’s party, the CSU, is for all intents and purposes the Bavarian CDU. (They are two formally separate parties, but the CDU does not run in Bavaria, the CSU does not run outside Bavaria, and they invariably cooperate on the federal level.)
Plus: there are elections in Bavaria coming up, and the CSU is terrified of losing to the AfD.
Result: Seehofer is trying desperately to reinforce his conservative credentials. He recently ordered all state institutions to prominently display crosses or crucifixes, which would not be all that remarkable in still-more-Catholic-than-elsewhere-in-Germany Bavaria, if it weren’t so transparent a ploy to play to conservative voters.
Seehofer’s antics right now need to be seen in this light.
Unfortunately for him, the CSU did not put up any kind of resistance to Merkel’s plans between 2015 and the AfD’s strong showing at the last federal elections. Thus, voters wonder how much of this newfound attention being paid to conservative sensibilities will outlast election day. Simply put: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you.” Most people who voted AfD are badly fed up with having been fooled not once, not twice, but countless times by the nominally conservative CDU/CSU under Merkel.
That the AfD is rapidly degenerating into a disgusting cesspool of far-right demagogues may be the only thing to save the Merkel system. Sadly enough, there is currently NO serious conservative party in Germany.
There’s a lot going down regarding Susanna Feldman, a 14 year old who was recently raped and murdered by an Iraqi “refugee” living in a refugee center. The “refugee” and his entire family flew back to Iraq, the country they were supposedly seeking refuge from, and revealed on social media they were actually a group of Palestinians who went to Germany to kill Jews.
AfD declared a moment of silence for her at the German parliament, only for Merkel’s coalition to respond with all the grace and refinement expected of Social Justice Warriors.
https://youtu.be/v2-Gxmrx2uQ
Quick side note — see Trump’s tweet on good relations with Merkel, despite the angry photo which got so much play:
I have a great relationship with Angela Merkel of Germany, but the Fake News Media only shows the bad photos (implying anger) of negotiating an agreement – where I am asking for things that no other American President would ask for!
The EU elites are pushing pushing pushing immigration, especially from Muslim majority countries. The Turks in Germany, many never fit in, many do. Some of those that don’t get radicalized anti-capitalistic, anti-Christian — much like US colleges.
There is some proportion of rapes & sexual abuse and harassment of women by Muslim immigrants. The elites pushing immigration don’t address this issue, pretending there is no problem.
Plus, every country that has a party which wants its people to be proud of their own country, such a party is called right wing & fascist by the elites. Patriotism doesn’t have to be anti-foreigner nationalism, but the elites are pushing that narrative, which polarizes folk.
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In most democratic countries, there are more than two parties, and voters vote for the party, not specifically individuals. Each party has a list. When a party gets into Parliament, they get the number of Members proportionate to their vote, so if their party gets 20% of the vote, they’d get 20 Members of a 100 member Parliament, or 87 Reps if there were 435 (like the US). From Wiki:
In the 709 member Bundestag, the CDU/CSU won 246 seats (200 CDU and 46 CSU), SPD 153, AfD 94, FDP 80, the Left (Linke) 69, and the Greens 67. A majority is 355.
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The Prime Minister needs to get the support of 355 or more members, so there needs to be a coalition among the parties who did get in. And, if a coalition leaves the gov’t, that usually means the “gov’t falls” and there are new elections.
In Slovakia, the Christian Democrats failed to reach the 5% threshold (getting 4.97), so are not in — but there is an anti-immigrant neo-fascist group which DID get in.
Most EU Christian Democrat leaders are mildly or strongly pro-immigration / pro-Christian mercy for those who need help.
Hungary also has a popular anti-immigrant Prime Minister, who got reelected recently.
Is Merkel on the way out? Or is her open borders policy on the way out?
Voters don’t want the open borders. That policy is already changing a bit, looks like it will change more.
That the AfD is rapidly degenerating into a disgusting cesspool of far-right demagogues may be the only thing to save the Merkel system. Sadly enough, there is currently NO serious conservative party in Germany.
Gorgasal: Been said for generations that if an issue of concern to the voters is not addressed by the political institutions, somebody will come along who will address the issue. You may not like that guy.
IIRC, Feldman’s murderer was extradited from a semi-autonomous area of Iraq administered by Kurds. Iraqi officials said it was illegal. Not sure of the legality issue, given the complexities of the situation, but it’s hard not to see this as yet another gold star for Kurds.
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Out or not at this particular moment, the damage has already been done, and Germany has been irreparably changed for the worse.
As with Obama, Merkel could hardly have done more damage to her country if her aim was to deliberately do so.
Immigration is not Merkel’s only major mistake. When she first had to form a coalition gov., she allied with the greens. This led to the complete shutdown of Germany’s nuclear power industry, which at the time was the envy of the world.
Had some kind of Fukashima style meltdown occurred in a German power plant, all of the testing and maybe most of the emergency repairs could have been via an extensive robotics system.
More recently, I’ve heard that there are some major German industries that have built their own coal fired power plants, because the “green” utility system is so overloaded and overpriced. Home owners were promised a few extra dollars per month on their electric bills, and the reality is 10 or 20 times that.
Relatively recently, Merkel referred to the nuke shutdown as her worst mistake.
Here is a really, *really* funny picture/meme with Merkel:
Merkel and Japanese PM
Richard Aubrey Says:
June 17th, 2018 at 6:01 am
Gorgasal: Been said for generations that if an issue of concern to the voters is not addressed by the political institutions, somebody will come along who will address the issue. You may not like that guy.
* * *
He came here, and they didn’t like him.
* * *
Snow on Pine Says:
June 17th, 2018 at 10:05 am
Out or not at this particular moment, the damage has already been done, and Germany has been irreparably changed for the worse.
As with Obama, Merkel could hardly have done more damage to her country if her aim was to deliberately do so.
* * *
What was not deliberate about any of it?
Oh, I believe it was deliberate all right, in both cases.
These policies were not merely “mistakes.”
Coming from the backgrounds they did–Obama essentially a Red Diaper baby, and Merkel originally an East German Communist–they convinced themselves that the steps they took and the policies they put into place would make their respective countries better places, as their core ideologies defined “better places.”
Or, alternatively, you could argue that their motives were nowhere near so benign, and that they took these deliberate steps in order to disrupt, weaken, and divide, to do whatever damage they could to Western bourgeois countries they pretty much despised, and saw as in opposition to everything they believed in.
Coming from the backgrounds they did—Obama essentially a Red Diaper baby,
His primary caretakers as a youth were his maternal grandparents. One was the manager of escrow accounts at the Bank of Hawaii. The other was an insurance agent. His mother was a red haze twit (though never a Communist Party member). The available evidence suggests he didn’t care much about her and she had no one but herself to blame for that. Obama spent a grand total of nine weeks in the same city with his father between the day he was born and the day in 1982 when the old man got himself killed in a car wreck. Stepfather Lolo Soetero was a good-natured and boozy technician on the staff of the state oil company who married the wrong person.
Frank Marshall Davis.