OPINION:
The reckoning is at hand for Angela Merkel in Germany. None of the political parties came close to winning a majority in the September voting, and trying to put together a workable coalition has given Frau Merkel — and Europe — a headache the size of a continent.
Frau Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union, itself a hybrid mouthful, won the plurality with a third of the vote. The Social Democrats ran second with 20 percent, a disaster for the “center left,” which wants no part of a coalition with Frau Merkel. She has had to look elsewhere, but it turns out, after weeks of trying to put something together, that there’s nowhere else to look.
She first thought she could forge a workable coalition government with the Free Democratic Party, a small libertarian party that would have been just large enough to assure Frau Merkel a fourth term as chancellor. But this week coalition talks collapsed over acrimonious debate about the environment and immigration, and it looks likely now that Germany will hold new elections.
It’s difficult to overstate just how beloved Frau Merkel is among the European globalists. With Barack Obama having left the scene, the salons of Davos and other places where the intellectual classes meet to talk of impractical solutions to the world’s dilemmas, have looked to her for wisdom, guidance and solace. The German chancellor is regarded as a conservative, as the Europeans define politics, but in office she has increased welfare spending and pushed for greater integration with the European Union. She is suspicious of national sovereignty.
Her reckless decision two years ago to fling open the continent to the huddled masses yearning for a better life endeared her to the intellectual class, but, to her consternation, to almost no one else.
The result was swift, predictable and baleful. The arriving migrants usually have few professional and language skills, meaning they will require public welfare assistance probably forever, and most of them are from largely Muslim nations, where there is little understanding of religious tolerance and how democracies work. With that, there has been a remarkable surge in Islamic terrorism.
It’s her advocacy of largely unrestrained immigration that has diminished her popularity. Though her pasted together alliance commanded a plurality in September, it was the worst showing by conservatives since 1949, and that produced the most insoluble political crisis of her 12-year tenure. Her open borders scheme has had grave and unintended consequences, this time for her personally.
The public-opinion polls show the depth of a widespread dilemma in Europe.
Zogby Analytics, the international public-opinion polling firm, show her approval rating at 40 percent. This is considerably better than the 28 percent of Emmanuel Macron of France, who was elected to wild cheers only months ago, and Theresa May in Britain, but it’s edging into Trump country. Nobody’s in love with anybody any more.
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