Well done Angela Merkel but not well done enough. In sticking to her almost suffocating position as the ultimate German safe pair of hands she has unleashed the Fringe Right with the AfD taking some 90 seats in the Bundestag.
Yet her policy on immigration was anything but safe. Letting a million asylum seekers into Germany in a short period of time, mostly from the Middle East, exhausted the goodwill of some Germans who voted for the AfD in frustration. She has unleashed the worst sort of xenophobic sentiments in voters which is so detrimental to the longer term health of democracy and the functioning of society as a whole.
Remind you of anything? UKIP at their peak in the 2015 General Election scored a similar 12.6% of the vote mostly based on a fear of immigration. Only the first past the post system saved us from hordes of UKIP MPs. But the end result was essentially the same. The EU, heavily influenced by Merkel, blocked the UK’s bid for any meaningful compromise on the free movement of people which ultimately led to Brexit. Now she has her comeuppance.
However much we dislike the reasons that the electorate votes for certain things, in a democracy politicians must listen and head off issues before they breed extremism. The EU was deaf, Merkel was deaf, the UK is out of the EU and Germany now has its own hordes of politicians focused on racial and religious division. There are so many lessons to be learnt in Europe and that is before we turn to the United States and Trump…
Inside Right Politics 