its debatable the effectiveness of having your party leader being also the country's leader, it leaves the party to weather all the blows against the public figure. Then they also have to manage the party while managing their full duty as the chairperson. You end up with the situation like Obama and the democrats loosing a lot of ground during his presidency
Good riddance.
As the article mentions, this is mostly due to the fact that CDU/CSU and the SPD took heavy hits in the latest regional elections, that being Bavaria and Hessen. Both parties are currently in a coalition.
Well least good news that both states have Green Party as new opposition party to defending in Immigration now.
The only real xenophobic party that we have right now is the AFD. All other political parties (even the CSU to some degree) are in favour of a humane treatment of immigrants/refugees.
Merkel's mostly pretty good, I agree, but she held up homosexual marriage for YEARS despite 81% popular support, purely due to her personal biases.
Frustration with Merkel and her Center-Left political doomstack is part of why the Far-Right has resurged in Germany.
Germany has practiced an incredibly aggressive, winner-take-all investment policy under Merkel's leadership, extending loans to floundering EU countries (Greece) with extortionate return rates, then leveraging the EU to make sure those nations don't default on said loans or get any particularly funny ideas.
Meanwhile, she's been Chancellor for as long as some soon-to-be-voters have been alive, and long enough that most young voters haven't even experienced an alternate leader. Don't get me wrong, Merkel is not a bad catch as far as politicians go, but 16 years of one leader? That's a bit fucking much. It certainly doesn't sound or feel very democratic.
Not to mention that under her reign, and it is frankly a reign at this point, she hasn't actually fixed vital, long-term problems that certain sections of Germany has. Germany has a rust belt, just like America. East Germany still has abyssal rates of literacy, stagnant economic futures, and little social mobility compared to the West German 'elites.' With 13 years to steer the ship, the CDU hasn't managed to even dent those problems.
So taking a soft stance on the migrant crisis, a profiteering stance on international finance ventures, and having almost total control of the German ship of state may have frustrated a certain contingent of voters, who say, feel their futures are being ignored, who feel that German money is being used to finance global profit-venturism, who functionally have been abandoned by the German state as a significant population to administer to. That they channel these frustrations in to a vicious, energetic opposition that promises change, radical change, at any cost? Hardly surprising or in my opinion entirely blameworthy.
This type of regional, and economical specialization and specificity is like, historically speaking, exactly when engenders extremists of all flavors, and it's just due to Western liberalism's monopoly on the tools of pacifism that those extremists now flock with zeal to violent, revolutionary ideals on the right wing.
You can retort with whatever you want to say about long-term planning and mix paternalistic dogma about the state "eventually solving the issue" with callous rhetoric to the effect of "people just need to move on and bootstrap themselves," but it's all just the empty vault of promises that non-authoritarian parties use to pacify the constituents who feel like the equation is zeroing them out. It's a patter that goes back to 19th centure lasseiz-faire capitalists arguing against basic worker's rights on the premise, "well if they just weren't such goddamn dumb, violent radicals they wouldn't fall in to mixing vats, eh?"
Merkel's sloppiness on the immigration problem is what fuelled the far-right resurgence. Wether the problem existed or not is irrelevant.
To elaborate a bit more on this. Merkel's government spends an excessive amount of money on surveys. Back in 2015 it wasn't that surprising that she went with the whole "refugees welcome" euphoria only to distance herself from it later when general mood slowly drifted towards more scepticism.
Germany's right-wing nationalist AFD was mostly formed as an Anti-Euro party and it wasn't until the mass migrations that the AFD quickly gained more power.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46020745
She also announced that she will step down as Chancellor in 2021.
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