German Elections – Anti EU Party Makes Major Breakthrough

The Alternative for Deutschland Party has had a major win in today’s elections. While Chancellor Angela Merkel has won herself a fourth term (albeit with a much reduced vote share), the big news is that a party on the right of politics and opposed to the European Union has made huge gains and will likely finish on 88 seats with around 13.3% of the vote.

Just one year ago, the AfD were on the fringes holding rallies and being demonized by European media, and yet their gains today show that there is a rising anger across Europe with unelected leaders in Brussels, an irresponsible migration policy, and a failure to defend and protect native cultures and traditions.

Six party election for the most part (even though there’s thirty-plus total parties).

Five of the six carried a Merkel-like stance on immigration. AfD was the opposing view.

AfD has only five years of existence...being created for the most part as a anti-Euro party.

If you look at AfD candidates...very few 4-star characters and this was readily apparent. If you go looking at various platforms...they had a strong immigrant platform, and a strong law-enforcement platform. Beyond, it was awful weak. Don’t even ask about pension or tax reform issues...they have none.

On the one plus-side for Merkel....with the EU deal for Turkey....they’ve held back the immigrants since spring of 2016. Presently, Germany is back to the normal 250,000 to 300,000 per year (the average for 30 years).

This 250,000 to 300,000 average per year is the bulk number....meaning each single individual (families included). There’s like three periods (the Balkans War period, the Yugoslav War period, and the 2014/2015 period) which are exceptions to the average.

Last year, some German university did a study which looked at the immigrants going back to the 1960s (all the Turks, Greeks, etc). It’s an odd analysis. On the 1st generation....they did go and have three to five kids. But as those kids grew up...they became Germanized, got married, and went to the German standard of 0, 1 or 2 kids. Logic explained is that cost of living in Germany makes having kids more difficult. Go look for a 3-bedroom apartment at a decent price....you won’t find it in major cities.

The study concluded that immigration doesn’t change much of anything because they all adapt and go back to the 1.5 standard.

They don’t carry iron-clad numbers on religion, but generally say that Muslims make up 4-million out of the 82-million. The thing is...then you have to break it up...Sunni, Shiite, Kurd, etc. Kurds are an ethnic group and Muslim, but they don’t typically associate with Turks (who usually are Muslim but not always).

On Muslim kids staying Muslim...no one says much. I’ve watched interviews with anonymous ex-Muslims who said as soon as they got finished schooling and moved out...they went to zero activity with the religion. You end up with different levels...will say they are Muslim but drink alcohol, smoke pot, and don’t take anything about the rules serious. Some fall into the moderate group. Some more extreme.

When I use the word ‘Germanized’, it typically means that you grew up in the German school system, you speak the language and even the regional accent of German, you watch mostly only German TV, and you rarely go visit dad’s ‘old’ country. There are a fair number of German-Turk kids who have no real relation to the family in the old country. They might speak a hundred words in Turk but they see themselves as fully integrated, working, paying taxes, and happy.

I would say this as well, which is one of the odd prospectives. If you were a Turk or Syrian, and living in rural communities (out in the ‘sticks’ as you and I would say)...they are part of the community and less likely to fall into some hardline episode. But less mosque activity falls into this as well. In the urbanized areas, people want to peer-review your life and draw you back into their special status-group. If they had required a lot of these incoming folks to go spend two years in some rural region or town, I think a lot of them would be better off.

So how did Merkel get elected again?

Party loyalty. Economy also not so bad. Her party did so well last time, they could afford to lose a lot of votes this time and still come out on top.

The second strongest party, the Socialists, split the left vote with the Greens and the Left Party, so even though Merkel's Christian Democrat lost votes they are still the strongest party in the Bundestag.

The funny thing is that the Socialists (or Social Democrats) are also Merkel's current coalition parties, so it's like the Republicans and Democrats formed a governing coalition with the opposition composed of Libertarians, Greens, Reform, Constitution, and various socialist parties.

Word is Merkel may try for a coalition with the FPD and Greens this time.

Was Merkel right or just assuming a lot?

First, I’d suggest that a fair amount of behavior was intellectual in nature, and this elite group (not just the political folks, but journalists and religious figures as well) kept telling themselves of all the good intentions. ‘We are smart enough to know what we are doing’ was rationally played out on TV nightly from the fall of 2014 to January of 2016. At some point, journalists went after the Dresden crowd who were the initial negative stance...suggesting that they weren’t that bright or competent.

Second, from a program management view (my background), all of this was run like a bunch of eleven-year-old kids in charge of a candy factory...with massive bad-calls up and down the line. The German federal government doesn’t do any part of the business except run the paperwork approval process. The care and feeding, shelter, and security part to this....all fell to the 16 German states, and the cities/counties. Through 2013 and most of 2014...the states and cities were spending a fair amount of money and the Berlin crew weren’t going to reimburse them (go figure that). In truth, I don’t think the money side to this ever occurred to the ‘wise-people’ running the government. Toward the end of 2014...Berlin offered up one billion Euro to the states, with a one-billion Euro loan...all equally dispersed. The states said fine...but they’d be back in three months for more. If you asked anyone from the gov’t how much was spent from 2014 to today....they can’t answer that. If you ask a city official...he’ll give a pretty precise number.

Third, Merkel’s vision was that a immigrant was an immigrant....she didn’t want to create a category to easily fit people. Maybe there was a humanitarian angle to this and you could have flown a ‘fair share’ crowd out of Turkey of Iraqis and Syrians running out of the ISIS War. But instead, they wanted them to travel the walking route from Greece to Bavaria. Statistics-wise, most of the immigrants from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya....fail (probably 90-percent). The chief reason? No war, no skills, no degree, no craft. The Germans will spend easily 20-thousand Euro on a one-year waiting period on some Tunisian 20-year old....only to find out he can’t pass the visa test.

On the America-ethnic-wise observation of yours...few grasp that there’s been this ‘tribal dispersal’ going on for thousands of years. After the plague hit in the 1600s...you find a lot of German landowners needing agricultural help....so Czechs, Spaniards, etc...moved into Germany. Some Romans stayed after the empire dissolved. Jews weren’t an original tribal unit in the region, until the Romans arrived and trading was established. Tribal wars from 3,000 years ago meant people were forced to move around and become part of other cultures.

Trying to say that there is a pure German out there doesn’t ideally work. Most Germans can say give you their family tree for about 500 years but going past the plague era and the Thirty Years War period is pretty difficult.

Last year, I helped some American guy who could track his family roots to a Prussian soldier leftover from the Revolutionary War. He knew the kid signed up from a particular village (near me). So I went to the cemetery of that village and looked for the name. It’s not a big village, and there’s tombstones dating back to mid-1700s. Not a single relating to his name. Then it hit me...it’s not German. So I did the research for the guy and came to realize that it’s Croatian. Croats are another group that came in after the 1660-period of the plague to work agriculture. So his family likely relocated into Germany and he was forced into the Prussian contractor Army in the 1780s. The kid chose to stay in the US after being captured by Washington’s Army.

I look upon this whole episode as a fairly incompetently run affair....run mostly because of Nazi-guilt and extreme intellectualism...and no real way to reverse anything without admitting stupidity.

This effort to get the EU involved and force all 28 members to accept migrants (it’s around 180,000 sitting in Greece and Italy presently) is hyped up by the intellectual Germans. Naturally, if they upset a dozen members by calling them racists for refusing migrants...and bringing about anti-EU feelings....well, it’s acceptable to the Germans. The fact that roughly half the EU has unemployment rates up around ten-percent or higher, never enters the mind of the intellectual folks.

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