The Alternative for Germany and Labour’s new immigration plan
The Alternative for Germany finished second in this year’s parliamentary elections and first among voters younger than 45.
The necessity of that grand coalition reflects the AfD’s popularity: It won so many votes that neither the center-right nor the center-left could form a government without the other.
The coalition’s breadth has the potential to be its undoing. If it cannot agree on policies and slides into dysfunction, it will give voters more reason to reject mainstream parties in favor of the AfD.
Mr. Merz seems to grasp the importance of his chancellorship. He has described it as a last chance for the political establishment to marginalize the AfD.
“In the next four years we must solve two big problems for this country: migration and the economy,”
In 2015, the share of Germany’s population born in another country was about 13 percent.
Today it is more than 20 percent.
As the writer David Frum put it, “If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do.”
“There is an awful lot of resistance to change in Germany,” Wolfgang Münchau, the author of the recent book “Kaput: The End of the German Miracle,” has said. None of the world’s 20 most valuable companies are German.
New York Times 17 May 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/opinion/merz-germany-chancellor.html
Within minutes of Labour’s new immigration plan being unveiled, the rightwing media confirmed that it was never going to be enough to pacify the hardliners.
Liberals meanwhile found the tone too inflammatory — did he really need to say “island of strangers?” — and the content too damaging.
It was too little, too late and too much.
And yet, and yet. Starmer is correct to see that something bigger is at stake.
A significant section of the country has been telling leaders for years that immigration is too high.
Starmer’s critics on the left say he should stop running scared of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK
The “shut up, you’re wrong” strategy has not been a triumph so far
Years of stagnation have broken liberal democracy’s central compact with voters, that it is the best system to deliver prosperity for each generation.
Robert Shrimsley Financial Times 15 May 2025
https://www.ft.com/content/3daf7366-fe7f-4b6b-9e23-652499082b34
Theresa May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy, argued that the UK economy created a nation of “serfs to debt, trapped by low pay and bloated assets”.
Britain, he wrote, had been hooked on cheap credit and ripped off by financial engineering.
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2023/07/do-conservatives-still-believe-in.html
Political repression gives a boost to populist parties; Liberty Valance
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/02/political-repression-gives-boost-to.html
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