Merkel's Final Days: Will Everything be All Right Again in the End?

10-09-2018 • By André F. Lichtschlag

The alternative media are celebrating the imminent -demise of Angela Merkel's chancellorship almost as exuberantly as she and her claquers celebrated their election victory in 2013. On days like these – when the CDU's parliamentary group leader Volker Kauder was overthrown, in place of the hated witch from the Uckermark. The bitter end for her is really only a question of time, too, because the opportunists are now betting on new magicians. Merkel, like so many politicians before her, missed the opportunity to resign at the right time. Now the political incentive systems are grinding against her. Journalists of the alternative media are practically singing in tune: "After she leaves, things can only get better", and even in the mainstream, which yesterday was still faithful to Merkel, people hum along quietly in agreement. Oh happy days. What a pity then, that so far, things have only gotten worse every time, just as institutional analysis precisely predicts about ageing coerced monopolies like the Federal Republic of Germany. I can remember the chancellorship of Helmut Schmidt (1974-82). At that time many of us teenagers only knew this tobacco snuffling Hanseatic in the Chancellery. He was very popular, his party at that time already less so. Thus things could only improve with the new chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had promised no less than a 'spiritual and moral about-turn' during his election campaign. However, after Kohl's election this didn't happen. Instead, Heiner Geißler, Norbert Blüm and Rita Süssmuth determined the new government's spiritual-moral policy of continuation, except that the decline of values had now accelerated. Snafu.