A rather impressive performance by Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany’s regional elections. Second in Saxony-Anhalt and double digit percentages in Baden-Württemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate. Today’s papers have tended to conclude that despite AfD’s shock success, the elections were nonetheless a triumph, of sorts, for Angela Merkel’s policy towards migrants, if not for her party, the CDU.
I can’t say that I see it like that. For a party which did not exist four years ago to take a quarter of the votes in one lander is a remarkable expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Add into that the fact AfD is held in some suspicion as being exclusively middle-class, if not Junker, in its make-up. The Germans will probably be the last European people to accede to the fact that the migrant policy has been nothing sort of catastrophic. But there are signs that the voters are turning even there.
Baden-Württemberg gave victory to the Greens. Send all the million migrants to Freiburg, then, and see if they feel the same way two years from now.
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